It wasn’t just the way the library suddenly became the professor of How to Do Anything You Want 101, although seriously, does no one else see the public library as a real life Narnia? It was the sinking realisation that I could have done way less work, had way more free time, and still been an amazing student. I could have worked on grand projects I was deeply invested in. I could have taken advantage of all the opportunities availible to me. I could have been awesome. Easily. Instead I spent a lot of time being mediocre and watching Adult Swim. While the crash course in American pop culture wasn’t a total waste, there’s no denying I could have done it way better if only I had known.

Except that’s not true, because I did know, or I could have figured it out after a minute of googling. I’m not interested in consoling away lingering feelings of failure, I want to know what really kept me from kicking ass back then because it’s undoubtedly the same thing keeping me from reaching my potential now. As tempting as it is to chalk my mediocrity up to a lack of knowledge or immaturity, you and I both know that we haven’t changed that much. I could have done better then and I can do better now.

I find myself saying the same thing about my career choices. I say the same thing about decisions in my personal life. I say the same thing when I find out that new years resolution I made last year, I actually made three years ago and let slide by for 1,116 days without progress (totally unrelated: I might have a slight addiction to tracking personal data). Years of obsessing over my perfect future and chasing after resolutions via web sites, complicated timetables, moleskines, and spreadsheets have disarmed my denial and left me with some pretty hard-to-swallow facts.

In fact, I didn’t learn much in college. Even more disappointing, I didn’t really try. I spent years of my life trying to unravel the mystery of my disappointment: was it the city? The fact that I didn’t find my tribe? The weather? The cost of living? The food? The timing? I’m always searching for an explanation. I’m wondering why I can never see that invisible wall holding me back. Present-day me is appalled. Obviously it was none of those things. It was me. I got in my own damn way.

My mate calls it “Leigh Cooper syndrome,” the state of being wherein you’re permanently convinced going somewhere else would solve your problems. Maybe she’s on to something. Sure I like jet-setting all over the world and knowing I can start anew anywhere, but I also spend more time looking forward to the future than I do paying attention to the present. Worse still, when I finally do pay attention, I find I’m still heaping blame upon stuff that has no bearing whatsoever. It’s the city! The weather! The roommate! The boyfriend! The mailman! I can still easily talk myself into moving to a new place, convinced it will be different. You’d think I’d have figured the ruse by now.

Then again, it isn’t exactly a ruse. Every time I zig and zag geographically it’s awesome. I spend my time doing something new. I find different people. I develop favourite cafes and restaurants. I fall in love with new countries. I go on unforgettable adventures. I develop new interests. I become a little less ignorant each time I move. I spend too much time in parks. I agonise over picking a hypothetical neighbourhood to purchase future property in. I adore it. What can I say, I’m a dreamer. Even though I am 100% aware that my problems don’t change the same way time zones do, months pass and I get itchy feet again. I think about how awesome it will be when I change everything — my job, my zip code, my “personal brand” — and wipe the less glossy moments of my life on the remains of whatever city or situation I am leaving behind. And that new place? Of course I don’t imagine fighting with my boss in it or being bored on laundry day. So naturally when I fight with my boss and have no clean underwear I feel like a roving goldilocks in search of the perfect fit. This one’s too quiet. This one too small. Why can’t this work out juuuuuuust right? Where is my perfect fit? Why can’t I find it?

Because the best version of my life is not going to just spontaneously come together like that. This is the same reason university was boring. A dull subject or a bad professor can only bear so much of the blame. No matter how killer your education was (and mine was pretty unbelievable), the one skill I needed to learn was how to take responsibility for my own learning. No one else is going to do it for you. No one is pushing me. If I want those things, things like fulfillment, growth, a stellar career, a tribe of kindred spirits, a life seriously lived, it’s on me. It’s my job.

All through university I was waiting for these things to magically fall into place, and when they didn’t, I would seek out elaborate explanations. I loved the illusion of fellow compatriots who would help me shoulder the responsibility of my own happiness instead of facing it head on, alone, like everyone must. But when taking out the trash is your duty and your apartment smells like garbage, well, you’ve no one to blame but yourself. That’s why it’s easier to fight with your roommate about recycling than it is to actually recycle. Rather than blaming the true culprit, myself, for any unhappiness that came up, instead I whined and moaned about dull subjects and bad professors and the city and the weather and and recycling and anything that would prevent me from having to feel the crushing weight of real responsibility.

With much embarrassment I admit University was the time to learn my lesson, and when I didn’t, “responsibility for my own learning” became “responsibility for my own life.” Even after graduation I was still waiting for something else to swoop in scoop up the job. For once, figuring out what you want is the easy part. Figuring out how to get it is pretty easy too; it’s applying the knowledge that’s so tricky. I knew what I should have done, but I didn’t even attempt to do it.

As enraged as I am that this whole time I didn’t have to wait, that I could have been kicking ass years ago, the truth is, you learn your lessons when you learn them. Can’t rush it. It took me as long as it took me to figure out I can be hands off and let the big life decisions be made for me all I want, but even when I let someone else take the wheel, the responsibility for the outcome still has my name tattooed all over it’s backside. So now, I’m staring it down like I should have long ago. It’s time. My life is amazing, and I want more. I want more fulfillment. I want a dreamier job. I want to keep improving my Korean. And hells yeah I still want a six pack. Knowing is the easy part. No one else can help get them. It’s on me. And that’s both the most terrifying and the most empowering thing I ever learned.

I am thrilled that libraries exist, expanding my life goal list to unreasonable lengths, but the advice of experts and the how-to hypotheses can only take you so far. If I want to step it up, I’m going to have to do things a little differently. Right now, that means amputating my many flailing attempts to “figure it out.” It means doing more than I talk about doing. It almost certainly means shutting up for a while. It means feeling lost and scared witless but moving forward anyway. So this is me, moving forward. Taking responsibility. Stepping up. Wish me luck!

She might as well have; Pat had been living in Asia for 10 years with nary a trip home. She’d started in Hong Kong, then worked her way to Tokyo, where I came to work under her notoriously cavalier office dress code. As of now I think she’s in Beijing, maybe Shanghai. The last time we chatted was a few weeks after I grilled her about being an expat over corn and miso ramen in 2008.

“Truthfully, your first year is a total roller coaster,” she said at last. “Even if you know the language.” She buried her face in the raised bowl, draining the last drop. The woman could eat. And drink. And show a poor kid from Texas how to really live abroad. I miss working for her.

But I hadn’t really thought about Pat until I moved to Seoul. I mean, I’d lived abroad before, for months at a stretch too, but damn it, Pat was right, changing your address sure is different. Your sense of time is totally warped; sometimes three months feels like a weekend, some days I’m convinced I’ve lived in South Korea for a decade. Those good days and the bad are unstoppable. There’s no getting off the rollercoaster. Pat’s words ring in my head whenever I find myself clenching my fists.

My life in Tokyo taught me much about the expat community, namely to ignore them. Droves of people lucky enough to land a job abroad “tell it like it is,” provided “it” is a tiny foreign-language bubble that rarely engages with the surrounding culture. God forbid we hang out with Korean people or anything. But the impulse to stick together is well founded, actually. Learning a new set of norms is hard. Like sometimes you want to run home and have mummy stroke your hair hard. Like screw this I’m never going to be fluent so I’m just going to stay in and watch Eddie Izzard all day, because it’s way easier to talk about learning a language than it is to actually learn one hard. That hard.

The problem isn’t the suffocating lows, it’s the manic highs. It’s the inability to predict how a transaction will play out that puts you at the mercy of lady luck. There are no laurels to rest on, no common reference point, so lots of expats choose ignorance. It works. If I never try to participate, I’ll never be upset or challenged or humiliated or meet amazing people and have amazing experiences or become less ignorant or a better, more open minded person or…you see the problem here? It’s not a particularly good coping mechanism, even if it is effective at ensuring you never have to change.

The alternative is to let it roll. I haven’t yet mastered this. Mostly I’m surprised by how quickly it changes. I could be having a perfect day when a silly mistake at the register haunts me for a week. I could be miserable until midnight when I stumble upon the most delicious waffles and successfully navigate the Korean Inquisition as to how I want my coffee. I tell all my friends what an amazing day I had yesterday, forgetting I was in a puddle of self-hatred for 9/10ths of it. So if you’re wondering what it’s like to live abroad, I’ve got to warn you, your first year is a total rollercoaster, even if you know the language.

There’s nothing for it. If I want to improve my Korean, I have to spend more time and effort working with it. There’s no escaping the fact that 99% of my daily frustrations would disappear if I could make myself properly understood. Unfortunately, natural-sounding, promptly-delivered sentences are the very last aspect of language learning I’ll master, even if it’s the first one I want. Doing something that helps me suck less every time I get the urge to complain about how elementary my ability is, this is a newly acquired skill. It isn’t easy to care, to try, to actually attempt something real. No one can teach you, no matter how much you pay, and nothing will make the actuality of being an expat easier, no matter how much you prepare. But don’t let that stop you. I’m trying to let all the angst and the stomach aches that come from riding the rollercoaster too much motivate me to push further. I’m trying to be patient and forgiving of myself. I’m trying to let it roll. Sometimes, I end up with red cheeks and a cold sweat, but sometimes 생각보다 어렵지 않아요.

“한국어를 배우는 건 다른 사람에 비해서 일본어를 잘 말하는 사람에게 어려워요. 제가 생각해요.”
“It’s harder for people who know Japanese to learn Korean. In my opinion.”

I’d been asking my numerous Japanese friends whether 저보다, compared to me, they think learning Korean is easier or harder for them. Are the undeniable similarities between Japanese and Korean grammar (and sometimes culture) a help or a hindrance? A blessing or a curse?

If it seems a bizarre question for a round-eyed 미국에서 온 gal to be asking, you have no idea how many Japanese there are in Korea. For peoples who claim to hate one another, they spend an awful lot of time hanging around each others countries, trying to learn the language, shopping at the hotspots, and generally being far politer than alleged nemeses have a right to be. Even stateside, the rosters of University-level Japanese courses are filled with more Koreans hoping for an easy A than Anime-philes, and if you sensed otaku culture’s popularity before, you know that’s saying something. Truthfully, there are so many Japanese and Taiwanese students enrolled in my language intensive you have to wonder, do other Asians have an advantage here? Is learning Korean actually easier for them? Well, I decided to start asking around. I went straight to the source, first I asking my Japanese classmates from 1급, all of whom unanimously agreed it’s easier.

“음, 한국어 문법하고 일본어 문법이 아주 비슷해서 일본 사람보다 어려워.”
“Erm, because the grammar’s so similar, it’s not as hard for Japanese people.”

“아마 너보다 쉬울 거예요. 그냥…한국 가요와 영화는 일본 사람한테 인기가 많아서 한국말을 자주 들었어요. 미국 사람한테 인기가 없지요?”
“It’s probably harder for you. It’s just…Korean songs and movies are really popular in Japan, so we hear the language often. It’s not that popular in America, right?”

They had me pretty sold on the topic. After all, the shared sentence structure, identical set of English loan words, and eerily similar pronunciation had to mean there was less to learn. Lest we forget the many different 높임말, or words that change depending on how polite you need to be exist in both Japanese and Korean, but few other East Asian languages. Surely learning new particles was easier than figuring out how to navigate a particle-based language in the first? Many of my 일본어도 공부하는 Taiwanese friends with Japanese speaking proficiency high above mine disagreed. They would know too, since Chinese grammar is closer to English’s than it is to Japanese’s.

“다른 내용은 어려울 거예요. 이 학생은 읽기를 잘 할 수 있지만 그 학생은 말하는 걸 이해하고 있어요. 안 쉬워요. 다라요.”
“Different parts will be hard [for different people]. This student can read well, but that student is understanding what’s been said. It’s not easier, just different.”

“아니요. 인어 두개가 너무 같을 때 쉬게 배우지 못해요. 혼란스러져요.”
“Nah, when the languages are too similar, you can’t learn them easily. You’ll be confused.”

They too had a valid point. I recalled the one lone French student in my Spanish conversation class; poor girl’s pronunciation defaulted to the rules of another romance language and it was painfully difficult to understand what she was saying in either language as a result. Perhaps the smaller degrees of difference become difficult to sort out when you’re so used to forming words one way. Plus the valedictorian of our TOPIK level was a Taiwanese student with equally impressive English proficiency and not, as the maths would predict, a Japanese girl.

Amidst all of the curious answers I began to see a pattern that had nothing to do with sentence structure or cultural overlap. The people who claimed learning Korean was easier, for whatever reason, had unexpectedly high speaking proficiency. The people who claimed it was harder did not. I’d be the first to point out speaking is just one of the four quadrants involved in actually acquiring a language, but it’s by far the easiest to judge. A few sentences and everyone knows how well you grok Korean. Your pronunciation, cadence, word choice, sentence structure, and speed all give you away. Perhaps underneath my carefully worded question, I was really asking something else, something deeper. I began to form a new theory.

Language acquisition is not an accident. We can debate the most effective learning methods until the morning dawn, but one thing is undeniable: if you spend no time with the language, you won’t get better at it. Of course it’s hard at first, that’s true for Japanese, Taiwanese, and American students alike. Here’s the kicker. I’m not asking you if learning Korean is hard for you. I’m asking if you think you can do it.

Easier or harder to grasp, your answer is a justification for your performance either way, and we all know ‘justification’ is just another word for excuse. You’re giving me an excuse. Why did you succeed? Why did you fail? It likely has more to do with how sure you were of success than with how similar your native language was. Your answer reveals more about your expectations than about your abilities. And for some of us, our answers highlight precisely what’s holding us back.

What’s the point of comparing your old language to your new? Let them be different. Learn the rules of the new language and stop calling them better or worse already. I am monumentally guilty of this. I love to compare. It’s not productive; when I fall short, I feel miserable, but when I inch ahead I get too cocky to actually improve. The solution is to stop comparing, stop making excuses, and keep working, because there’s only acceptable answer to the question of whether Korean should be hard or easy for me.

“길이 각고하면 가고 싶은 곳에 도착할게요.”
“If you work hard for long enough, you’ll arrive where you wanted to go.”

There exists an unquenchable thirst to be awesome that makes people with the real minerals strive unabashedly for some version of perfection that may well be unattainable. This kind of perfectionism blazes trails and changes paradigms, and perfectionists of this brand tend to have a reputation for holding the world to unrealistic expectations (read: miserable colleagues), despite incredible track records of success. We call them geniuses and read their biographies hoping for a checklist that will teach us “how to care so deeply about your craft that you are misunderstood for 90% of your life, but are hailed as a visionary for the remaining 10.”

I know, that checklist sounds totally dumb to me too. At first glance, it looks like these men (and sadly, they are mostly men) spent decades of their life preparing for a single sweet spot in time, a set of perfect conditions that allowed their work to matter in a way most of our 9-to-5 gigs never will. What lucky, lucky men, right? Wrong. The truth is, this type of success is actually repeatable.

People who are this awesome don’t peak early. Hell, they don’t ever peak, they just keep going up and up and up and if they didn’t die, they’d probably still be blowing our minds. As clearly repeatable as success is, it’s anything but formulaic. To even think of writing a checklist almost guarantees you’re not a visionary. Why? How can it be so hard to distill success into bullet points? How can the signs be so impossibly slippery? Are there really that many ways to kick ass?

No. I know this because I’m good at riddles. For example, I knew immediately that $19.88 is more money than $19.83, and that’s why 1,988 pennies are worth more than 1,983. It’s called a lateral thinking puzzle. The riddle sets up a set of expectations, say calling one-thousand nine-hundred eighty-three pennies 1983 instead of the AP-style suggested 1,983. That one comma makes a hell of a difference, doesn’t it? Your brain expects to be comparing dates, not amounts, and therein lies the hinge on which the whole riddle hangs.

So no, there aren’t that many ways to be successful or talented. Success and talent aren’t some crazy, ineffable imaginings. They’re real, concrete commas we don’t know we’re missing. If you know about the comma, the riddle becomes straightforward. It’s a simple misunderstanding. Unless you don’t know about the comma. If you don’t know about the comma, you start cooking up grandiose backstories about the value of copper twenty years ago, or the economic rates of inflation. In short, you waste a lot of time.

This is why the success of our heroes seems so unattainable. It’s why no amount of googling “Regan-era copper price” will get you any closer to answering the riddle. Most of us are trying to peel an apple when we should be scrounging around for an orange. So the problem isn’t just that we spend too much time futzing around on the internet, it’s that when do fire up, we’re so busy comparing — comparing ourselves with our neighbours, comparing our salary to our boss’s, comparing the years 1983 and 1988 — we miss the whole point.

The problem is, you don’t know what you don’t know, and sometimes what you don’t know doesn’t matter (e.g., knowing how many bacterial species live in your duodenum will likely have no impact on your ability to poop) but sometimes what you don’t know is the all-important, game-changing, can’t-go-back comma. If you’re faced with a riddle, how do you know where to start looking for the comma?

I’m not asking rhetorically. My goal is not the kind of success Malcom Gladwell will write a book about, I just want to understand Korean movies. Even toddlers can do that. On the one hand, class is great, it really is, but on the other hand, it has its own rules and expectations, many of which no one tells you aren’t hard or fast. There are some things even the best textbooks in the world just can’t help you with. Class can’t help you make Korean friends. Class won’t improve your ability to make dirty jokes. Class will not introduce you to K-Pop you can actually stomach.

It feels like theres’s a pre-ordained path: first unlock this foreign language so I can make friends, dirty jokes, and better karaoke selections, but that’s not how it works. It’s through drinking buddies and karaoke parlours I make sense of Korean. Here then we have problem. I’m chafed by my beginner-ness: books are still gibberish, television might as well be greek, and my one Korean friend got so sick of repeating her side of the conversation, we stopped hanging out. Ten weeks of class time (and an English-language boycott) has improved my Korean in many senses, but not in this. I continue to be an excellent student, but truthfully, lack real fluency. My sentences are cumbersome, my delivery unnatural. To put it politely, I sound like a robot. A stupid one. A very friendly robot perhaps, with ever-improving pronunciation, but a not-too-bright robot nonetheless. No one likes to try for native and end up with Mr. Moviephone.

Perhaps it’s a phase. Perhaps I’m staring at tiny green sprouts and complaining about how long I have to wait until they’re carrots. Probably not. Like the riddle of the pennies, you know the answer is simpler than ’80s economics and copper’s atomic weight. No one has to tell you when you’ve found the comma; it’s as if suddenly everything has clicked into place, and you can’t imagine not knowing the riddle’s solution. Sure I want to know proper, polite, don’t-get-your-weigukin-ass-kicked Korean, but I also want to know informal, daytime television, skeevy old man Korean. So here’s my riddle: how do I engage in Korean conversations when I don’t yet speak Korean? How do you make friends you can’t yet understand? How do I know if I’m missing the comma? And where do I start to look?

My classmates are awesome. Simply awesome. Most of them are from other countries around Asia, which means to communicate, it’s Korean or silence. We’re all in the same boat, coming to Korea 보통 for the first time, trying to sort out registration cards and bank accounts. It helps that we’re all here by choice, studying the language because we want to, but the real reason it’s worth tuition to hang out with these folks for four hours a day is that we can actually hold a conversation. I don’t know enough Korean to chat with native speakers, since they invariably ask something incomprehensible to me. I try, though I end up catching one out of every five sentences. With classmates, we all have the same base of vocabulary, so we naturally stick to topics we all understand: food, age, where we live, what we did this weekend, if we’ve ever been to your country, and the like. Having year-mates to swap Korean emails with is so much more motivating than reading manwha alone in your room. It puts real communication at the forefront, which in my opinion is the whole purpose of learning another language.

The particulars of the class itself are a huge factor in how effective and enjoyable it is. My teachers are another reason to attend a class, rather than avoid it. Each week I get at least 20 hours of native pronunciation drilled into my brain and 20 hours of opportunities to ask a native speaker all the questions I like. My class homework involves turning in my notebook for review every day, which means not only is my writing double checked by a fluent speaker, but anything else I write or attempt to learn is also commented on. If I attempt something beyond the scope of the class, it gets reviewed and corrected by my teachers. It’s like having spell check for an entire semester. Not only does this encourage me to take on more complex writing, but it provides invaluable feedback, since often I don’t even realise what I’m messing up, confusing, or using incorrectly.

Daily classes also provide some structure, namely deadlines. I still find self-study the centre of my language learning, but if no one’s watching, sometimes I step off the gas and coast. Knowing I’ll be held accountable for a particular grammar point tomorrow ensures I keep studying hard every day, and in my experience, what you do every day is what you win at. I enrolled in a language intensive for the visa sponsorship, honestly, but I lucked out, having picked a good one that convinced me classes can be quite useful, albeit for none of the usual reasons.

That said, (and this is up for debate) I still think classroom Korean is not the same as real-world Korean. An analogy: whenever I instant message a mate, it hardly resembles English. There are typos every which way, slang out the yin-yang, acronyms and even stuff we just make up on the spot. You would never learn this in class, because technically it isn’t proper English, yet we have no trouble understanding one another. Natives of a language know how and when to bend the language intuitively, and that’s part of it, but if proper English is the only English you’re ever exposed to, you’ll be at a loss next time we instant message each other. In short, what you’re exposed to is what you get good at. No exposure, no proficiency. That’s the basis for my entire learning methodology. This is why I still think classes alone (or at least classes that don’t curate material from real-life sources intended for native speakers) will never make you fluent. They’ll help, but you need more than a pre-fabricated conversation can give you. I mean, I don’t just want to fill out a Korean job application, you know? I want to get the jokes on variety shows and I want to understand the text messages I receive and I want to make others laugh, you know, real language proficiency.

So, if watching television is too boring because it’s all still gibberish, don’t stop watching. But don’t wait for the magic Korean fairy to sprinkle understanding in your brainhole while you sleep. Supplement grammar and vocabulary with English equivalents as needed, just enough to take the edge off. I drill direct English-Korean vocab, word for word. And today, I turned on the television and caught maybe 10 out of every 1000 words. Phase I is officially over.

Now it’s onto phase 2. I’m weaning myself off English, and though I’m leaving the 800-odd I’ve made just as they are, my flashcards feature a new, English-reduced format. I don’t know enough Korean to nix English completely, but eventually that’s the goal. Until then, until my vocabulary base is big enough, I study like this:

Flash Card Type 1 (now retired)
Front/Back: 어휘
Back/Front: vocabulary

Flash Card Type 2 (examples)
Front: 1) 은행과 약국 사이에 병원있습니다. 2) 언니있어요. 사이가 좋아요?
Back: 사이=between

Flash Card Type 3 (sentences I picked up and understood)
Front: 그 시간에 다른 여자와 데이트를 했지요?
Back: 다른=another, 데이트=date

Flash Card Type 4 (definitions of words I already know)
Front: <자동사> 어떤 생김새나 됨됨이 따위에서 둘 또는 그 이상의 사물이 차츰 같아지다.
Back: 닮다

How do you know when it’s time to give up English? There’s a scale of greatest return here. At some point constantly translating back to English impedes your progress. Until you get to that point, it helps. Tricky, I know, but the thrill of understanding is potent, and once you’re competent enough to regularly experience native-level transactions, then you can start to forget about English. The frequency of these little I can read the ricemaker! moments don’t have to be high, maybe one a day, but their presence is absolutely critical for sustaining your language-learning momentum.

[Update]: In an earlier version of this post I majorly mixed up my theories of language acquisition and misattributed the notion that bilingual dictionaries should be avoided. I owe a great, big apology to Stephen Krashen, father of the Input Hypothesis, and an apology to you folks. I’ll work hard to ensure this sort of thing doesn’t happen in the future.

It takes more than a quick dictionary search to find the right words for white rice, brown rice, and so forth. I had to stare at the television like a preschooler to figure out what a power button looks like in hangul. Diligent combing the internet for pictures with buttons to copy provides me one incredibly long, boring, and difficult vocabulary list to memorise, filled with false cognates and words that sound maddeningly similar (hey, we are talking about various types of rice here, how much variety were you really expecting?).

It took me at least four days to properly spell 현미접곡 without a cheat sheet, but man did I just pwn in that kitchen today. Endlessly drilling the kind of task-specific vocabulary I’ll never use in class felt like such a waste of time all weekend, but when Monday morning rolls around, I can solve problems in a split second. Here’s how it went down:

I moved into some new digs to shorten my commute time so I’m a little out of sorts. I walk into the kitchen I’ve never seen to make breakfast. There must be a ricemaker here somewhere…ah yes! Fabulous…er…why isn’t it opening? I stare down the machine, certain I’m missing some kind of secret Korean lever they don’t tell 외국인들 about. I find none. I am now eye level with the largest ricemaker I have ever seen, smelling freshly cooked rice and wondering why I cannot eat any. There aren’t too many buttons on this one. There is a light though. It’s blinking. It’s blinking on the 만늡발 setting. Not a moment’s hesitation, I back away, disappointed. Slow cook? When the hell does that end?

And then it hit me. I understood what was happening. I peered at the other buttons. Did I understand them too? 오본, 메뉴, 오 이런!! I’m reading real people Korean like It’s freaking 표준 mother of pearl! 언제 그것이 했어요? and then I go back to feeling like an idiot when I can’t tell the difference between the green tea and the barley tea packets.

Decoding that television remote was tedious. It was tricky. But now I know how to turn on and off air conditioning units, ricemakers, washing machines, and microwaves like I was born to operate electronics. I know timers like it’s my job. Looking up how to say mixed rice was all kinds of pointless at the time, but now the menu of my neighbourhood 죽 restaurant is, you know, a menu, instead of a series of identical pictures listed with different prices. These are the kinds of words no one will teach you. Oh, someone might come around and show you which setting to wash your clothes on, but unless you understand 런지래 is delicates and 속세탁 is hand wash, you’re living your life requiring nothing ever change. It doesn’t feel right. Memorising a series of button combinations instead of vocabulary words even feels foreign.

Plus you miss out on feeling like a total badass when, because you know what all the buttons mean, you can operate the machine like your Korean neighbours.

The comparison is hardly dramatic; months toiling in frustrated misunderstanding can make the most determined student doubt the task ever can be completed, and indeed internet forums are filled with students who, when confronted with the great crisis of language learning, lost faith. They blame the length of their tongues, the volume of characters, undeveloped outer ears, age, anything to unroll cellophane over the intensity of their own failures. I can’t blame them; I find myself adding more and more vocabulary to my flashcard system without experiencing any discernible progress. Even though it’s undoubtedly helping, it feels like I’ve stalled, like I’ll never learn Korean no matter how many flashcards I make, complete, or throw into the empty hole between my ears. I am in the void, and the void is highly discouraging.

Enter faith. Nothing will convince you of your success with a foreign language. On the contrary, every brush with the language will work hard to make interacting impossible. South Korea, a country filled with kind and friendly residents, will become hostile. Ajummas will say words to you, words you know the definitions of, and you will stand there like a gulping 개구리, eyes bulging, at a complete loss for what she means. Even children will mock your horrible accent by answering your carefully worded Korean questions with English. All of the world conspires to prove time and again that no matter how much Korean you’ve learned, it isn’t enough.

I need faith to keep trying when it seems futile. I need faith to trust that every little bit helps move me forward, whether it feels like it or not. I need faith to pass the time until I start understanding bits and pieces between the gibberish. My failure to understand 99% of Korean doesn’t mean I never will. Mockery from juvenile passerby proves I need to learn more, not that I haven’t learned anything. While there may be some great god of the polyglots who whispers in the ears of the chosen, he is silent, so I must find my faith, faith that I will eventually learn to speak Korean despite my cowing ignorance today, elsewhere.

I’m more than a bookworm, I’m a geek to boot. I comb the Young Adult section for new fantasy not popular enough to warrant a display at the end of the aisle. I actually lost sleep regretting the DARPA book on my bookshelf back in DC I will probably never finish. You couldn’t stop my tirades about public key cryptography if you tried. These are traits undeniable, yet I forget regularly.

Mostly I forget on Friday nights. University students swarm like gnats down the sticky alleyways between Yonsei and Ewha each Friday, shrinking and expanding to meet the width of the sidewalk. The noise overwhelms passerby; the roar of oncoming traffic is set to a clicktrack of 구두 stilettos the height only Asian women on the prowl can manage. These women are going to war with painted faces and pack sisters, swept up by the heat of the night. I watch from my reading spot behind the stone walls of Severance 병원, next to the cancer patients well enough to loiter the courtyard when weather permits. It’s just a parking ramp that separates us, but it might as well be an ocean for how capable I feel of crossing.

In these moments I feel an unmistakable otherness, a kind of loneliness I rarely confront. Usually there is the solidarity of my own tribe to answer the tide of nightclubbers. I always find fellow guerilla soldiers in the trees, on the fringe, hiding from the seemingly unstoppable force of mainstream youth. A little dramatic perhaps, but the smoking balcony of Severance grants me a bird’s eye view of the procession below and when I look around for fellow conspirators, I see only the sick, the sound of their IV bags wheeling across the flagstones a poor substitute for conversation. In South Korea, my tribe hides elsewhere.

For a moment, I fear the answer lies below with the procession. I must paint my face and join the throng. Luckily, the thought is fleeting, when a lone figure fighting the tide of students jogs my memory. I never savoured a night out. I find it unlikely I will now, simply because I am in a new place, tribeless. The answer is to be patient, to keep looking for the kind of people who like what I like and do what I do. I venture to the places tried and true — the 서점, the 커피솝, the 영화관, the football bars and small rock venues and gardens where you can picnic — in hopes that my tribe will be waiting, watching the socialites and wondering, just as I do.

Tribeless, unaccustomed, and illiterate is not a winning combination. Rather than wallow, I seek ever harder to understand. I throw myself into studying, especially when studying proffers a little escapism. I return to mother’s milk.

Illiteracy presents the perfect opportunity to aim lower with the kind of reading material I know and love. I added Korean translations of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Percy Jackson and the Olympians (the first book is called Mr. D’s Summer Camp over here), and Danny the Champion of the World to my bookshelf. I had to. The frustration festering in my stomach at my own illiteracy threatened to erupt every time I reached into my bag out of habit for a book that was not there. Illiteracy is agony.

Other expats try to correct my terminology; I am new to the country, I do try my best, this is a learning process, but deep down I also believe moving to a foreign country without speaking the language first is at best presumptuous and ignorant. I’ve filed enough change of address forms to know there’s a chicken and egg conundrum hiding underneath: how can you live in Korea without speaking Korean, but how can you speak Korean without living in Korea? I’m a fully grown adult with complex thoughts, complicated desires, and completely developed taste. Undeniable, except I can’t express any of my thoughts, ask for any of my desires, or compare any of my taste in the local language. I can’t send a text message, understand a television programme, or read a menu. I don’t know what your people call it, but my people call it illiteracy.

My illiteracy is dissipating, albeit not rapidly, but steadily. If steadily is what I get, I work with it. I’ll bide my time with Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and Danny. Harry Potter in particular is a good choice. His wizarding empire makes for better study aids than Korean QVC, especially when there are peppermint toads involved because if you didn’t know already, I’m nuts for anything with dark chocolate.

Harry Potter generally requires no justification, but for the resistive few: