Caveat: Knowing Korean (or not)

Some people seem to be under the mistaken impression that I've learned Korean.  Not hardly at all.  I'm making an effort to post here at least once a week in Korean, but it's just a way to give myself some struture and discipline in my efforts.

You'll notice that what I post is quite short.  My last Korean post was exactly 1 sentence, with a title.  And it took me 15 minutes to write, using both a dictionary and a reference grammar.  And I ran it through google translate just to be sure (although frankly that program has a lot to be desired – quality machine translation is still a long ways off).

I still feel no sense of fluency, and when I went out to dinner spontaneously with co-workers this evening, I was pretty depressed at how little of their conversation I still understood.  My vice principal gave me a little speech, of which all I understood was something to the effect of "if you have a problem, talk to someone" but there was a lot more to it than that.  All I could do was nod stupidly.

The problem boils down to:  vocabulary, vocabulary and vocabulary.  I'm just no good, it seems, at memorizing vocabulary.  Why wasn't Spanish or Russian this hard?  Is it really that much about cognates?

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