Learning the Language

*Note: Since a big part of my lifestyle is based around weight loss and exercise, I thought I would have a second part to my posts giving updates or tips from the past week. I'll break my posts into two parts to keep it more digestible. Scroll down to follow my exercise progress.*

It's Yellow Dust Season. I just bought my second pack of 3M 9322K dust respirator masks. I'm pretty sure they're used for construction sites sawing wood and drywall, but it's a good design to protect yourself against the yellow dust/microdust cocktail in the air these days. A lot of non-local (I'm trying other words than 'foreigner') people didn't believe me when I told them about the pollution levels being dangerous. It wasn't until they started complaining of sore throats, scratchy eyes, and headaches that they started to return for advice. Anywho. Yellow Dust Season is followed by Cherry Blossom Season (and the marker of warmer weather!!) so I'm just hanging on to the ride for now.

I had a few unexpected breakthroughs in the past two weeks. (The two weeks before that were... let's just say educational. I might get into it later after things get sorted out. Good point: it started me on a reading addiction, an upgrade from what was previously merely a book addiction.)

Let's start with the bigger epiphany.

Last week I blew my professional facade and accidentally cried in front of an associate. Arguably, they were being very pushy and patronizing, but the fact is I would never, ever have expected myself to react that way. It took me a few days to understand why.

My first year in Korea, 2009, was all good and fun. I was taking baby steps in learning the language. People were astronomically impressed that I could read Korean letters on the menus and signs, or even if I said things like 이것 좀 더 주세요 or 얼마예요? (Refill, please or How much?). I felt great when I could order Chinese delivery over the phone and felt like I overcame a huge step when I could figure out the McDonald's delivery service. At the time, you couldn't order online with your foreigner registration number. Ours weren't well integrated into the national database. Things are better now.

As time went by and I started using Korean for errands that I had to run on my own (I mean who wants to bug their friends for a favor to talk to the taxi driver over the phone more than once?), I started to feel like the impressed comments were more of a time waster. I start thinking, yeah I'm talking to you in Korean. Last I checked, we were in Seoul. Fancy that.

Then it slowly built into a kind of patronizing feeling when people keep commenting on how great my Korean is. Excluding the first year where I felt Korean was a bonus skill, Korean has been an essential method to proving my intentions in Korea. My friends have all supported my marathon toward fluency, helping me study, interpreting my broken text messages, and constantly inspiring me with their own ability to speak in better English than I could in Korean. It became a fluency competition.

The tables turned somewhere. I was first afraid and nervous to speak in Korean. Now, I get nervous and feel judged when I use English with local Koreans.

Sadly, after college, time runs short, people get jobs, and 5 hour blocks of study time becomes a rare bird hiding somewhere in a giant forest, never to be seen by human eyes again.

With thousands of corrections from friends and associates, managing to pass only the first of the two level intermediate Korean proficiency exam, and consistently missing the punch line on variety shows, I know that my Korean certainly isn't fluent. However, I'd like to think that I've showed enough devotion to show that I'm not just working in Korea, but with Korea.

As we hear intolerant people in America say all the time, "If you come to America, speak English." You might have seen the oddly controversial debate over the Coca-Cola Superbowl commercial. I don't really see how it's offensive in any way, if not touching. But the same kind of feeling that I learned in America--that people don't appreciate those who just come and take without making an effort to respect the locals are lazy and a burden on society--stayed with me. That drove me to break out of that circle of dependent foreigners and become an independent Seoulite.

In my mind, when I cannot fulfill that standard of clear communication, it means that I am not independent, and society throws me back into the barrel with all the other new arrivals and foreigners happy with the status quo of ignorance. All of my work has gone to waste. Zero.

So take a problem where my room has something that needs fixing. Needs maintenance. I know there's a peculiarity. I describe it, in Korean, and hear that they're going to come help out (course... not the warmest people are handling this situation, but we've all accepted this personality trait in some people. You just gotta work with them). Maintenance comes. They say it's not a problem with the machine, it's a problem with the pipe setup. Lots of explanations are thrown around, I get each of them, but it doesn't explain why the problem has recently crept up if the pipes were always the same way. I try to explain this, but my associate keeps getting pushier about dropping the issue and just letting it be because my room isn't special, the whole building was the same, why am I so suspicious of him, blah blah (which... after he investigated, found it was not the case, but it didn't help heal the burn he gave at the time).

Given, I'm trying to come up with a diplomatic response in a foreign language, whilst listening to his engineering terms in a foreign language... it was beyond my ability to immediately handle the conversation alone. It had exploded. Bombed. Fail. I lost credibility in my ability to judge if a machine was broken. I also lost my credentials as an equal in Korean society because my communication skill fell through. I felt one tear of frustration, and then everything after that was pretty much just tears from embarrassment about the first tear (does that happen to anyone else, or just me?).

After all of this, he came around and became a little more understanding. I think many people forget that what I say isn't all that I want to say. The information that gets to other people is sent through a language filter, where only about 80% of what I really want to say can actually get through. My words become neutered and often lack personality or sincerity. That's where I'm jealous of Sam Hammington.

It took me a while to really put my finger on why I was so stressed out. I still feel like as an outsider coming in to this society, I still have that responsibility to conform. I want to get better, but I haven't figured out my schedule to allow for study time, to the extent that I wouldn't start to hate it anyway...

At the same time, I don't know why I don't respect the progress I've made thus far. I keep pushing a perfectionist approach to my abilities. If it's not perfect, then it's completely lacking.

It may be because society here has not become accustomed to "intermediate," but rather has this perception that foreigners either can or cannot speak the language, and unwittingly throw out the array of abilities in between. All or nothing sort of approach.

I think both sides have a lot to learn.

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My second breakthrough was fabulous. 

I leveled up at the pool.

I remember learning how to swim when I was little. You know... stand on the diving board and jump into the arms of some loving relative in the water. From that point on, I had no fear of water (except open water for different reasons) and could manage to not breathe in water. Basic human survival skill, yes?

Then I took a class at Korea University. I needed the credit to reach 'full time' status, and hey, we can all agree I needed the exercise. (I also took a yoga class that semester.)

I learned to swim properly. Face in the water. Proper form. Swimming became an exercise, not just a fun thing to do in the summer. Later on, I would find it to be a spectacular exercise after I hurt my knee (runners knee--a chronic, but not debilitating). Swimming puts no impact on the joints, so it doesn't cause inflammation after exercising. I could get my cardio in without causing pain, as would happen with jogging or even cycling.

Since September, I've been going to the neighborhood YMCA and swimming to get my 50 minutes of cardio. I could feel it was far less intense than the heart rate I could rack up jogging, but I had to compromise intensity for pain relief.

On Tuesday, things got intense. Instead of breathing after every stroke, I can breathe after two. Sometimes three! It just... happened. Unknowingly. Automatically. And the workout got so much harder because I found work faster and push harder without having to pause for breath.

This sounds absolutely ridiculous, but I was ecstatic. That one small, minuscule improvement made the world of a difference. It picked up my speed and heart rate. No one was slowly trailing behind me.

Next... one day I will magically know how to do the butterfly stroke. Then I can join the big kids in the advanced lane. (Or not. I'm cool with this right here for now.)