Midterms

Not that they really mattered in the grand scheme of life, but we had midterms at school this week. There was more tension in the air than usual in the hallways -- I saw a lot of people furiously cramming information into their heads before and in between periods. Even I was a little nervous at first. But that passed soon after the writing section when I realized the exams wouldn't be as difficult as I'd thought. Good thing, because I hadn't studied much.

I have had a distinct advantage over much of my class this semester because of the inherited knowledge of Korean I have from my family. I've had to accept this with both a little pride and embarrassment (yes, it's good to understand what the teacher's saying most of the time but then, why did I get placed in the lowest level?) Class has been great, though, especially for learning proper grammar and new vocabulary words. I used to have this very foggy idea of how to construct sentences which has been cleared up quite a bit. Plus, I can now conjugate verbs into the past, present, and future tense, which is pretty helpful.

But the second I walk out of that classroom, most of that knowledge slips away. Thinking at a desk and thinking on your feet are two wholly different animals. I still find myself stumbling over questions at the supermarket and misunderstanding what store clerks are asking me. It's so easy to take for granted a simple thing like being able to communicate what you're thinking -- without having to think about it. Not here, though.

I've found the thing I miss the most is being able to read. Walking through our neighborhood department store, brand names and store signs that are in English seem to psychically call out to me. I don't need to sound out letters or piece together words to find a meaning -- the phrase "Hyundai Department Store" just speaks to me in all its literal glory, with all its intended meanings, in the split second it takes the words to hit my eyes. I go to the New York Times website and see eight different headlines at once, get a general sense of all of them and drag my pointer to the one that piques my interest -- all within a matter of seconds.

Slogging through Hangul, though, is like having tunnel vision. I see one letter at a time, then a syllable, then a word. I sound it out in my head and hope for some semblance of meaning. Trying to read newspapers and books remains a pretty futile exercise. I can maybe get through a paragraph and understand one out of every five words. Navigating through a Korean website, therefore, is like working a maze -- a deep, dark, confusing maze. My methodology has been to start out by picking a random path that looks promising and plow ahead. Usually I hit a dead end and have to start over. And over. And over... I'm guessing this eventually gets easier. It's just going to have to take getting lost a few thousand more times.