It’s a month and a half into my first semester of school! Part-time school that is. I’m back at Seneca one day a week, for three hours, learning Korean.

Korean’s a bit of a weird language to learn right? Especially since I’m not Korean at all! We were asked in our first class, why we were taking the class. My response was because I live in a Korean neighborhood. That makes sense and is valid, and about 50% of the reason why I’m taking it. The other main reason is because Korean seems/seemed like an easy language to pick up.

If you’ve looked at Korean, perhaps on some signs or on the menu for 감자탕 (pork bone soup), it’ll look a lot like Chinese. And Chinese is definitely not an easy language to pick up (especially if your first language is a Western one). The glyphs are hard to memorize, and if you can’t do that, then you don’t have a vocabulary. Without a vocabulary, you’re use of the language would be quite limited.

The one thing that is easy about Korean is that it is easy to read. Now you might think I’m crazy, because in the last paragraph I just said that it was difficult, but here’s the reason – the Korean language is built from a (small, < 26) set of consonants and vowels. Each Korean character is made up of 2 - 4 "letters" and each letter has a specific sound. It's not like in English where the same character such as 'e' have different sounds: met, medium, and meme (or so I thought, because as we learned Korean, we found out that there are a couple of pronunciation rules that throw a wrench in things). So once you've memorized a couple of "letters", then you're off to the races, reading entire sentences (slowly). Of course, after getting over that hump, I'm now staring at a cliff of vocabulary words which take a lot of memorization and time to learn. Not sure how far I'll get with that.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: back2school, korea