We gain a teacher on our trip, Diane Hong. She is an amazingly patient woman whom has taken on the task of teaching us the Korean Language as a family. She arrives on Wednesday nights at 8pm and Saturday mornings around 11am. She has over 20 years of experience and we are very lucky to have found her!
It turns out that the Korean language is based on phonetics. Established in the 1400's, the language was created by philosophers at the request of King Sejong. There are 14 symbols of consonants and 10 symbols representing vowels. The symbols are actually pretty easy to remember and among the Asian languages it is considered one of the easiest to learn (Chinese has over 80,000 characters!).
David will learn some at school as well as from Ms. Diane. Galen will have lessons in Korean but has had to enroll in Spanish at school. There is no end to the irony that she moved from Texas to Korea to learn Spanish (she was taking American Sign Language before we left). This will make her quad-lingual by the time we get home! We are already impressed!
Jason is learning extra vocabulary for work and its proving to be very useful on the job. I am finally making it around town. I am able to communicate to find the groceries and household supplies for the apartment. We are also getting braver about going out to eat at the local restaurants.
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