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This blog will be semi-long, but I suppose I'll make a follow-up blog on it or whatever maybe...Anyway sorry for bad grammar, typing this up on my phone and doing a copy/paste when I send it to my computer.
So realistically I've only been "speaking Korean" the last four-five months (around the time when I started playing LoL 100% of the time. Prior to this I only knew 50-70 words, and absolutely zero grammar. I had no true reason to need to learn it before this, and also had no time to be bothered with it(I was under severe amounts of stress for almost all of 2012, only getting breaks towards the end of the year).
Short story(s) before I go into details. My first boyfriend here was a fellow pro-gamer. We spent most of the time just playing SC2 together/Starcraft1(for fun), and going out and renting motels(this may sound weird to foreigners, but due to Korean culture most people live with their parents until their mid-late twenties, and thus have no privacy. Therefore there is a market for mass "motels" throughout korea that are made specifically for sex/hanging out.) And we'd sit on the bed with our laptops with google translate open and naver translate, and talk to each other that way for hours. It was a super good bonding tool, and I was able to truly feel stuff inside the relationship just due to his effort to communicate with me. He spoke about 100-150 words of conversational English and I had no quarrels with that.Anyway, outside of constantly destroying me in SC2/SC1, we'd play other games like WC3, WoW,play RvR's, go to coffee shops, etc. Eventually the relationship came to an end when I left Incheon, as we already didn't live in the same team-house, and then I became about 1.5hrs away. This in part with Korean culture (anti-gay) lead to the downfall of the relationship. To this day he and I keep in contact, but he's super busy with his gaming, etc.
After this, I dated another progamer, but again to the same discrete measure, although he spoke almost literally no English. Again, I had no problems with this at all, as google translate was enough for me. Well, coped with body language/"charades" to explain stuff etc. Also by this time I knew [some] Korean, like 20 words? lol... However I could read/write the alphabet now too. This relationship ended up dying for the same reasons as the first. Time, distance, and me being too stressed to want to deal with it anymore. He was up for continuing, but I wasn't with everything going on with me. I also had ended up moving back into MVP around this time, so I was going to be too busy/etc.
Anyway, after that, and for the rest of 2012 almost I went on being content with talking to no one, not seeking anyone or anything either really. I also was content with something that was going on, but for the most part nothing.
Let's go back to when I started LoL, with about a 50 word vocabulary, but I could read all the chat. Fast forward to where I'm at now, and I have an active vocabulary of about 900 words+numbers, perhaps more now, I haven't counted lately. My grammar is still lacking on suffix/prefix placements, but for the most part I can communicate/converse with koreans on a low-level. Everything I learned, I learned from playing LoL. I learned maybe one or two words a game. I also learned a lot from MVPimp(arguably my best korean friend in Korea) who would occasionally say something to me in Korean, and then say the English translation.
I'm going to leave out some time-frames here as I deem them irrelevant to my topic, but I'll bring them up in a later blog or something...
Anyhow, I ended up dating a half-korean/half-chinese person very early in 2013 whom spoke good(not fluent but very good) but our personalities collided a lot and his English often bothered me due to having errors where there shouldn't have been. Which actually worried me, because why was I getting annoyed by this? It only happened a few times, but the point remains I guess...
Around March 2013 I started going on "apps" (gay people will know what I'm talking about) as it's the only way to find gays, in S.Korea especially. I began talking to Korean boys a lot, and also learning rapidly. I became frustrated with my Korean and thus started spending hours each day on naver.com and using it as much as I could/thinking in Korean.
Getting to the conclusion/Current boy:
Lately all the boys I talked to (now just one, as we're pretty close to going into a relationship, will update this after I'm back from busan with him), the chats are 98% Korean, 1% konglish and like 1% English. I met one a few weeks ago and I think he's personally set a record in my life for how fast/how much I ended up liking him. We end up talking for about 6-8hrs each night, mostly repetitive sentences/questions/life-stuff, random jokes, etc. He knows I use a translator when I speak to him sometimes (as I can't understand everything he says 100% of the time). He also knows I'm taking studying very serious lately (I have a super great nuna(누나) who helps me a lot with life/Korean lately. She's a famous translator for games like Dota2/LoL/etc )
I worry how he(and all the past ones) I spoke to, view my Korean, and I stress over this a lot. Do they view me the way English speakers view people who speak broken English? How much will this affect the relationship, now that I'm the one speaking their language. I don't have gaming to fall back on as a medium, but rather just life stuff, as he doesn't play games really. I've promised him I would try to be near-fluent come Autumn, and he has told me "언어 상관없어요!" aka "Language doesn't matter!". I still worry none the less.
He's also still pretty young, he just turned 19(western age) a few months ago, but this is less a year and a half difference between us.
This weekend I'm going to spend the weekend with him on Haeundae beach/hotel. We plan to just literally sit in the hotel room and watch horror movies(I was so happy he's a horror fanatic too lolol) the whole time/chat/whatever else he or I want to do. However the concern still eats away at me that, while we can communicate/travel around/get the gist of what we're saying... I can't have conversations about like, life, childhood, future desires, and it hurts me frustrates me to no end. Recently he started using a little bit of English with me when he can, he doesn't know much, but he's so cute when he does use it lol. I've spent about five hours writing out all the Korean words I know and writing their English translation word with the Korean/English definition next to it. I'm going to give it to him Friday and we'll see how that develops.
I'm so nervous lol, this is the first time I'm the one speaking the second language. Anyway, anyone with similar experiences(second-language dating, when being no where near fluent) please tell me your opinions/stories. Or if anyone just has any insight/advice/etc please let me hear it. I recently started downloading all my dramas/movies/etc with Korean subtitles, listening to a lot more Korean music, etc, but I don't know... Can a true relationship ever form if one of us isn't fluent? I would've been more than content with the first two pro-gamers, as language truly did not matter for me, google/naver translate was enough, and eventually we would've gotten better at each others language...
Anyway, please let me know what you guys think. I'll make an update blog on how the first date(s) go this weekend with him, with maybe photos, etc.
Thanks for reading!
 
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Me and my gf speaks a mix of Mandarin Cantonese and mainly English.
She is fluent in Mandarin and is kinda ok at English because we are studying abroad (but her ielts score is only 5, not extremely horrible compared to some other oversea students)
I speak fluent Cantonese and pretty well English due to my many years of oversea experience. But my Mandarin is terrible, not just the pronouncation but also the words I know are very limited.
My aunt couldn't write and barely speaks a few words of English but she got married with a USA guy and now they both speak English to each other.
So yea I don't think it's an issue, it adds a bit of extra spice into the relationship imo
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you and select both learned a language through mobas!
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If you guys really like each other, language isn't going to stop you. It will make it harder, but true love aside, your Korean sounds like enough to carry on conversation, and that is enough. And besides learning a new language is a really good bonding experience. Best of luck and glad you are doing well!
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LoL you say? Too bad 450 of those 900 words are probably bm XD
Join us in the secret LoL community on TL in the hidden "Other" tab.
I'm a whitewashed Chinese. Born in China but I left the country at a young age. Personally I find language barriers to be one of the only things I would not accept in a relationship. I'm sure there would be exceptions and I might behave differently in practice than how I want to now. But I don't want a relationship where I can not communicate properly with a SO.
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Good job Nick glad to hear your Korean language skills are improving.
I saw you mentioned the other day you randomly had a thought in Korean for the first time, that's when you know there's no turning back...
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On May 28 2013 13:21 obesechicken13 wrote:
LoL you say? Too bad 450 of those 900 words are probably bm XD
Join us in the secret LoL community on TL in the hidden "Other" tab.
I'm a whitewashed Chinese. Born in China but I left the country at a young age. Personally I find language barriers to be one of the only things I would not accept in a relationship. I'm sure there would be exceptions and I might behave differently in practice than how I want to now. But I don't want a relationship where I can not communicate properly with a SO.
Yeah. I've always wondered how some people have serious relationships despite language barrier.
The cynic inside me probably chops it up to the fact that the language barrier means you don't have to talk as much, and thats why those relationship work.
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On May 28 2013 13:21 obesechicken13 wrote:
LoL you say? Too bad 450 of those 900 words are probably bm XD
Join us in the secret LoL community on TL in the hidden "Other" tab.
I'm a whitewashed Chinese. Born in China but I left the country at a young age. Personally I find language barriers to be one of the only things I would not accept in a relationship. I'm sure there would be exceptions and I might behave differently in practice than how I want to now. But I don't want a relationship where I can not communicate properly with a SO.
Shh that's only for those who know the password.
Thanks TL remodel xD
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United States7639 Posts
I think you're really brave for being willing to meet and befriend, let alone date, people who don't speak the same language as you. During my half year in Korea, it was so hard to socialize with the people there, I ended up being a wuss and mostly just spending all my time with fellow international students, as well as TLers. Despite having studied Korean for almost two years, I had very little confidence in my speaking, although my listening and reading were decent. If a random Korean person stopped me on the streets to ask me directions, I would freeze up, stutter for a few seconds, then hastily reply "죄송합니다 잘 모르겠어요," even if I knew where he or she was looking for. It was pretty pathetic.
Hell, you should have seen me when I met Bisu or tried to talk to Stork. They were simultaneously the best moments and worst of my life. I wanted to just die and melt into the floor where nobody would ever see me or remember me again x__x
During summer, there was one boy in my Law and Justice class that I crushed on pretty hard, but I was always too shy to really talk to outside of asking what last night's homework was or greetings at the coffee shop in the morning. He was ridiculously cute and very generous and charming, but his English was pretty limited. Our conversations were short, filled with pauses, and me laughing awkwardly because I either didn't know what to say, or how to say it even if I did. That alone put me off to the idea of ever trying to pursue anything, it was just too stressful thinking about how every time I opened my mouth, he could be thinking "Wow, what an idiot, does she even hear what she's saying?" I really wish I could have gotten to know him better, but the language barrier felt insurmountable to me.
So yeah, I admire you for even going for any relationships like this, and I hope it works out for you. For me personally, I don't think it could; constantly doubting myself and feeling stupid around a guy isn't exactly a recipe for a successful relationship. But if you can get past that, laugh off the mistakes, have the willingness to learn, there's no reason this shouldn't go well. My cousin in China who spoke abysmal English married a man from Florida who spoke almost no Chinese, and they seem to be doing great so far, three years down the line. Good luck, and keep us updated. And yes, post pix! I never turn down a chance to look at a cute Korean boy :3
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United States5582 Posts
First of all, congrats on finding a boyfriend that you connect well with. I'm also extremely impressed that you've been able to improve your Korean rapidly with sheer willpower and your desire to connect with other Koreans. That's commendable. I hope your interest in Korean will continue, despite having a good or bad relationship with other Koreans in the future.
Anyway, you're worrying way too much about what your Korean sounds like to others. For most Koreans, they're impressed that you're able to even say 안녕하세요. I'm pretty sure that your bf thinks that your Korean sounds cute. You even said it yourself regarding his English, "Recently he started using a little bit of English with me when he can, he doesn't know much, but he's so cute when he does use it lol." Most people think that people trying their best to speak their nonnative language is cute, because it's cute seeing others use so much effort to try to communicate with you, and you can't help but cheer them on for their efforts. So worry less about what you sound like, and just focus on improving your Korean so your conversations with him flow more smoothly. Trust him when he says that language doesn't matter.
I dunno if it's a true relationship if one of you isn't fluent, but if one of you becomes fluent with each others' language, then the relationship will surely deepen with more mutual understanding of each others' thoughts.
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Communication is key in a relationship and the language barrier will become bigger and bigger once you guys get closer. That is when you will feel the most burden and frustration. If you can get over that and you two can learn the language better (you korean and him English) then you can succeed. However, if you guys cannot freely speak to each other once the relationship is wanting more, it will not end well. Good luck!
btw, is there something that attracts you to K guys?
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I was wondering when you would come out Nick... I'm glad that you finally did. Get it out bro, get it out (physically implied too).
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Hey that was pretty interesting. I find the hotel rental "culture" fascinating. For your anxiety about how you sound to native speakers, I think you just have to embrace it. My intuition tells me it's way more important to be true to how the language feels to you than to try to imitate someone. I usually find it less "attractive" when someone is so worried about grammar that they lose "flow" when they speak. For instance when you hear stephano speaking english you can tell he is french but its really clear and natural because he embraces his french accent and imperfect grammar.
Have fun!
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what does the average American think about broken English? And I am asking this in all seriousness.
My experiences so far talking in my non-native language and/or to non-natives:
Germans are good at understanding (even very) broken German.
Chinese and French 'melody' of speaking English is pretty much incomprehensible for everyone else, Korean and Japanese butcher the language, but are easier to understand.
Spanish speakers not used to talking to foreigners will not comprehend what you are saying, even with good pronunciation. They seem not to be able to understand what you infer by stringing together verbs and nouns.
The slightest bit of accent makes it really hard for non-fluent people to understand you. Using slang terms or local terms is even worse (example: English people using 'quid' for 'pounds').
And most importantly: Never ever go ballistic on something that could just have been mis-communication. Just last week, I told my girlfriend that I would never go and visit her mother alone, she never heard/registered the 'alone' and got very upset until I rephrased it.
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I have a lot of experience dating in a second language as I've been living abroad for several years now. In that time I've gone from utterly incompetent in my second language to somewhat fluent so I've probably been in your shoes at one point. If there's one thing I've taken away from all that experience it's this:
Every relationship takes work. Whether it's family, friends, or a boy/girlfriend, every relationship we form with another human takes work. A lot of people don't or won't consiously acknowledge that, which often makes for poor relationships. However, it is glaringly obvious from the outset that a relationship in a second language takes a lot work. Someone who is willing to get into a relationship like that knowing that it's going to take a lot of effort and patience from both sides is someone worth being in a relationship with.
One of the best girlfriends I had was a chinese study abroad student while I was studying in Tokyo. Our only way of communicating was using Japanese, a second language to both of us, and to make matters worse my japanese was very poor at the time. We spent a lot of time with dictionaries and translating tools like you have to converse initially but after being together for about a year we were both fluent enough to converse meaningfully in Japanese. There was definitely a couple trying times in our first few months but the effort we put in to make the relationship work was something we never forgot. Though distance eventually ended our romantic relationship we are still very good friends now four years later.
Being somewhat fluent now I've dated a few girls with no english ability and no intention of gaining any. Those relationships have been much weaker, not because of language problems but because they expect me to be a Japanese guy in white skin. The ability to communicate is one thing. Properly using that ability, especially in a mixed culture relationship,
is something entirely different.
Nowadays I tend to date girls with some english ability or at least a sincere desire to learn, not because it's necessary for communication in the relationship but because those people tend to be more open minded and can relate to my struggle with japanese. They understand how much work a mixed relationship takes and in my experience make much better partners for it.
Sorry to ramble so long but I hope you can take something useful from my experience. Best of luck in Korea!
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snipealot
Korea (South)494 Posts
I started dating my Korean girlfriend around 10 months ago. I had only studied Korean for less than 4 months so my vocab back then was maybe 1500 active words(words I actively used) with another 1000 passive(words I understood but couldn't use actively) ones. Still, having that much let our conversations be 95% in Korean. I'm sure you will be fine if you like the guy. It was never really difficult to talk to HER, and as I spent more time with her and studied more Korean it started getting easier to speak with other Koreans as well. These days I rarely have issues outside of difficult topics, and even then I can for the most part piece together what is being said even if there are words I don't fully understand.
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Congrats to you dude gl gl
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EPT
