We just spent the first day of a 3-day July 4th weekend in Sequoia National Park (don't highly recommend that place btw if you don't handle high altitude well like me). I had a stuffy nose the whole day that felt like a nosebleed would gush out at any time and a headache that made me hurt every time I turned my head. The good news though is I listened to a Korean language podcast most of the way there and back (a grueling 5 hour trek that's deceptively long due to the actual sequioa redwood trees being much farther from the gate than we anticipated, due to a long winding road straight up the mountain where we could only go 10mph tops. The trees were nice, there was something called the Crescent Meadow that was dreamy, almost out of a scene from "The Sound of Music," but I think we just got caught on one of the busiest days of the year for them, buses were packed with people and it took us 40 minutes in line to get to the gate. I can't imagine what it would have been like at Yosemite, our original destination.
Korean has replaced, of all things, baseball! My enjoyment from listening to Vin Scully and other baseball announcers describe the game still exists, but I don't get that satisfaction feeling I get from learning a new language. Every time I listen to baseball I think, shouldn't I be using this time to try to get to know my girlfriend better and understand her culture, try to speak her language? It's really a very beneficial mutual compromise, too, where she will listen to Chinese, yell out some words she just heard from the podcast, and I will confirm that that's the right pronunciation, and then I'll do the same a few seconds later in Korean. And then sometimes we'll realize, oh, wow, that word is the same or virtually the same in Korean as it is in Chinese! Wow! And I appreciate Korean even more. My girlfriend doesn't like when I praise the Japanese, but I find it fascinating the crossroads between the 3 large Asian giants of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean and the bonds they share with each other. I wonder if schools in those countries tell students that the languages all kind of intersect with each other and interweave and that learning those other languages might be easier if you're already a native speaker of one (kind of like romance languages like French, Spanish, and English, or if the bitter history between those 2 countries prevents teachers from encouraging students to learn those rivals' languages.
Learning Korean allows me also to experience the thrilling feeling of learning a new language and being at the beginning stages of learning, the freshness and infinte possibilities, something I got with Japanese 4 years ago when I first started. Everything is new, the feeling of achievement is pretty satisfying. It's a long way to fluency (if I ever get there), but the baby steps to getting there are fun to take.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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