Life's Just Exciting!

19 Months & Counting

With eyes narrowed and eyebrows curled together in the middle of his forehead, the driver looked at me as if I'm a blabbering idiot. The look on his face actually said so much more. To him I was the most incomprehensible being to roam this earth.

One year and seven months after and I still can't speak Hangul, the Korean language, in a way Koreans will understand. My tongue, trained to speak Tagalog and English all my life, can't seem to deliver the bite required to pronounce, for example, the word "park" into "pakki". The weekly trip to my son's playschool remains a challenge to this day because my request for the cab driver to bring us to Dankook University doesn't sound right by the Korean driver's ears. Of course there really is no letter D in the Korean alphabet. Instead they use letter T. Several times I tried saying Tankuk instead of Dankook, but I still end up getting the what-are-you-blabbering-about look. The fact that there is no letter D in their alphabet also makes me wonder endlessly why they use it in the first place. And it doesn't end there. There is Busan, which is actually Pusan -- again because there is no letter B in their alphabet. Gangnam, which is actually Kangnam because they don't have a letter G. And here's one more. Their president's surname, Roh, is pronounced as Noh because the word Roh has a bad connotation (if I am not mistaken it means death or is linked to it). Why not just delete that surname from the list, in the first place, and officially replace all Roh with Noh or Goh or Poh? Hangul has many other quirks and, for the sake of being politically correct, I'd say unique qualities. But I will not go into that direction because I am not learnt enough to discuss them.

Sometimes I am lucky and encounter Koreans who are not afraid to use what little English they know to correct my Hangul. But for the life of me I can't tell what's the difference between the way I said the word against the supposedly correct one. My favorite example here is Hangangjin. Again, they don't have a letter J so you are supposed to use CH in its place. Doesn't seem very hard, does it? Try and say it to a Korean, especially one who can't speak English, and you'll understand what I'm blabbering about.

Everyone is saying the key is consistent practice. To translate that into action in my particular case means to go out in the streets more often -- take the bus, talk to the friendly woman in the laundromat, buy from street vendors -- because at home I am the only one who showed the slightest interest in learning the language. But time is running out. I might not be able to learn the language enough to commit it to memory so that one fine day, given the chance of coming back, I'd find surviving easier than the first time. My only consolation is that at least I can read Korean!

posted by lala @ 9:38 PM