Hello! As the title goes.
It’s been a good few months since I committed to learning Hangul. My interest in learning a language has always been in my mind since I was a little kid. But at that time I wanted to learn French. My native language is Filipino and my native dialect is Tagalog, which is the dialect many Filipinos speak. My Dad used to speak in his other dialect, Bicolano, with his family, but he never taught us any of the words. I guess, so they can talk amongst themselves without us understanding. Maybe. That always fascinated me.
I got lucky that English is something we had to learn in school. It was my best subject in school, too. I also learned by reading more books and watching a lot of American movies and dramas. It was basically all I watched growing up. Mind you, this was in the early 2000s where DVDs were just starting to become a thing. Subtitles in English-speaking movies were not common at all in the Philippines. Shows and movies in English were often dubbed in Tagalog on television, and I hated those. I never watched them. To me it was awkward. However, if we watched movies in theaters, subtitles are non-existent. But we had been learning English since we could learn to speak anyway, thus making it the second language of the majority of Pinoys. It is as common to me as speaking Tagalog (unless my brainpower and energy had been used up for the day then I revert back to Tagalog).
My interest in Hangul was fairly new. It was only last year or the year before that I engaged in Korean culture. It started with food, then dramas, and now, music. The more I absorb these pop cultures, the more my interest in the culture as a whole grew. I guess, naturally, I wanted to learn the language, which proves itself to be both easy and hard at the same time. The easy part is reading. I could read hangul (not so quickly yet, though) but I barely understand its meaning unless I look it up. Saying Korean words isn’t as hard as it may seem, too. It is basically said as it’s written, which is pretty similar to Tagalog. The difference is Tagalog only has 5 vowels and 28 consonants that are written in Roman letters. Hangul, on the other hand, has a whole set of characters that takes a few tries before the sounds of different vowels starts to separate itself from one another.
The hard part is building a list of vocabularies in my brain to store, remember, and, one day, use. Unless the words were borrowed from English, they are basically new words to learn. That is where the fun starts. Learning sentence structures and rules aren’t so bad, either. It just takes a bit of explaining, but it’s not too difficult to understand how sentences are formulated. It’s truly just memorizing the words and how it’s manipulated to create a meaningful sentence that makes learning a little bit challenging.
What I find most interesting the more I learn the language is that I learn so much about the culture and how different, and sometimes similar, it is to the culture I grew up in. The language itself illustrates Korean society in general. I often get curious with how the language was formed, allowing me to learn a little about their history. I wonder when to be informal, allowing me to understand how important relationships between people are in their society. Learning the language already taught me the levels of politeness in Korean society, and boy is it different from Philippine politeness. Somewhat similar, but there’s difference in level.
I chose the Korean language purely because of the amount of pop culture I absorb daily. My reasoning isn’t as big as, perhaps, say, moving to Korea. Maybe one day I’ll make business there, who knows. For now, it’s mainly for pop culture, and understanding the words I absorb from it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It could benefit me in the long run as well. And why not have another language in your pocket and open a whole new culture different from yours, right?
