I started learning Korean in the spring of 2020.

It was the pandemic, everything was shut down, and people were taking on all sorts of new and sometimes obscure or rare hobbies.

I did have a reason for choosing to not only learn a new language, but one that used an entirely different writing system. A new alphabet to learn…it was like being a toddler and starting entirely from scratch. But if my new favorite music was Korean, well, then, what other course of action did I have except learn it, myself?

Five years later, I’m still a toddler, at least Korean-wise. I have the comprehension and vocabulary of a two-year-old – my vocabulary is single words, mostly animals and food, and I get really excited when I hear someone use a word I know (and I usually repeat it back, aloud). I can actually read Korean, and my spelling isn’t terrible…I just don’t know what most of what I’m reading means. I can pick out words but almost never enough to get an actual idea of what’s being said. (This is unlike my Spanish ability, in that I can look at a lot of written Spanish and get at least an idea of what’s being discussed.) I really wanted to be more advanced than this, by this point. I didn’t really expect to be conversational but I did expect to be able to maybe ask for a product in a store, or ask where the restroom is – like I can in Spanish. Unfortunately, as it turns out, without Latin root words, languages are a lot harder for me.

After the first year or two of grad school, I decided to let myself off the hook from studying Korean until I graduated. I knew there was absolutely no way in hell I’d have the spoons, the intestinal fortitude, the attention span, or the brain power to do a dual Master’s and learn another language at the same time. 

It turns out I was right to make that call and in my assessment of my abilities. Just in the weeks since I graduated I’ve seen a change. It’s sort of hard to describe but it’s like…before I started grad school, my brain liked Korean. I’m not saying I was picking it up quickly, because I wasn’t. But my brain seemed attuned to learning it. For example, I liked the challenge of sounding out words and trying to figure out what they said. I enjoyed trying to spell new words, just to see if I could, and then looking them up to see what they mean. I quit doing all of that during grad school, and it really wasn’t even a conscious decision, at first. It’s like my brain simply couldn’t attend to language learning and study/academic writing at the same time, so it 86’ed the superfluous task. And now, since my mental capacity has been no longer bogged down by school, I feel like my brain has perked up and gotten interested about Korean again. 

During school, when I watched or listened to any BTS content, I feel like the words were just going in one ear and out the other. My brain wasn’t actively involved at all. I even quit the echolalia, where I repeat Korean words and phrases I recognize when watching tv. I’ve resumed doing that, again. It’s basically involuntary; I don’t make a conscious decision to do it (thanks, autism!) 

Anyway, I guess the best way to put it is that, since graduating, my brain is much more actively engaged with the language. I find myself numerous times a day stopping what I’m watching to look up a word or phrase – another thing I’d quit doing during school. I feel like I’m easily hearing the words I know in conversation again where I hadn’t noticed them as much for several years (also applies to words in songs). It’s hard to describe but it’s like the words I know jump out at me somehow when I hear people say them. It’s like spotting a longtime acquaintance’s face in a crowd of strangers. 

I’m just generally interacting more with the language than I had for several years. The other day I heard a sentence I actually understood most of, and then I went on a 10-minute odyssey to find out what the one word I didn’t know meant and why it was used there. This is an example of one of the ways I interact with Korean while trying to learn it: 

I heard Jungkook say a sentence I understood most of: “나 여기 왔어요, 이 집” – “Na yeogi wasseoyo, i jip.” 

I had all the words already except one. I knew he said “I,” “here,” and “this house/place.” (I also can tell he’s speaking informally, which tracks, as he was speaking to the other members at the time.)

I turned on the Korean captions to find out the other word because I wasn’t 100% sure what I’d heard. I looked up the word I didn’t know, wasseoyo, and it’s the past tense of to come. 

So what Jungkook said is that he’d been to the restaurant before. Literal translation from Hangeul to English is “I here came, this place.” (This is typical Hangeul sentence structure, S-O-V, instead of S-V-O like in English.) 

 Another change I’ve noticed since school got out is that I’ve resumed catching incidences of elaborated or contextualized translation. Korean tends to use minimal words as a general rule, and they aren’t particularly fussed about pluralizing. In English one might say “The students are going home.” Korean would edit that down to what translates literally as “Student house go.” When they translate to English they put the sentence into English sentence order and add the filler and contextual words English-speakers are used to. Because I know a bunch of Korean words and a little bit about sentence structure, I sometimes catch when the translator has added information or assumed context. For example:

I was watching Are You Sure? and Jimin said something to Jungkook that was translated in the captions as “Are you hungry?” but I heard and understood the words he actually used. I backed it up and put on the Korean captions to double check that I’d heard it right, and I had. What he really said was “배 괜찮아?“ – “bae gwaenchanha” – which translates literally to “stomach okay?”

My intention, now that I don’t have any other sort of study or homework to do, is to join a Korean learning program online. The two problems are finding the money to cover it, and deciding which one to use, because there are a lot of options. Once I sort both of those questions out, I hope to start making better progress. I feel like my brain is open to learning, I just need a program to follow!