Coffee Helps

I’ve finally gotten around to making a serious effort to learn Korean.

What with one thing and another (Swine Flu, parties, all-day meals, difficulties with the air here that make my nose bleed and cause me to feel generally urgh), I still haven’t made it to a lesson. But having talked to a few people who have, I’ve decided that I have to teach myself as much as possible first. The first week, the teacher spoke in English, said one guy last weekend, but after that, it was all in Korean. Now I know how the kids at school feel when we talk English all the time.

The main difficulty is the completely different alphabet. If I’m going to be receiving class handouts written in Hangul, they won’t be much use to me unless I know how to read them. Seeing a vocabulary word written in Hangul will mean nothing to me if I can’t read it and know how it’s pronounced. And so I have embarked on an internet course to learn the basics before I venture into a class where I have the potential to look like a complete idiot.

Now, many people, like me, would probably freak out when confronted with words written in Hangul. 안녕하세요!* You glance at that and you see a bunch of meaningless symbols . The thought of ever being able to read them, never mind write them, is impossible. This is exactly how I have been feeling until now – but all has become clear. (* It’s “Hello”, by the way. “An-nyeoung-hah-seh-yo!”.)

It’s not a system of individual characters for individual words that you have to memorise, like in Japanese or Chinese languages, for example. It really is just a different alphabet. You don’t have different symbols for every word – you put the words together from the same selection of symbols every time, just like in English. This has made the whole thing a lot less daunting, particularly when I studied it closely enough to see all the patterns and connections.

And you know what? It makes an awful lot more sense than our alphabet. The character means what it means, and isn’t pronounced about a dozen different ways depending on the word that it happens to be in. I realised today that when I encountered new words, I couldn’t master the pronunciation until I saw them written down in Hangul rather than in their romanised form – mainly because the sounds in our alphabet vary so much. You only have to look at this poem for proof of that! I’ve caught myself struggling a few times with the romanised forms, where they spell out each syllable in letters with which I’m more familiar, and yet only when I look at the Hangul can I clarify whether that sound is, say, “aw” or “oh”.

I can only do it syllable by syllable, like a small child reading with their finger following every letter, but I can do it. I can read again! It’s incredibly liberating, even if I still haven’t a clue what most of the things I’m reading actually mean. And so I’m walking along the streets banging into lampposts because I’m staring so intently at a two-word sign on a shop door, sounding it out bit by bit. I’m sitting in restaurants reading every item on the menu board. I’m spending a whole hour after work reading the supermarket flyer that was stuck to my door when I got home. I get so ridiculously excited when I discover a word that I actually know the meaning of, or that’s just an English word written in Korean characters.

안녕하세요, 제 이름은 헤 리 입니다.

That says “annyeounghahsehyo, jay ireumeun hayley imnida”. Or, yes, “hello, my name is Hayley”. I believe it may even be grammatically correct. And I wrote that all by myself! Excuse my childish excitement. Even my 6-year-old students are excitedly saying “yayyyyyyy Hayley Teacha!” when I say or read something correctly in Korean. I may be prematurely turning 30 on New Year’s Day (no, I hadn’t forgotten that cheerful fact), but I am a primary school child at heart. Long may it last!