Learning Korean 1

I've been learning Korean since September 2013. At my first teacher's recommendation, I started using the You Speak Korean! series of books by Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho. I'm currently on book 3, Intermediate Korean 1. My second (and current) teacher even helped with the creation of the series.

I'd studied plenty of languages before Korean (Latin, Russian, Ancient Greek, German, Old English, Sanskrit, and Finnish), but with Korean it's completely different. For one thing, I'm not enrolled in college or grad school this time around. In other words, I'm old. My efforts feel much more deliberate now, more self-directed. And I take a much more active approach to language learning than I ever did before. I do exercises in my book, and I write sentences to practice and showcase points of grammar as I learn them. But I also listen to podcasts about learning Korean. Every week, I go to a meetup of English speakers learning Korean and Koreans learning English. I get together with a Korean friend for chatting and help. I watch (subtitled) Korean dramas. I compose sentences in my head all the time. I look up words. My engagement with Korean is so much richer than my engagement with Russian, say, ever was. (Although I sometimes think my Russian fluency, at its peak, was better than my current Korean fluency.) Part of that is the changing times. In the mid-80s, I couldn't access the same breadth of pop culture, and so on. No one could. Before the Internet, finding kindred spirits and this kind of language material was impossible.

And unlike Latin or Sanskrit, Korean is alive and well. So I can encounter it in a wide variety of contexts and settings. Pop songs, websites, overheard conversations. This means my experience with it, active and passive, is so much more real than it could ever be with half the languages I've studied. So, while I use a textbook and work with a tutor and think about things the way someone with a linguistics background might, my experience with Korean isn't merely academic. It exists in the world of, you know, people.

Still, I've never lived in Korea. And I'm too bashful to throw myself into Korean-speaking opportunities with abandon. And, like I said, my brain is getting old, well past the point where absorbing a new language is merely a matter of exposure.