I’ve Learned 20 Languages, but THIS One Has Been a Real Struggle…

Today I want to talk about my struggles with Korean.

I want to talk a bit about how I have learned different languages,

what the process has been for me, where I have had success and

why, and where I have struggled.

Some of the languages that I have struggled in include Korean,

Arabic, and I'm going to go into why. Today I'm gonna talk about Korean.

My initial exposure to Korean was in 1972.

That's a long time ago.

My wife and I were living in Japan.

We went to Korea on a visit just to see it.

I was very interested in a country on the continent of Asia

with some kind of language relationship to Japanese in terms of being of North

Asia origin in its basic structure, an agglutinative language, and, of course, with

an awful lot of boring from Chinese in the case of both Korean and Japanese.

And of course, tremendous cultural borrowing from China.

So I was very interested.

Had a great visit when Korea was, I guess, considered a developing

country, but it was really developing as we now know. I went again in 1976.

A good friend was at the Canadian Embassy there.

He was getting married.

He wanted me to be best man at his wedding.

He married a Korean lady, so I did that.

At that time, I bought some books for learning Korean, and I'm gonna show you

my library of books for learning Korean.

Yeah, but I didn't do much with it.

I went back to Japan, where again, I was living at the time.

And then in 1980 I visited Korea.

I was working for Atomic Energy of Canada.

I thought I was gonna be very much involved with Korea because Canada

was building a nuclear reactor in Korea.

But in the end, I only spent one year with Atomic Energy of Canada.

Then I went back to the forest industry.

And so again, my initial sort of spurt of Korean study kind of went down the

tubes, but still it was out there.

And then, you may know that in 2003 I wrote my book, The Linguist, about my

experiences in Learning nine Languages, which at that time, didn't include

Korean, and then we got started with LingQ.

At any rate, I said, "You know what? I should get back to Korean!"

So I bought some more books.