Sofie to Korea

녹슬었을까봐 조금 걱정했어요. (I was afraid that my Korean had become too rusty.) I told this to my LP whom I was finally able to meet up with yesterday after a three-week hiatus due to various circumstances involving travel, changing schedules, and unplanned meetings. It was soooo nice to be able to speak Korean again, and she was very helpful as always.

Usually we start our meetings by reading a Korean text out loud but this time we just jumped right into a Korean conversation to force me to practice speaking freely. She suggested that I start out by telling her in Korean about what I had done in the weeks that had passed. That sure got me around quite a lot of things spanning from dinner and bowling with colleagues (회식), an encounter with an incredibly rude waiter (서비스가 만족스럽지 않았어요), visiting someone at a hospital (문병), celebrating my Mom’s birthday (어머니의 생신), enjoying a long row of Danish holidays resulting in long weekends (휴일), and getting used to the fact that it hardly gets dark at night in Denmark this time of year (햇빛이 너무 많아서 잠을 자기가 힘들어요).

For two hours we spoke almost entirely in Korean. Even when she would explain a word or a grammar structure she did so in slow-paced Korean. Of course I didn’t understand everything but just uttering a slightly confused “네?” would make her rephrase the sentence or maybe putting in an English word for the Korean I didn’t understand. What I need to work on now is to make it all sound more Korean using these very natural endings such as “-거든요”, “-더라고요”. Endings that I understand and theoretically know perfectly well how to use but forget to use in my search for the right vocabulary when forming a sentence.