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?