A month ago, I took a weekend road trip to Maine with my friend and her fourteen month old daughter, C. N was attending a wedding in her hometown, and since the drive from DC was upwards of twelve hours, she asked for my company to help take care of her daughter during the drive. Since C was no longer really a baby and more of a toddler, she was Not At All Delighted to spend hours and hours strapped into her car seat instead of running around tasting things, climbing things, or dancing. We sang to her, played with stuffed animals with her, handed her toys and snacks. And we talked with her. When she wanted water, she would say ‘wa, wa’, and we would repeat, ‘water? C, do you want some water? water?’ When she wanted her stuffed dog, she would say ‘da’, and we’d say, ‘here you go, here’s your dog’.
This week, I’m visiting my grandmother at my aunt and uncle’s house. It’s been a long time since I’ve practiced my Korean, and on the plane ride here I was feeling panicky about how much I’d forgotten. But it’s all slowly coming back as I hear words I remember and see them in use. They’re almost all words I learned in Korea last year, not necessarily in the class I took but just getting around Seoul and speaking with my relatives. As a result, almost all of my vocabulary involves food. But that’s vocabulary that came out of a need and desire to communicate.
Growing up, I spoke only the bare minimum of Korean, just a handful of words and phrases. My grandmother spoke to my sister and I almost exclusively in Korean, and we understood each other through hand gestures, facial expressions, and the few words we shared in each others’ languages. I was always surprised that I didn’t pick up more Korean, since my grandmother had lived with us since before I was born, and my relatives are even more surprised. But speaking with C made me realize how much language is repetition, need, and just sounding out what you hear in your own head. Now, when my relatives speak Korean around me, I do something I never did before that I’m now realizing is essential to learning a language, in that I consciously repeat what I hear in my head, and even quietly to myself. Doing so cements the language in my mouth, instead of just flowing through my ears.
I’m never going to be great at Korean. My brain feels clunky and rigid around new languages, and I think I’m too old now to be truly fluent. My mother has lived in the country for most of her life, and she still has trouble with words, still mixes up ‘he’ and ‘she’. This morning, when we were discussing the pomegranate tree in my uncle’s yard, she had trouble saying the word.
‘Pom, pomegrammy,’ she said.
‘Pomegranate,’ I said.
‘Yes, pomegranite. Pomegramin…’
‘Like pomma-granite. Like granite, like a granite countertop.’
‘Oh, granite. That makes it easy. Pomma-granite.’
And then a few minutes later…
‘Pommy, pomegram…’
Our minds are rigid, but it doesn’t mean language isn’t worth trying. And repetition does make it easier, even if it takes a long time.
A loooooong time.
