learning a language

I think I posted before about the different nationalities in my Korean class. I'm constantly amazed at their language study. Most of them speak fluent English because they studied it from a young age. Of course, there are a few that don't speak much English at all, and the others I don't actually know how well they can speak English because we always speak in Korean except during break time, when you can hear all sorts of different languages being spoken. I looked at one of the Sri Lankan girls notebooks the other day and saw her lovely Sri Lankan writing next to some of the Korean. It just looked like a series of neat spirals to me. She is really amazing to me because she speaks English well, is one of the best Korean speakers in the class, and she also knows Japanese and I think some Chinese. She's still in college at home and took a break to come here for a semester of Korean. Wow.

I've always been jealous of people who could speak other languages well. Now that I'm getting to where I can speak Korean, I wonder why I never took the time to really study a language like I am now. It's completely rewarding, in my opinion, even though it takes A LOT of effort. I started trying to study Chinese this week. I bought a book when I was at home for Christmas on Chinese characters and another on conversation. I looked at them a few times, but I stay so busy with Korean that I haven't made much time to study anything else. Well, since I decided I'm going to China for sure, I thought I should get a bit of a jump on the language. It's incredibly hard. The grammar is similar to English, so in that respect it'll be easier than Korean, but learning to read the characters with the right pronunciation will take a lot of time. I can write about 15 or so and can read about 25 maybe, but that's barely scratching the surface. I heard that you need to know about 1000 to read a newspaper!

After Korean class, I usually walk to the bus stop with the two Russian ladies and they often speak Russian. I can recognize some of the words (since my Dad speaks Russian and I've visited there). This week, after I started studying the Chinese characters again and then walked along listening to Russian, the thought ran through my mind that learning Russian would be so much easier! Maybe after I master Korean and Chinese....