I Gave Myself More Than a Month Before Saying This For Sure
I don’t really care to learn Korean.
This comes as something of a surprise to me. I’ve almost always been interested in studying languages and I’ve had plenty of time here in a nearly perfect immersive environment. Learning even a little would also certainly make my daily life easier. I just don’t really care to.
It’s not that I don’t want to, exactly. I’m certainly not resisting; I’ve picked up a few words here and there. I’m just not actively trying. As a result, I’ve picked up a lot less than I otherwise might have.
I’m still having a lot of trouble distinguishing sounds in spoken Korean. This is the first time I’ve spent any real time dealing with a language with a different alphabet and it shows. I catch myself trying to match sounds I’m hearing to English letters, then matching those to the closest Korean letters. It’s ineffective, at best.
That lack of familiarity may be behind my lack of interest. The language certainly sounds interesting enough, but I don’t hear it and think “I’d like to be able to replicate that sound” the way I’ve done with most others. I thought maybe after hearing it often enough to be familiar with the sound I’d start to be more interested, but so far that hasn’t been the case.
It’s also not that I’ve lost my interest in languages entirely. I’m registered for French in the Fall- a completely unnecessary elective, and I’m already more excited about that than I am about being surrounded by native Korean speakers.
At the very least I’m learning a great deal about how very, very little you need to speak to be able to survive somewhere.
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