by David Wills

Created on: January 19, 2009   Last Updated: June 22, 2011

I didn't bother trying to learn Korean in my first five or six months here. It seemed like a mammoth task that just didn't appeal to me. Sure, I hated being the idiot foreigner that couldn't express himself or ask for anything he wanted, but I didn't realistically see that changing within my time in Korea anyway. Whenever I heard a Korean person speaking English, they'd say things like "I'm learning English for eight years," and I'd wonder what the point was in even trying. Why learn another language if after eight years you were still making such fundamental mistakes. I'd hear other foreigners saying "It took me two years to learn Japanese," and I'd feel put off because I never saw myself staying in Korea for two years, and there seemed to be no real point in knowing Korean outside of the motherland.

But then, like I said, I also didn't want to be that idiot foreigner. I speak French and have been to France about a dozen times, and every time I've been the majority of British people there can't speak a word. They mine and asked for things in exasperated English, totally oblivious to the fact that French people aren't obligated to know what Englishmen are talking about all the time. I'll always be reminded of the one time I saw a women in Super-U mining that she wanted Rocket Lettuce, by putting her hands above her head and zooming about the produce aisle. I don't want that to be me in a country less tolerant of differences than France.

So when I came here I did what all the guidebooks said and learned the alphabet, and I'm so glad that I did. It meant that Korea very quickly stopped feeling like a foreign country. I couldn't understand what the words meant, but I could read them out and make them sound familiar. It wasn't such a strange language after all.

Over the weeks and months, certain phrases stuck in my head as I heard them over and over. was the most obvious example. I heard it every day and it stopped sounding like something I wouldn't hear at home, and instead became just another part of the world around me. was the first word I began to say myself, as I tried my best to sound polite. I didn't want to be one of those Englishmen barking at French shop assistants. Numbers, too, sunk in, as I went about the usual routines of life.

But after that, there was no more learning. It was difficult. I'd study and nothing would stick in my head, so I gave up. My friends had all been in Korea for almost a year, so they spoke for me in restaurants and

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