Korean is the 6th language that I've started learning. My goal is to become conversational by the time we leave but the goal is looking very daunting. Before we came to Seoul, we did a lot of research on the university programs versus the institute programs and it all came down to timing. The date of our arrival was just barely past the start date of the summer university programs so I have to wait until the fall programs. The one institute we decided on has start dates at the beginning of each month and we thought it was too rushed since we arrived on the 27th of June and wanted some time to explore Seoul before I started classes.
So that left me with doing some self studying. We bought the book from the institute and decided that I would try to test out of the first month of class. I'm not sure if I can make that goal even though I've been studying everyday.
Maybe the book is not that good for self studying or I'm not picking it up fast enough, but I had a very frustrating day today. The book gives you several grammar points and lots of vocabulary in each section but not very many examples or good explanations. I am also getting very confused between Japanese pronunciation and Korean. I took Japanese in high school - over 15 years ago and yet I still retained enough of it to confuse me. Another problem is, my method of learning vocab words in other languages (Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese) was to think of another language that the word was similar to. Now I'm getting all sorts of confused when I try to relate Korean to another language.
My problem is that I never followed through with any language for long enough to become completely fluent. I think the closest is Spanish with Vietnamese a far second. I'm going to try very hard in Korean since I think I will be able to use it with James for the rest of my life.
I'm glad I'm not doing much else in Seoul. I couldn't imagine studying and working while trying to learn Korean! My brain hasn't worked so hard in a while!
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