Korean

Today I began a challenge for both myself and my sister. We were only able to use Korean at home when we were talking to our parents. You might think that, since we're Korean and that was our first language, it would be simple, but that was untrue. We totally failed.

First of all, because of my lack of vocabulary, and i say my because I'm not sure about my sister, I was unsure what to talk to them about without completely botching up the entire time during the conversation. Along with that, my parents don't usually talk to me much because I usually speak in English and they have a hard time understanding, so striking up a conversation was challenging.

Now, usually, during the day, my parents both work so I end up having to only talk to my sister or I have to use Kakaotalk to converse with my mom. My vocabulary is tiny and my spelling in Korean is horrible. My mom had to correct my words left and right, it wasn't a pretty sight.

Finally, at the end of the day, I asked my parents for a graded evaluation, in Korean of course. My dad said, " you need to talk more, C." So, I knew I wasn't going to do well for the first few days, this was pretty good for the first day. My mom, on the other hand, immediately said, "44." I was surprised at this, so I asked why and she replied that it was a result of my lack of usage and lack of spelling ability. At that point, I was content with my scores, and now I'm writing about my failure in bed.

One might wonder, "Why is Sam so intent on learning to speak Korean well all of a sudden?" Well, it's a result of a mixture of things. As I have gone to taekwondo, I have met people, such as Jun and Jee, that I want to converse with, but they usually speak socially in Korean. I'm not a very social person so I don't really fit in with the white community of taekwondo either. Church is a very awkward place to be as well, because of my lack of skill. Since I've reached the point where the college kids are trying to talk to me because I'm finally around their age, I've had difficulty replying to them. It has just been very frustrating. In the end, I realized that if I don't learn korean well, I'm going to be screwed because I won't be able to fit in with the English speaking people or the Korean speaking people because of my lack of skill in both and since I don't really get out of the house often, improving my Korean skills seemed like the way to go.

-Sam Rho