Tagged: learn korean

The following is an extreme example; I don’t usually get corralled into conversations like this in Korea anymore, though, for obvious reasons, it used to happen a lot more often when I taught English. Fortunately for me now, my ace-in-the-hole is that I can converse in Korean. Without that, this...

I Got a Tutor I think one of the cardinal rules of studying Korean has to be this: “Reject all invitations to trade English study for Korean study.” The first reason is that if you trade one hour of English for one hour of Korean, you’ll spend one hour talking...

  The Language is All Backwards I'm told that Korean is one of the hardest languages in the world for English-speakers to learn. When I was first studying the language, I didn't really sense this though. Spanish had seemed pretty hard to me too and improving my Korean appeared to...

I'm Not Fluent! The only proper first answer to this question is, "I'm not fluent." Fluency implies a level of comfort in the language that I don't ever expect to achieve. The word I've used for at least the last ten years or so is "proficient" and even that is...

I love the way every official document in Korea about someone includes their birthdate. It tells you something about the culture and the importance Koreans place on age.

Background: How it All Started Koreans are forever referring to a digestive problem called “체하다”. I’ve always wondered if it’s just “indigestion”? Or something more? All I could decipher is that it seems to happen for no good reason. Google Dictionary is no help:  Yahoo! turns out to be more...