I keep telling myself that if my Korean is going to improve, I need to try harder to read things. I frequently puzzle my way through parts of newspaper headlines or articles, and I’ve learned a lot reading advertisements, but such forms of “found Korean” won’t be available to me when I return to the US. So I’ve been telling myself I should buy some actual books in Korean to try reading. It is perhaps too ambitious, given the pathetic level of my vocabulary — but I’m pretty good at working out the grammar as long as I have a dictionary in hand.
In one final visit to the bookstore today, I bought what looks to be a late-elementary or middle-school level text of Korean history, that I might try. I also found an abridged translation of Don Quijote (돈키호테 = don-ki-ho-te). I remember when I was first trying to learn Spanish, I would sit down and try to read, in Spanish, books I had read before in English. So what better first text to sit down with in Korean than a translation of something I know very well in Spanish?