Spending a lot of time over the last year in Asia has had fairly detrimental effects on my ability to speak proper English. In Japan, I found myself speaking Japangrish, to make myself more easily understood, and in China, well, I just didn't speak much English at all. It's gotten so bad that my mom has started making fun of me for it. Case in point: In an email thread with my family, I referred to the "laundry machines" at the office. My mom's reply: "Here in the 'new world' we call them washing machines :)" I love my mom for being cool enough to make fun of me.
A couple of days ago, as an experiment, I wrote my first blog post ever in a non-English language. It was an attempt to explain some of the reasons that Korean is hard to learn for native English speakers, so I figured I might as well try to write it in Korean. Those of you who actually read Korean can see how awkward the attempt was =).
In any case, the post came from an email conversation I had with The Korean from Ask a Korean, a fantastically well-written blog about all things Korea from the perspective of a Korean who moved to the United States during high school. Since I tend to geek out on language things, I figured I might as well post part of that conversation. An edited version follows.
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Out of the languages that I've attempted to learn so far, Korean has been the hardest. I've done a lot of meta thinking about learning Korean, and I think there are a number of reasons it's difficult for non-Koreans (and especially Westerners) to learn:
1) Obviously, the…
In any case, the post came from an email conversation I had with The Korean from Ask a Korean, a fantastically well-written blog about all things Korea from the perspective of a Korean who moved to the United States during high school. Since I tend to geek out on language things, I figured I might as well post part of that conversation. An edited version follows.
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Out of the languages that I've attempted to learn so far, Korean has been the hardest. I've done a lot of meta thinking about learning Korean, and I think there are a number of reasons it's difficult for non-Koreans (and especially Westerners) to learn:
1) Obviously, the…
Try surviving in Korea for over two years, you're English is great, I'm quite jeruse, what is a washing machine?
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