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How Can You Make Friends in Your Second Language?

kylieleewrites

Very late PSA: I’m going to Seoul as an English teacher with EPIK next week…

…and sometimes I wonder how I’m going to make friends with my elementary Korean skills.

After all, so much of our personalities is conveyed through our words. As a writer and English teacher, the very foundation of my career is diction and syntax. It’s a skill that I’ve honed for my entire life and a tool that I use to convey the many shades of Kylie that I have to offer.

A HUGE part of my personality is my ability make jokes or dish out sass like free chicken samples at a food court Panda Express.

I can make people laugh in other languages, too.

Just… not always for the reasons I intended.

FLASHBACK: Kylie’s Last Korean Lesson (via Skype)

Kylie: So I tried to make Korean seaweed soup for my dad, but it came out really watery. I went to H-Mart and there were too many kinds of seaweed so I just picked one. (Shows teacher a picture of the seaweed aisle at H-Mart).

Teacher: (begins laughing hysterically)

Kylie: … What?

Teacher: (continues to laugh hysterically)

Kylie: WHAT, teacher, WHAT?

Teacher: THAT’S the seaweed you used?!

Kylie: It’s wrong?

Teacher: (slams forehead on desk, still laughing hysterically)

Kylie: YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHICH ONE I PICKED. HOW DO YOU KNOW ALL OF THESE ARE WRONG?

Teacher: (starts crying laughing)

Kylie: TEACHER PLZ

Teacher: Kylie-Ssi, those are seaweed sheets for kimbap and rice. (Pastes two pictures into our shared google doc)

What I used:

nori_shutterstock-500x500

What I was supposed to use:

miyeok1

Kylie: …. no wonder it came out looking like sludge.

Teacher: (dies of laughter. RIP I need a new Korean teacher now)

END FLASHBACK

… My point is, I am unable to express a vital part of my personality in Korean, at least for now.

So, up until I become fluent in Korean, will the only people in Korea who truly know me for who I am be English-speaking foreigners? Will everyone else only know a watered-down, baby-talking version of me?

At first, my answer was a resounding “YES” that motivated me to study Korean even harder.

But then, I thought about the interactions I’ve had with my students and foreign friends of different English-language abilities.

There’s Eugenia, in my beginner English class. I don’t know her nuanced thoughts on American politics and race relations, but I know that she’s punctual and dedicated despite being the lowest-level student in the class. I know that she’s got a funny side, because she saw me on the train after class and sat across from me, staring aggressively, until we finally made eye contact and laughed together when I jumped in surprise.

Then there’s Jonathan, another beginner student who can’t really pronounce the letters “s” or “z” but sits at his table 5 minutes before class and plays scales on a black violin.

Are my interactions with these people less meaningful because they’re limited by language? Are they less “real” than the interactions I have with native English speakers? Are the things we share with each other actually watered-down and inauthentic?

I think that perhaps, when we don’t speak each others’ languages as well as we might like to, what we see is not a lesser part of each other but a different part. Perhaps we see a facet of someone that we might have overlooked when distracted by all the vacuous words so often tossed in the air. There’s a sort of innocence, or maybe honesty, to paring down our words to the bare minimum. There’s nothing to hide behind.

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