Learning a Language: The Fumbling Phase

Hey all!  Here's post number two.  Just yesterday I got an email with some details about getting ready to go!  It's exciting, but a little bit stressful, what with all the  finals to get through first.  So far, this paper is done:

 But this one is not:
: (

But forget about that.  More interesting, was the email's declaration that all students must arrive in Seoul knowing, at least, how to read Korean.  So quick! Let's learn Korean! And also listen to me pontificate uselessly on how to get started on a non-Romance language.

And here we go...

Learning a language through a class is a luxury that most people don’t have.  At the moment, I’m in that camp. In addition to actually memorizing the vocab and getting the grammar all straight in your head, one of the most difficult parts about it is where the heck do you start?  This is the second time now I’ve had to start learning language stuff before going abroad, and ended up spending a lot of time floundering around in book stores trying to figure out which book will get me to the learn the most.  There’s no right way to figure out which is the best, but my advice is that you should pick the one that looks the most interesting, that way you’ll be excited to open it up and learn.  For example, when learning Japanese I picked up a strange little book that teaches the language through manga.  There’d be a little scene from some famous manga, and then the words and grammar and whatnot would be explained.  It might not be the most organized way to learn things, but I sure wanted to open it up each day and see what ridiculous thing I would learn about next. J That’s one piece of advice about getting started, but even before that, concerning what part of the language to do first, if you’re learning something like Japanese or Korean, you should absolutely go for the alphabet as your very first task.  There are ways to learn it all at once, the Rosetta Stone offers something like that, but just from my personal experience, it’s way too overwhelming and depressing to have phrases thrown in your face that are absolutely foreign in every way possible. 

Let’s use Spanish and Japanese as an example (assuming you don’t know either):  It’s easier to remember that “me llamo Anne” means “my name is Anne,” over remembering that わたしはアンですmeans “my name is Anne,” because at least in the first one you can read the darn thing.  When you know the letters, you can associate sound and letter with meaning, instead of a lot of pictures with meaning.  But you can forget about doing that with Chinese, if you want to learn that then you’re on your own. >.<     

I’ll add further support to this by saying that both of my abroad experiences, to Japan and now to Korea, required that all students learn the alphabets before arrival and beginning language instruction.  So there you go, official people think so too.

Okay now that I’ve rambled too much, let’s learn Korean!  The Korean alphabet, Hangeul, is actually a lot easier to learn than it seems.  Unlike Japanese, which has two alphabets and a terrifying amount of kanji (a derivative of Chinese), Hangeul has just 24 marks to memorize.  Hanja (I see it as the Korean version of Japanese kanji) isn’t used as much, and if you just want to read some stuff and talk to people, then you don’t really need to know it.  This is the source I plan to use to get started:   http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hangeul_step_1, and once you’re done with the lesson just click the “Next” button at the bottom.  J  Another word of advice: if you really want to get this in your head, you need to go slowly.  Especially with Hangeul, it’s so easy you might want to try and cram everything into your head at once.  I suggest taking a day or two to drill each lesson until practice becomes boring, before moving onto the next one.  For me, when I’m bored with what I already know and itching to get on with it, then that means I’ve got it memorized pretty well.  The key is not to just understand, but to get it in your head.

Well there you go!  So, bombs away, and we'll talk about language again when I (and you perhaps?) have got all the letters jammed into your squishy gray matter.