Last night I stopped in the stationery store to buy some more colored paper for my sixth grade town project, and had an actual conversation with the woman in the store, in Korean. I was buying some stickers and toys too (thinking of using them as prizes at some point).
It was pretty cool: Where do you work? At Hongnong elementary. The kids like these things. Yes, they do. Your Korean is pretty good. No, I only know a little. How long have you been here? I lived in Seoul for 2 years and started living here recently. Etc.
At the end, the woman complimented my Korean again, but I felt ashamed. "계속 연습 하고 해요," I said (continuing practice [I should] do). But it felt like a lie.
Why? Because I have kind of dropped the ball on actively studying Korean. My first few months here in Yeonggwang, I'd kept really well to my routine of working on Korean at least an hour a day. But since the start of summer vacation, I haven't studied at all. My vocabulary list on my cell phone has reached maximum size of 200 words, so I'm not even saving the words I look up anymore. I'm not reviewing vocabulary. I'm not carrying around my "grammar bible" lately.
I thought about this. I think I was much more deeply wounded than I've been willing to admit, by the alcohol-imbued insults and mockery of my Korean-speaking efforts, that were directed at me during our "staff field trip" three weeks ago. I took it all very personally. And I took it as a call to give up on learning Korean. Certainly, it really wrecked my motivation.
Keep this in mind, the next time you want to laugh at someone's English that isn't so perfect. There are many English-speakers in Korea who have such an atrocious level of attainment that you want to laugh. They can sound like buffoons. But don't laugh. Be positive. I've been guilty of it, too – I know.
Learning a language is hard. This is one of the reasons why I think it should be required for foreigners teaching English here to study Korean. I think it would increase sensitivity to the emotional/motivational issues involved in language acquisition – they're not trivial.