Language

It sure beats studying an Asian language!

One of the derivative consequences of spending seven years studying East Asian languages is that when you study virtually any other foreign language, you find it inherently easier to learn the language.  After spending four years studying Chinese and three years studying Korean and using it in Korea, I absolutely love learning Spanish.  When I studied Korean and Chinese, I found myself continually procrastinating and finding excuses not to study.  My present experience studying Spanish is much different.  Perhaps in a couple of months when I take my Spanish language exam my perspective might change, or maybe when I dig further into the language I’ll find Spanish progressively frustrating.  I doubt it.  I get Spanish, and thanks to Korean, I’m thoroughly enjoying language learning for the first time in years.  I may still have a ways to go until I am fluent, but at least I "get" Spanish.  That’s more than I could say for at least a year after I started learning Korean and Chinese.   
 
This is especially true of Korean.  Along with Chinese, Arabic, and Japanese, the Korean language is considered one of the four most difficult languages for native English speakers to learn.  Korean gets an asterick for being especially difficult to speak.  The Korean alphabet (hangeul) is much easier to learn than the other three languages.  Korean grammar is more difficult than either Chinese or Arabic (I’ve heard), and it is on par with Japanese.  However, Korean pronunciation is more difficult than Japanese.  It’s not a tonal language like Chinese, but it has inflections that Japanese does not.  I digress.  The point is that going from studying one of the most difficult languages, one that can leave a student feeling utterly stupefied, to studying one of the languages considered easiest to learn is cathartic.  I get Spanish, and it feels great.  It’s nice to be able to carry on complex conversations using a steady stream of English cognates rather than struggling to put together simple sentences using words you struggle to recall. 
 
I built a foreign language dictionary database using Microsoft Access to help me learn Korean, and I modified it to learn Spanish.  I am surprised at how many words were missing from the database, basic words one needs to know to adequately speak a language.  The Spanish dictionary I’m building now is much more comprehensive.  When I learned Korean, I felt (rightly) that my vocabulary was inadequate.  I’m determined not to make the same mistake in my Spanish studies.  Every day I try to learn 40-50 new words.  I’m also trying to change bad habits by focusing more on listening and reading comprehension and watching programs, such as the educational telenovela "Destinos."
 
While I have less than three months to achieve proficiency in Spanish, I’m confident that I can do it.  After just 2.5 weeks, my Spanish is much improved.  What a difference a language can make.

Es ist Zeit, Deutsch noch einmal zu lernen

I recently received some very good news.  I can now bid on Spanish posts for my next assignment.  I signed up for a self-study Spanish in anticipation of improving my Spanish so I could bid on Spanish-speaking posts for my next job assignment.  I planned to self-study for three months and then test in Spanish in order to improve my language score.  Fortunately, the criteria for qualifying for a language-required post recently changed, and my current Spanish score now makes me eligible for a short Spanish language course after I leave Korea.  Consequently, I can now bid on Spanish-required posts.  Although I know Chinese and can pursue assignments at Chinese-speaking posts, I need to have a backup plan in case I don’t qualify for a Chinese-speaking assignment.  Learning Spanish opens up a number of new job possibilities. 

Es ist Zeit, Deutsch noch einmal zu lernen.  ("It’s time to learn German again.")  My German score falls a bit short of qualifying for a short course, so I will now switch my focus to improving my German.  The chance of being assigned to a German-required post after Seoul is slim, because German-speaking posts in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are all in high demand.  However, exam scores are good for five years, and improving my German will allow me to pursue jobs at German posts in the distant future.  If I am successful in improving my German, then I’ll focus on improving my French.  French is spoken in more locations than is German.  Frankly though, many of the French-speaking job possibilities outside Paris are not too appealing because my French-speaking posts are often marked by violence and political instability.  I would really like to improve my increasingly rusty and meager Korean, but the nature of my work requires that I focus on the future more than the present.  I will bid on my next assignment in early 2006, so I have one year to improve all of my foreign languages in order to bid the wide range of posts possible.  Because I will likely not return to Korea anytime soon, I am moderately interested in improving my Korean.  Once I leave Korea, my Korean will undoubtedly fade into memory.  In the future I need to be very fluent in at least two foreign languages.  I plan to focus on achieving fluency in Chinese and Spanish because both languages are much more widely spoken than Korean.  Korean is also a very, very difficult language to master.  In my opinion, Chinese is much easier to speak than Korean, and both languages are classified at the same level of difficulty.

In other news, today I had lunch with coworkers at Phở Hōa, a Vietnamese noodle soup restaurant in downtown Seoul.  (Phở, pronounced "fuh," is the Vietnamese term for noodle soup.)  I love eating at Phở Hōa.  It’s a specialty chain based in Sacramento, California with franchises throughout the U.S. and Asia.  My wife and I often ate at Phở Hōa when we lived in Seattle.  We couldn’t find any restaurants while living in the Washington, D.C. area, so when my coworkers suggested it I enthusiastically said yes.  I ordered the same dish I always ordered in Seattle, phở noodle soup with beef flank and brisket.  It tasted just like I remembered it.  The soup was definitely a welcome change from Korean, Chinese, and American food I eat all the time. 

I realize I frequently write about food.  There’s a few reasons why I do.  For one, I love food.  I am always on the "see food" diet–I see food, and I eat it.  Secondly, food is a very important part of one’s culture, and no cultural discussion would be complete without talking about ethnic cuisine (even American–Kentucky Fried Chicken qualifies as ethnic American food in my book).  Thirdly, many social gatherings take place over meals.  Meals provide a great setting for socializing and getting to know others.  Lastly, food is a relatively innocuous topic to discuss.  Instead of focusing on controversial topics such as politics, it’s much easier to talk about food without stirring controversy.  You can almost never go wrong with food–unless you insult the cook, of course!

Spanish in Korea?

We will be in Korea for two years, and we don’t know where we will be heading after we leave Seoul.  I just spent many months studying Korean, and I’m now living and working in Korea, so you would think that I am busy studying more Korean.  Au contraire!  I’m busy studying another foreign language.  "Why?" you might ask.  Well, here’s why.  Korean is primarily spoken in the two Koreas.  I won’t be heading to North Korea anytime soon, and really there’s no other place I can really use my Korean unless I head to northeastern China or Los Angeles.  Thus, I have to look ahead to the next two years when I know I’ll be heading to a place where another foreign language, perhaps English, is spoken. 

Early next year I will bid on assignments around the world.  I can bid on jobs that require English or Chinese, my second language, or I can tackle learning another language.  To maximize my chances of landing a good assignment, I’ve decided to polish two other languages I’ve previously studied, Spanish and German.  If I can improve my speaking and reading in both languages, I will qualify for additional training in those languages should I be chosen for an assignment that requires Spanish or German.  I decided to focus first on Spanish because the number of Spanish-required assignments worldwide exceed German-required assignments.  Moreover, German-speaking locations such as Germany and Switzerland tend to be highly competitive (who doesn’t want to work in Zurich or Berlin?).  Should I be successful in improving both Spanish and German I may also try to improve my French.  I took all three European languages years ago in high school and college, but I have not used them in years.  I have not studied Spanish for over 15 years.  Still, the level I am required to speak and read Spanish to receive additional training is not much higher than where my level is now.  Learning Korean, one of the world’s most difficult languages for English speakers, has emboldened me to tackle Spanish and German, languages I consider far easier to learn.  My challenge now is to find adequate resources to polish these languages before I retest.  Spanish and German resources in English, not Korean, may be a bit difficult to find.  I have about one year to improve both of them and retest in each language before I bid on my next assignment.

While I want to continue improving (or at least keep from backsliding) my Korean, I believe that I now need to place higher priority on learning another language for my next assignment.  I will continue to take Korean classes one hour per day at work and try to study other languages at home.  That is one of the unfortunate aspects of working in a job that moves you often.  You sometimes have to focus more on where you’re going than on where you are now.