A "Korean patch" is someone who was not born and raised in Korea but knows Korean really well, almost like they put a patch on themselves that magically gave them Korean speaking powers. I wish they really did have a patch or a microchip to implant into my brain to learn Korean, but I'm trying my best to do so on my own, and with the help of a nifty website called "Talk to Me in Korean." If I ever created my own business I'd want it to be run like Talk to Me in Korean, with a state-of-the-art website that tracks one's progress and provides hundreds of lessons (some video, some audio), but also a Youtube channel that updates every day or so to stay in the mind of loyal subscribers. Most importantly, though, the creator of the website adheres to the rule that learning a language has to be fun, or else people lose motivation quickly and abandon ship halfway through, forfeiting all the progress they had made until then because language learning is like dieting, you need to stick with it every day and exercise every day to keep the brain in that mode. They also have cool explanations of words like Korean patch to have it stick out in one's mind, rather than the 15 different ways to say "to see" or "to stay."
MJ has a classmate in her nursing program who wants to study Korean and had even learned Korean as a child, just didn't stick with it and didn't get over the hump of actually learning it. She just wants other people to teach her, as if there was some sort of magical patch a native Korean speaker can give to a learner. In fact, it's probably harder for a native speaker to teach a brand new speaker their own language, because native speakers just know it naturally, they didn't even need to learn the rules. I couldn't describe all the rules of English and its exceptions if I tried; it takes some real skill to dig into one's own language and learn all the nuances of it, and then also try to make it as fun as possible to a new speaker. Of course one can try to memorize all Korean words by rote memorization, in fact there's tons of books and videos that just give 2000 most common words, go ahead and memorize them, but it is NOT easy to sit down and just try to digest them all in one session, not when Facebook and Youtube (not to mention the Robinhood app when the Nasdaq and E-commerce stocks hit all-time highs this week in front of July 4th- the time-honored July 4th trade) for trying to memorize all the words. It's the videos and funny situations and actual usage and going through the situation of using it that makes us really learn a word. I remember first learning Japanese and having a hard time saying anything in front of my Japanese colleagues, but word by word I spit out some things that I was learning, and each time I said something new I was so nervous to use it that when I did use it, the native speaker actually understanding it made me get such an adrenaline high that it was like remembering the first time I played dodgeball all over again, or the first (and only time) I ran a marathon.
Which is the whole premise of Talk to Me in Korean. So many memories. But the website's name itself is a good reminder for practice: I need to talk to someone in Korean, and luckily I know someone really near and dear to me who I spend almost 24/7 in lockdown with, and whom I hope to share many memories (not just to retain new words I learn like Korean patch).
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