안녕하세요, or: Secrets About Learning a New Language

You can stop reading right here if you think I'm about to tell you how to learn a foreign language.  Well, okay, I'll give you the one-sentence abstract: It's just like losing weight (eat less and exercise).  You study every free moment, and you tolerate insufferably slow progress until your ears bleed.  And you absolutely do not let it get to you that the delightful and beautiful young whippersnapper you teamed up with as a study-buddy can keep up with you in her "spare time" while simultaneously pulling down an "A" in her Digital Signal Processing class.  You just don't.  Competition is only good as far as it motivates you.

No, what I'm here to write about is an amazing secret world, a place where the Internet is weirdly and truly anonymous.

I'm not lying to you.  Being a bit metaphorical, maybe, but not lying in a pretty important sense.

Late last September, I decided to really study Korean.   I have Korean family members, though they themselves are "merely" Korean-American and they don't speak a word of Korean, nor do they have any inclination to do so.  Maybe they'll change their minds, maybe they won't, but the essential point is that they are actually ethnically Korean, and they can actually not do a damn thing their whole lives about being my relatives, so I have a bona fide permanent link to Korea.

And I'd like to be all noble and claim that I'm doing this for their benefit, so that when they suddenly hatch into "cultural awareness", they'll have a loving relative to lead the way.  This is true to the extent that that reasoning has made me feel my efforts have some long-term underpinnings.  But the immediate impetus for Korean study is the "Korean wave" -- Kpop, Kdramas, the junk food of Korean culture.  In the midst of a giant western recession and a significant eastern wound-licking after the Tsunami Apocalypses, not to mention some fairly expensive extended U.S. awkwardness with the Middle East, South Korea stands out as the giddy nubile teenager in the crowd.  Their pop culture right now is full of happiness, hope, energy, and affection, and it's irresistible.  I haven't been this deeply in love since Eric Estrada was in CHiPS.

So that's the back story, but what I'm writing about here is the strange Internet-cultural result.  In my attempt to learn Korean, I've signed up with a subscription service called HaruKorean -- for a nominal fee, they'll encourage you to write sample sentences, and native Korean speakers will correct your Korean.  In my actual daily life, I have almost one Korean-fluent friend (she's the wife of a colleague), and frankly, I think she should pay my subscription, and she probably would, if she had any idea how much grief this site was saving her.

I want to believe my progress with Korean is nothing short of astounding.  I know for a fact that my progress with Korean is entirely average, though perhaps I might gain some extra credit for doing it while holding down a full-time job and being middle aged.  I'm a grammar weenie, so that helps me delve into the constructs of the language, but my retention is pretty typical of a distracted adult.

This is, again, not central to what I'm here to discuss today.  You might wonder why I waste your time with irrelevancies, but if you knew me in person, you'd never wonder again.

What I'm here to discuss today is the kind of sample sentences I write on HaruKorean.  No, I don't have a secret life.  I don't have anyone stashed in the basement the police need to know about.  I just have a typical middle-aged life, full of doubts, and possibly hopeless dreams, and cranky judgments   I express all of these on HaruKorean.  I do this because I am writing in Korean, and nobody I know understands Korean, even bad Korean.  The people who correct my sentences are on the other side of the world, and I have reason to believe, from the profiles on the site and from what I know about the proprietors, that they are kind people.  I trust that they'll treat my strange little sentences-of-honesty with kid gloves, and they do.  I don't spend every sentence baring my soul, far from it.  But things I want to say, I say, without regard for whether my own family would approve.

I don't imagine that my family couldn't find this out, if they cared to.  Google Translate isn't exactly a state secret.  And my sample sentences are written on scrap paper all over my desk.  My family members certainly love me, of that I have no doubt.  But it's a fact of middle age that one's family tends to find one singularly uninteresting.  It's part of what makes middle age a time tinged with slight sadness.  They could Google me, but they won't.

The story would end there, except that I have also gotten involved in the opposite scene.  I correct English sentences for foreigners, via a different website.  It's a similar scenario; people submit sentences, and native speakers correct them.  I love doing it; my penchant for correcting people's English finally has a constructive outlet.  And I have definitely noticed the same phenomenon.  People express what they find to be rude, what they wish they possessed but don't, what they aspire to, and what disappoints them about themselves.  Far from finding this to be "juicy gossip", I react to it with affection.  I love the fact that these people will tell me (well, not me specifically, just the nameless correction team) things about themselves that are clearly heartfelt.  I have no way of knowing, of course, whether these people are this open at home.  But I suspect they aren't, or at least not with the same tiny things.  And I love them for it.

When I started learning a foreign language, I just hoped to develop a new ability and get to know a new culture.  I never expected to experience this tiny wormhole to another universe, where people can be themselves simply by stepping through to another language.  They say that learning a foreign language opens new worlds, but in this world of permanent records and accidental public life, it is wonderful to slip through a language barrier and feel, strangely, free.