First, I apologize for not getting a post out last week. It was a holiday/long weekend here and well, time just got away from me. I know, no excuses…
Our house guest/extra child has been adapting to life in the Unites States quite well, sometimes too well. He is a very good follower so he is susceptible to peer pressure more than most. He recently got in trouble for booing at a school assembly. Hey, he was just having fun with his friends and he says those friends are more fun. Right. I am sure they are. He is, on the other hand, the best soccer player among kids his age.
As far as Korean goes, I am finding it interesting the holes that I have in my vocabulary as well as in our “exchange student’s”. This past week we were able to witness the lunar eclipse. We all had the opportunity to learn new words: 월식(月蝕) and 일식. I expected that a sixth grader would know that word. There have been other words as well. When he first arrived here I was surprised that he did not know 시차. Of course, maybe only someone who travels a lot would know that word. My wife keeps reminding me that he is only a grade schooler and that he doesn’t have a large/specialized vocabulary. That describes me pretty well most of the time. If you only speak to kids you will learn to speak like a kid. My children are communicating by using a mixture of English and Korean together so it is a win/win situation as far as Korean goes. English is another story. My younger two children spit out a hodge-podge of words sometimes that don’t really make sense, kind of like our resident English learner.
He tends to do a fair amount of communicating using descriptive sounds like ‘확-‘ ㅅ슈 -ㄱㄱ ‘ ‘very very’ ‘many many’ ‘봉’ and lots of other sounds that are hard to write down but I am sure you can imagine that my arms are flying around while I am making these sounds right now. It is kind of like having a comic book acted out in front of you. So he is doing a great job of combining comic book-like sounds with pantomime to get his point across. But, after being here about a month he is starting to get some complete sentences out too, which is good.
Sometimes we hear things in Korean or English and it doesn’t really matter because everyone involved understood what was being said. Then, we have to think about what language we just heard.
