Learning Korean step 1 the alphabet
December 4, 2009 2 Comments
I thought learning the Korean alphabet would be hard, like learning Japanese was pretty tough. But another foreign teacher, Meredith from the school in Anyang, told me that she had learned it in a day.
I was expecting learning to sound out the words would take me a lot longer than that so I decided to dive right in to Korean.
I learned about half the alphabet my first night, then the second night I got tied up in my novel, then the 3rd day I had a kid absent from a 1 person class so I spent 90 minutes or so just studying the letters i didn’t know and all of a sudden I could read 99% of the signs.
Not that I understand hardly anything. If it’s not a word that came straight from English like Cider becomes saidor (sa-ee-dor) then I don’t really know what i’m reading usually but it’s a start. The hard part will be building up that vocabulary I think.
I also finally got the words yes, no, and 1,2,3 of something memorized.
Congratulations, you can say yes/no, 1-3.
But what pisses me off is that you are there, and yet you don’t even know how to speak the language. Respect should go both ways.
Despite this, you have the balls to criticise. How could you criticise/praise something which you don’t even understand?
Why should i have to speak the language if the Korean firm that paid me to come out here brought me here and forbids me to speak Korean at work?
Yeah I’m going to be critical where I see fit. I’m not a cultural anthropologist, i’m not trying to be objective or even handed. And frankly it would be a pretty boring blog if I were.
If you have something to add, something i haven’t considered or reasoning behind something then I’d welcome a dialog on that. If you just want to tell me I’m too ignorant to write down my personal feelings on my personal blog then maybe you’d be better off writing that on your own blog.