First I want to make it clear that learning a language is only as difficult as you make it. I have had the pleasure of meeting several people from around the world and I am glad I made the trip half way across the world to teach English. I keep getting these reoccuring questions that I just want to address and some of these are common sense (at least to me), but there are others that are interesting nonetheless. I will just answer them without any reguards to order. Some of these questions are in other languages and I'm just going to summerize them in English.
Q1: When are you going to go back to (Okinawa), Japan?
A1: I have bought a plane ticket to visit there from January 21-24. I will basically be reconnecting with old friends and hopefully I'll make some new friends.
Q2: Are you going to try to come back to America?
A2: I will visit and probably invest, but if I choose to return it would have to be for a good reason. Currently, I am making more money abroad than I was in the United States and I am doing my dream. I wanted to travel for the longest time and I do not want anyone or anything to take that away from me. If I do choose to come back to live, it will be on my own terms and my own volitions.
Q3: Why Korea and why not Japan?
A3: I did actually try to go to Japan during the beginning, but that when the language schools Aeon and another chain closed. And that was before the earthquake too. While it has been a dream to live there, I have already done it as a international student anyways. That being said, I guess I have to factor in the fact that I wanted to learn another lannguage too.
Q4: How is your Korean?
A4: My Korean is a work in progress. I have reached a middle intermediate level in the language, but honestly I could have reached low advanced if I had not had so many distractions with social activites. Not to say I want to become anti-social, but I had to make a trade off between reaching a desired level and experiencing new things. There we certain days where I had to choose between either meeting someone from my hometown, (that i haven't seen in years) or studying 2-3 lessons in Korean. This new year though I will be making up for lost time.
Q5: Is their racism towards foreigners in Korea?
A5: I am not going to beat around the bush and evade this question. Yes there is racism, but it is on a minor level. For one, when I walk outside I will get the painfully obvious "Oh, you're a foreigner." response. I also have a harder time to engage a Korean person in the Korean language because, not to sound counter racist, but there are some Korean people that refuse to talk to me in Korean. Even if my Korean keeps getting better and better and I no longer need English to do anything, there are those few people that just refuse to speak Korean with me just because I am white. I came across this in Japan, but it is more prevalent over here simply because it is not in the norm for a white person to speak Korean- period. There are seriously English teachers that do not even bother to learn the Korean language because they have no positive interactions with Korean people in Korean. I met a English teacher that has lived in Korea 9 years and only has a basic level of proficiency in Korean. But despite this, I still get plenty of language practice in Korean and I have noticed myself not even use English on the weekends. My interactions with Korean people have been both warm and cold.
If you are African American, you will be hard pressed to speak Korean right away, however if you happpen to be Asian, most Korean people demand that you understand Korean because it isn't seen in their culture that you could be a native English speaker. If you happen to want to learn the Korean language, being Asian by default opens more doors as opposed to being white in Korean society. Also if you're white, in many Korean people's eyes you're automatically assumed to be an American by default. There will be places where I would go and Korean people will comment that "this American acts weird", and I would have to tell them that he or she isn't American. Their exposure to foreigners mainly comes from hagwons and middle schools so it is easy to make assumptions based solely upon ignorance.
Age is key in Korea. People say that the older you are the more respect you will get, but the younger you are the more jobs you will get. On applications there are some job positions with age limits and this causes a lot of turmoil for people that are trying to pursue their dream jobs late in life. You cannot enter a university after a certain age in some schools. It is sad, but it's their culture and that's the way things are done. Times are changing, but until it completely changes that's the way it is over here.
The main thing that should be taken away from this is the limited exposure to outside cultures. Not all Korean people are as I have described above. There are some open minded Korean people and there are a lot of closed minded Korean people. Those people have to have an interest in learning about other cultures to want to open their minds.
However a closed mind is like stagnent water- it grows fowl.
Q6: How are you able to study so many languages?
A6: I schedule them. Originally last year I was going to study a lot more, but I had a change of plans. I got to a point where I was getting pretty stagnant with learning languages, but here's how I basically study languages and it isn't my whole flowchart but it just to give you an idea, I'm actually going to change it up a little bit.
Step 1: Phrase Learning Phase- I basically learn the basic script and get adjusted with how the language sounds. I will probably add more audio/shadowing sessions to this in the future.
Step 2: Grammar Learning Phase 1-I learn grammar but do not focus heavily on vocab. From doing the grammar exercises, I pick up vocab from the context. I used to just put everything on flashcards and memorize it, but I do not have the time to always make them. If I do not know a word and I need to know it, I would make a list of words I want to use in exercises and incorporate them somehow. I have found that this works great for Korean and I will do this method for other languages.
Step 3: Polishing Phase/ Reading Comprehension- I get language material that is on my level and study them. I will naturally learn new phrases and grammatical expressions anyways. This is the step I grind out whatever errors I have in speaking a language. This phase sounds tedious, but only the final steps take a while because it involves a little bit of shadowing. Doing this, I have noticed I can naturally improve my listening since it is audio heavy anyways.
Step 4: Optional Grammar Phase 2- If I find myself still enthusiatic in a language, I will decide whether I want to learn it to another level. This phase involves more polishing and learning techniqual information and specialized jargon. So far, I have only gotten Japanese to this phase mainly due to time constraints. I plan on getting Chinese to this phase once it becomes in my active study catagory.
Note that I am not "fluent" per se in any of these languages. I am saying this because to me fluency is the ability to speak at a near native level. That alone takes years on end and you have to go beyond the advance stages to do so.
Also I have side languages which I dabble in (mainly to see what I want to study next). I do not know any grammar in these languages; I just know like basic phrases.
I have dabbled in French, Spanish, Russian, Okinawan, Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, and Cantonese. I think of these French and Spanish is pretty good followed by Bengali. Bengali kind of sticks to me for some reason. I would say that I really only know 4 languages fairly well, but I will add more as I get older.
I have more questions that I will answer, but I do not want to make this blog overly serious because I want a comedy/satirical blog. I supposed I could have answered them in a another fashion, but I do not want to come off as racist or bigoted so I decided to answer them out of the blogging persona here. I think I will do the other ones in the exact same manner just to be safe. I in no ways concider myself to be an expert on learning languages nor Korean culture, but I hope I was able to answer honestly and truthfully.
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