Learning Korean

I'm not gonna beat about the bush - I'm struggling. There are a lot of chips stacked against me. Foremost is the extreme difference between Korean and English; for those of you who have only studied European languages it is hard to explain how much more difficult it is to deal with the completely different phonetics and grammar. At first, even when I could get the speaker to slow down to a syllable at a time, I could could not distinguish the sounds they were making; even after a month+ of total immersion I still have trouble simply hearing and repeating regardless of if I understand or not.

Another difficulty is my position as English teacher. Most people who talk to me are quite eager for the rare opportunity to practice their English often to the extent of overriding / ignoring / not understanding my requests for Korean translations or to help me practice listening by speaking Korean slowly. Part of the problem is that when I try to speak Korean my accent is so heavily English, and their understanding of English so poor that most people assume I am speaking English words that they don't understand; so it is hard to get lots of feedback of my book learned pronounciation.

That being said, I think I'm finally starting to hit the first point of inflection on the learning curve. Within the last week or two my listening cognition has been skyrocketing and I've been better able to convince the people that know me of my earnestness to learn how to speak the language.

My goal is for my last blog post to be a summary of my year, written in Korean!