Day 276: Linguistic Laziness

I think I've done fairly well at adapting to life in Korea. I've roamed the city exploring neighbourhoods, have dived head first into culinary adventures (for better or worse), made friends here and there, and feel quite comfortable indeed with my day to day life. But there's one thing that I have yet to conquer - the language.

When I came to Korea I had full intentions to learn the language, either by signing up for courses or just making a lot of Korean friends and milking them dry for free language lessons. But, alas, nine months has come and gone already and I've only learned a smattering of the language. I know about twenty words or phrases and while it's enough to get me around, it's not all that much. "Just getting by" with the bare bones falls far below my original masterplan, and I'm full of lame excuses why.

I'm too busy with work, there's no courses near me, I'm trying to save my money, I'm too tired, it's too hard, I don't really need it anyway since I'm already getting by, what will I do with it once I leave?, there's more fun things I'd rather be doing, the Koreans will never be able to understand me anyway, I'm too lazy....

Well all of those are true to a certain degree, but guess which one carries the most truth?

Being just too damn lazy really is the only real reason. And I'm kinda embarrassed about it. A lot of people who come to Korea know even less Korean by the end of their year than what I know right now, but a lot of others just throw themselves right into it and do quite well. My friends Ailish and Michael are shining examples of the truth that YES! foreigners can learn Korean, with effort and dedication. Michael particularly is amazing with it (but granted he's been here two years already...)

Still, I don't even know the Korean alphabet and have never really even tried to. Back to those reasons/excuses listed above, the combination of them really is true. I work 50 hours a week - in my precious free time I'd rather give priority to my precious social life. I don't know of any courses here in Ilsan, and would rather spend that money on travel instead. Korean is DAMN HARD to learn and since I teach a language all day I really don't want to spend the rest of it of my day struggling with a new one. Koreans do have the bad reputation that unless you pronounce something *perfectly* they really have no clue what you're saying. And yeah, I'm just lazy.

I feel guilty, but at the same time not really. I've done so many other great things in Korea and have conquered so much already, much more than the average weguk here, I believe. But still, I have this hanging over my head like a nagging mother-in-law. And now in recent weeks both Addie and Katie have taken to learning Hangeul in their free time. They can now both read the alphabet (Korean, unlike Chinese or Japanese, has a phonetic alphabet) and jokingly tease me that I'm being left behind...

Languages has never really been my strong point (although I did alright with French in high school) but I really could/should be making more effort. Still, I don't feel compelled enough to do so. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to do something (especially learn something new) unless I'm really good at it right away. I get discouraged/bored easily and then move on. And it's like I abandoned learning Korean even before I gave it a real shot. Lazy lazy lazy. Am I a bad foreigner for being this way?