::A Geek in Korea::

I was hanging out with some foreigners that had been there for a few years. None of them are snobbish, or elitist, but they were discussing coworkers they know that have been here multiple years but have limited Korean skills. Everyone around the table had their limits on what they could and could not do that they fessed up to. Most could read Korean, but couldn’t write well. Everyone at the table can speak functional “getting around town” Korean though, and considered it a necessity to survive.

One person mentioned a guy with six years experience in Korea that can’t read Korean. This is pretty bad, since Korean is pretty easy to learn the basics of on your own, and it increases your lifestyle so rapidly if you live here multiple years. It takes a month to get the basics down, and after that your illiteracy would seem like a huge joke.

This was topped by a guy that’s been in Korea for seven years that can’t read or speak ANY Korean. He wasn’t able to even say “Thank you,” which seems incredible. I couldn’t imagine being in a social situation where I would never make an attempt to communicate with someone on even a basic level. I can’t imagine what sort of bubble a person would have to ensconce themselves in to not know how to say the simple expressions you hear every day after years.

To go seven years and not learn something means there is something very strange going on. Going from no Korean to “A few words” is so trivially easy that you’d have to actively try to not learn parts of a language after a few years of living here. Trying to imagine living in a foreign culture only being able to react with fellow foreigners seems so incredibly limiting.

Even my parents and relatives that were here for 10 days made an effort to learn a few words to be polite. I’ve adopted Korean words into my vocabulary to the point that it’s only when I’m around foreigners that don’t many words that I get self-conscious about it.

I even fessed up to my own little embarrassing Korean skill while we went around the table. I never learned how to type Korean on a phone in Korea until my wife showed me how this year. I wanted to send her some message, and I realized I didn’t know how to do this on any of my phones. No one had ever shown me, and until you are given a hit about how to do it, the layout on the keyboard was no help whatsoever.

You have to “build” the characters in Korean.

For example, typing “. . |” will make a “ㅕ” character, which is made up of two dots on the left, then a bar. A “ㅑ” would be made by typing “| . .”. Characters like “ㅜㅠㅛㅗ” are all made the same way, varying the dots and bars to “draw” the character. More complex consonants are present on the keypad already, and you can hit them twice to “double” them up. It’s a pretty ingenious way to have all the different characters availble of a small keypad.

It’s MUCH easier for me to use a Korean phone to construct Korean words than it is for me to hunt and peck a Korean keyboard. I didn’t know how to do this until LAST YEAR because I always phoneticized my words into English from the Korean sounds. While I still needed to be able to read Korean to change it to English letters, phoneticizing words is an less efficient per byte of information. I pride myself in squeezing in my perfect message into 140 characters whenever possible without using slang.

Since everyone else I was talking to knew this skill before I did, I guess I could be on that “exasperatingly ignorant foreigner” list too, but in a much more niche sense. I’m on the top of the “Has been here forever, yet knows nearly no foreign people” list. I guess everyone has their failings, but some seem worse than others.