Amanda Takes Off...

Give me your
banana
Let me taste
your
banana
nyum nyum nyum nyum

The ad started airing Saturday and I kept straining my ears each time to make sure I heard it correctly. Olympus wants your banana with help from the band 요조.

Good Man says the lyrics include slurping sounds. He says the song isn't bad, though. He says, "It's about a not fully yellow banana, and it goes into your mouth—"

This is where I broke into a fit of airy giggles.

"And nobody knows how time goes so fast."

I'm still giggling.

This weekend was a rather low-key affair. Good Man, who is usually a bad son, was being a good son this weekend, so we didn't meet at all.

Good Man, like most single Koreans, lives with his family (primarily his mother and sister since his father works abroad). If I didn't understand Korean culture, if I were an outsider looking at a friend who was living here and dating Good Man, I'd wonder what the hell she was thinking, (seriously) dating a man who still lived at home.

As a related side note, despite Thursday's high about studying Korean, Friday I crashed. I started Sogang 3A and I've got to wonder if I'm ever going to break through the low-intermediate level. When I first started studying Korean, progress was so, so visible. But now it's much slower and I feel a bit frustrated with that. Also, I'm concerned about losing my Korean level when I go back to the States because I don't know anyone who's kept up their learned-abroad foreign language after moving back to the States.

The thing is, I actually do want to learn Korean. In order to survive in Korea, you really only need to get though Sogang 1B, in my opinion, though lots of people do fine getting through the level that 1A would put you at. Heck, lots of people learn only Bar Korean and do fine (so they say; the funny thing is that my bar Korean isn't great because I don't go to bars a lot!). I know that I won't have nearly as much an opportunity to use Korean in the States, and I know that in my field, being bilingual in Korean wouldn't be very useful.

But I am no longer learning Korean because I need to but because I want to. I enjoy learning it, I like being able to write short stories in it. I like being able to read stories (albeit easy ones!) in Korean. Most of the time I like to be able to communicate with the people around me (though lately my neighbor has been bothering me and I've been pretending I don't understand her).

Also, although I know the following are probably considered poor reasons to learn a language, I want to be able to speak with Good Man in front of my family without them understanding us. (Yes, that makes me sound evil, but I own it.) I don't want to come across as some twit who lives abroad for two years and who can't communicate in their Other Country's language! Finally, I never became fluent in either Spanish or Swedish and I don't want to be one of those monolingual Americans.

But I can't even get Good Man to speak Korean with me. Actually, that's not entirely true. We've done it a bit. At first he spoke too fast. Then he spoke word-by-word-and-it-was-too-choppy. Now he's figured out this really good method where he speaks slowly in phrases, in chunks. But since my level is still fairly low, we usually switch to English. This is usually my fault because though he'll slip into English, if I stay in Korean, he comes back. But what happens is that I slip into English and stay there.

So all of these things came together this weekend to make me feel frustrated and a bit pessimistic about learning Korean.

I was chatting with Good Man online and I told him why I was frustrated about Korean. He promised

I will practice Korean, but I will not tell how to download TV in your PC

Later, we were chatting in English and I expressed frustration with his living situation. In the middle of my complaining, he said "한국어로 이야기하자." Let's speak Korean.

I stared at the screen. Oh now that's just not fair! We always hash things out in English. But hey, if he wants to do that, OK. Always hashing things out in English isn't really fair, either.

I wrote back "더 어려워! 하지만—" It's too hard! But—

I told him what I wanted to in spelling-error filled Korean. He said something sweet in Korean in return and all my frustration went away.

I believe Good Man when he says sweet things to me, in whatever language, flawed or perfect. But why, when I'm upset, does it sound so much sweeter in Korean? Is that why he wants to speak English all the time? Does it come across differently?

"사범님, 천번 했어요." Sabumnim, I did one thousand.

"천?" One thousand?

"네." Yes.

"아만다, 이천 해요!" Amanda, do two thousand!

I wrinkled up my nose. "아마 할 수 없어요—" Maybe...that's not possible.

"화이팅!" Fighting!

"하겠어요!" I'll do it!

Master appeared while I was on 1,200. When I was done, I let the rope fall from my hands. It flew to the floor.

"이천이나 했어요!" I did two thousand!

"하겠어요!"

(As a side: Good Man said that the correct thing to say would have been "이천 번이나 했어요!" (이)나 is a marker attached to numbers that are larger than you would expect. I learned this in Sogang 2B and thought, When in the world will I ever use this?)

I am wide awake now and I think tomorrow morning I may be in for a tough time getting out of bed...

(한글)

Conversation with my coworkers at lunch yesterday.

"Amanda, is your boyfriend the eldest son?"

"Yes, the only son."

"Oh," knowing glances between women about being in a relationship with the eldest son, "Is he a good son?"

I laughed, "No. He says he is 'a bad son, but a good boyfriend.'"

Cool Co-Teacher touched my arm and said, very genuinely, "Oh, that is very good! A bad eldest son is the best to marry, because he will put you first. A good son puts his mother first. You should marry him."

I laughed, "Is your husband a good son?"

"Ummm, not too much, but sometimes. I wish he were a little more bad."

Another coworker struggled to find words in English (we'd been speaking in both languages). "Yes! Um—him, don't let go! OK?"

I finished The Little Prince yesterday. I was very excited to do so, as this is only the second (chapter) book I've ever read in another language (the first being Pippi Longstocking in Swedish).

When I finished it, I still had ten mins left to my subway ride, so I thought about how I read the book. When I first started reading it, I was focussed on how much I didn't know, how much I didn't understand. Around chapter 4 (a very long chapter—for this book, which has very short chapters) I thought, "This is too hard, I should quit." But I was determined not to.

At some point, I started focussing less on what I didn't know and more on what I did know. I started enjoying it and not worrying about what I didn't understand. Oddly, the last chapter, which was probably the least concrete of all the chapters was the easiest for me to read.

I also have a copy of this book as a graphic novel, which I started reading today. Now this is interesting because it's been rewritten and simplified a bit. That whole fourth chapter doesn't even seem to be in it. I hope the water pill seller is... In any case, I am really enjoying this book because the pictures help me keep my place and the dialogue is entirely in Banmal, which is good for me to read.

I am writing down words and grammar patterns I don't know or find remarkable. I am not writing down every word I don't know, just the ones I want to. Some come up multiple times, but I'm still not sure of the meaning. Some (사막, for example) I've already figured out, but I learned from the book. Some are compound verbs that I figured out but wanted to mark anyhow. Some are words that I think are just fun to say (쓸쓸하다). I've noticed some grammar patterns that I learned in Sogang (and wondered, "When will I ever use this?") and some that I'm curious about. I'll be posting about these things on my Korean language blog.

I'm in another excited phase of learning Korean. I have technically made less progress in this language than in Spanish (I'm finishing 2B, which would be two semesters of Sogang) and I took two years of college Spanish. Wait. Actually...I think the Sogang course is three or four hours a day and my Spanish class was only one. Well, now, that might be the difference. Still, I studied Spanish for two years in college, which was apparently the "fluency" level (meaning it was the foreign language requirement of every college my friends or I went to) and got Bs. I was never anywhere near as functional in Spanish as I am in Korean.

And I never even dated any hot Spanish-speaking men.

Had I known Good Man was around, I would've started studying Korean years ago! ㅋㅋㅋ

I wasn't feeling well Friday, so I stayed home. Today my Cool Co-Teacher said, "Are you feeling better?"

"Yeah, I slept a lot Friday."

"Yeah, you still look a little pale. But it's OK. It makes you prettier looking! Really, you are prettier today because you are still so pale looking."