Lingua Korean and Lingua Franca

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Besides being my first day of Korean class, today it really came home to me how much English has become a global language. I have started to make friends too!

I'm in Level 1 Korean, but there are shades of gray within each level I have come to discover. I'm in section 3, which means that I know the alphabet and can write what I hear, with some limited comprehension, but I don't have the fully functional grammatical structures down. The class is broken down into four 50-minute periods- two for grammar and vocab, one for reading and one for conversation and listening comprehension.

There are a lot of Japanese in the program, but also a surprising number of other nations represented. In fact, I met people from 4 different continents today! Europe is pretty well represented- Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Luxembourg. Also Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, America and probably a few more I didn't meet. And to communicate, we all used English. It was completely natural. There was no negotiation about the possibility of French or Chinese, and certainly not Korean. We just automatically went to English. Even the guy from the Netherlands, who said he only knew English from school and TV and has never had to speak it for more than 5 minutes at one time was basically fluent. I couldn't do that in Dutch or French or German. And he said he felt like the idiot of the group because the other girls spoke 3 languages. I tried to convince him that I was really the bottom of the barrel, because I've got 1, maybe 1.4 languages, and that's if you count my Korean and French combined.

Four of us people of European descent go together for dinner and went into Sinchon around 7pm. We had no idea where we were going. We just spur of the moment decided on a likely-looking restaurant. We got to sit on the floor, old school style! We had some very tasty and very spicy bulgolgi with veggies, the name of which I do not know. But it was only 8000 won, which is pretty good for dinner I think. It turns out that I'm an old person around here. They are all 18, just graduated high school and about to enter university. Ah, to be a youth again, with the world as your oyster. I definitely don't think American 18 year olds would be as mature as these three. Maybe it's the lower drinking age? The effects of socialism? Something in the water?

After dinner we went for a walk around Sinchon, just talking. I took some more pictures of the street scenes. I now have a firm grasp of the dimensions of the Sinchon area, which is good. When we got back to the dorms we got ice cream from the convenience store and sat in the lobby talking. It was very much like the first few days of college, where you go around in a group and try to cement friendships quickly.

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Comments

[Angela]

Awesome
Awesome entries Sarah- keep them up! Come back with lots of stories and loads of K-pop CDs.