Korean in Indianapolis!

I have now finished teaching my third day of writing workshops for my client in Indianapolis. I discovered yesterday that a number of the employees there speak, or at least are familiar with, Korean. It’s not too surprising, I guess, since there are many former military in this area, and they have often spent time in Korea. But I didn’t expect it, and it was a pleasant surprise yesterday to hear Korean suddenly coming from the mouth of one of the workshop attendees.

I did a lot of Pimsleur today. I did part of a lesson walking to work from my hotel. I did the other part walking back. I did more Pimsleur walking to dinner. I did more at dinner, sitting in the restaurant with my headset on, talking to myself. I continued on the walk back to the hotel. Then I did more in bed. Then I finally ran out of steam.

But I am happy to have gotten so much done today. I even managed to study the alphabet a bit during lunch, in the client’s cavernous cafeteria. (I keep forgetting letters in between study sessions, so I have to keep refreshing my memory.) The exercise I did at lunch, in my large orange Korean textbook, was entitled, “Recognizing Loans from English.” I had to copy Korean words (in Hangeul) and then guess at their translation. Here are a few of them:

I love the way they look.

In my last entry I wrote about how Korean doesn’t have plural nouns. Well, I got that impression from one of my books, and also from my experiences with Korean Pimsleur. Apparently my impression was at least partly incorrect, since today in my Pimsleur lessons I was repeatedly asked to form plurals of nouns. Like “friends” versus “friend,” for example. So now I am confused.

That’s how language learning goes. You learn some basics, including some partial truths, and form impressions that are just plain wrong. But if you keep going, you get closer and closer to accuracy and correctness. And truth about a language and how it works.

With Korean, I am currently far from truth. I wish I weren’t. But I am okay with it. And I still have 21 days to get a tiny bit closer.