A couple of months ago, I set myself a goal. I should have set it a lot earlier than I did, but I eventually got around to doing it. I even put it in my Bucket List as one of the things I had to do before leaving Korea (it would be kind of pointless to do it after I leave). That goal was learning to speak Korean or, as I put it in the Bucket List blog, "Have a conversation with a taxi-driver in Korean." Why a taxi-driver, you might ask. Well, he would be a complete stranger who, unlike some of my teachers, would be less likely to go easy on me or revert to speaking (or trying to speak) English. Taxi-drivers are also the Koreans that I come into contact with most often who always want to start a conversation despite my not being able to speak Korean. So it seems like a perfect situation - someone who wants to talk to me and can't speak enough English to revert to the language if I were to mess up.

I set this goal a couple of months ago. And then I just carried on with my everyday life, not making much effort to see it come to fruition. I learned a couple of words here and there, enough to help me through and get what I wanted and be polite about it, but I wasn't really trying to learn. Everything that I learned was just the result of being surrounded by a language - something is bound to rub off on you eventually! And then Grant came to visit me.

Over the first two weeks of Grant's visit, I passed on my knowledge to him. But it wasn't enough. One day I came home from work.
"Hey!"
No response. I was still in the kitchen kicking off my shoes and thought that he might not have heard me.
"Hello!"
A bit louder this time, but still nothing. I could see his silhouette through the glass of the sliding door. Was he sleeping? I walked through and saw him rifling through websites.
"Hi!"
Still no response, but this time I knew he wasn't asleep. Getting annoyed, I poked him. He turned with a big grin on his face.
"Sorry, Baby. I was studying."
I looked at the laptop and saw a jumble of tabs open, each of them about Korean: "Learn Korean", "Study Korean", "Practice Korean", "Korean alphabet." A sense of guilt washed over me as I remembered my enthusiasm in the week before arriving in Korea and how it had abated as soon as I got here. I had discovered Grant on his first day of practice, and he practiced every day after that for the next week while I was at work, and sometimes even before or after I came home, much to my dismay.
"Baby, can we watch a movie?"
"When I'm done studying!"
Sigh. It felt like my boyfriend was lost in this world that I was too lazy to discover, getting excited over reading signs as I had seen myself do, and wanting to learn ever more about the Korean language.

Then Sunday dawned and we made our way to Shinae late in the afternoon and wandered between shops, stalls and markets. Our last stop was the bookstore behind Lotte Young Plaza where I had been told there was a (small) selection of English books. We were intrigued and made our way in, only to discover that by small, what my friends had meant was barely existent. But we weren't deterred and while I made my way through the fiction section which seemed to be based on children's and teenage literature - English for the middle and high school student - Grant made his way through his own sections, which seemed to be mostly in Korean, of computer and science literature. Or so I thought. When I found him, his nose wasn't stuck in a manual on PHP or a book about astrology as it usually was, but instead he had found a section on learning to speak Korean! I joined him in browsing through almost every book in the section and decided to reward his enthusiasm and, I hoped, kick my own ass into gear, by buying two books - Survival Korean by Stephen Revere, which helps with learning the language and grammar rules, and Surviving in Korean by Yeong-Ju Lim and Sun-Shil Ahn, which also teaches a bit but provides a more solid base of vocabulary than Revere.

In the taxi home, I started perusing through Revere, taking in the details about the book without starting to learn quite yet. When we got home, Grant made his way to the laptop to play some games and I collapsed onto the bed and opened the book, wanting to start learning. But, I was convinced to join in with some games before we had to make our way to quiz, and the books lay on the bed until our return that night when they were unceremoniously thrown into the corner as we passed out on the bed. I had taken Monday off, and when I woke up the first thing I reached for was not my laptop as I usually do, but the books. I quickly made my way through the first chapter of Revere - I already knew the language and skills that it possessed so it served as more of a recap than anything else - and through the second chapter which proved to be a little harder as it provided a lot of vocabulary that I didn't know in a very short space of time. It is now Wednesday, and I am up to chapter five and going a bit slower now as I learn the grammar rules as well as the pronunciation. The knowledge is slowly seeping in though, and I find myself thinking in Korean more than I used to and trying to make proper sentences rather than spitting out random words.

One problem that I have been experiencing with my learning of Korean is that with all of this new vocabulary coming in, I seem to be losing some of my old vocab. Yesterday, I was sitting on the bed and came across the word jib. "Jib," I thought to myself. "Like in hayanjib." I recognised the word! I felt so proud! But as soon as the word hayanjib popped into my mind, the struggle to remember what that meant began. It started off as a mere irritation and quickly developed into an annoyance and an aggravation. One little thing that annoyed me led to more things annoying me, and soon I found myself in a terrible mood, until suddenly it dawned on me. Hayanjib - The White House. The name of the building that I live in. I hit myself on the head that it had taken me that long! But, while the word did come to me eventually, I am now in fear that this will become a habit - losing the vocabulary I have as more vocabulary fills my mind. I can only retain so much information after all!

But the books have also proved useful so far! I pulled one out at dinner last night to tell the waiter that the kalmegi we were having was too spicy and to ask for another non-spicy one. While it took awhile for the waiter to understand what we wanted (he understood that it was too spicy but didn't understand that we wanted a non-spicy alternative), we still eventually managed to get some meat that I could eat.

For the next few weeks, I am likely going to be carrying the book around with me and using it to get what I want across, but I am hoping that after a couple of weeks, at least some of the knowledge contained within them will rub off on me and I won't need it nearly as much. It's not that unlikely is it? Grant's enthusiasm rubbed off on me after all!