Mood:
sadWhen I read Hangeul, I don't recognize the whole word yet. I have to read it out phonetically still. I haven't reached the stage where I can pick up whole words with the one glance. Maybe I haven't read enough to do this. I shy away from reading Hangeul. My eye gets drawn to Latin characters and away from Hangeul. I do not like reading Hangeul. When I do, I force myself. I do it with a frown on my face as if facing an unpleasant chore. I do not read units of characters very well. For example, I still get ã…ˆ and ㄱ mixed up. A word like ì „ì̀ ê±° (bicycle I think) confuses me when reading it. I have to read it very slowly. Oops I got it wrong - it's ì̀ ì „ê±°. This proves my point - I still can't say the Korean word for bicycle properly because there are too many js and ks for my liking. Also I get mixed up with oh sound and the eu sound. I get the oh and o sound mixed up as well. I also get o and oo mixed up. I read very slowly. I think once I become faster in reading Hangeul, a breakthrough will be made. Then I can picture the word in my mind as a word written in Hangeul, not as a word that has been translated into Romanization and which appears like that in my mind's eye.
I just need to get faster reading Hangeul, I guess. I can do that by reading lots.
At the moment, I don't recognize many whole words on sight. If they show a Hangeul sentence on TV, I am reading the first couple of words by the time they take it off the screen. This is how slow I am in reading Hangeul. I am getting better though. I read signs in the subway system and other public places now kind of involuntarily and the Hangeul doesn't turn me off too much. I think because these signs only have a short phrase. Paragraphs of Hangeul turn me off. Also certain types of font turn me off. I don't like Hangeul that is written in small size. Hangeul is definitely harder than Latin characters to read because the characters are squashed together in a smaller space and you have to read in all directions - horizontally then vertically - it varies with each word. In English you just read horizontally. Probably Koreans do not read like Hangeul like that. Their brains probably take in the unit of characters at a glance. But for someone like me beginning to read Hangeul, my brain doesn't do that. I do prefer Latin characters. I think they are easier for the human brain to process. Hangeul might utilize space better but it still adds a degree of difficulty to reading. Hangeul is just not as clear as Latin characters. If you see a sign in Korean above a sign in English, you will know what I mean. The eye is naturally drawn to the English sign as it looks clean and easy to decipher. The eye is repelled by the Hangeul. Far away they look a bit like Chinese characters. I do not like the modern Romanization either. I used to think it was better than the older style but I no longer think so. The new Romanization takes more letters to write. Also the use of two characters to write a sound is not good. It's better to have a character per sound as they used to. Even if they just add diacritical marks to a character. Because this way it's easier to read.
Or if they don't want to add diacritical marks, they can make up a new character to represent the phonetic sound. For example, they can write and inverted v for the "eo" sound etc. The brain pauses when it sees eo. Is it a diphthong or is it a single phonetic sound?
I was embarrassed by the Turkish guy who could speak Korean so well. He has been in Korea for less time than I have but he's fluent in Korean whereas I am not. But I can't feel too down on myself. We had different circumstances. I think if I had been thrust into the same circumstances that he faced, I would be a fluent Korean speaker now. I am not THAT bad with languages. I know I am more of a book learner than someone who picks up language by mixing with native speakers but still ......
I DID pick up English fairly quickly (and forgot my Korean just as quickly). I remember in kindergarten understanding a lot of what my teacher said and what the other kids said and that was only after a year or a year and a half of being in Australia.
I picked up English reading fairly quickly as I have written about before. I struggled reading the Little Golden books when I was in kindergarten but soon after mastering one book, I was reading these kinds of children's books by myself, using a dictionary for words I didn't know. Nobody in my family taught me to read except for one time my sister tried to teach me to read Cinderella. I had to teach myself. It was hard at first but I was driven to read because I wanted to catch up with my older sisters. I didn't understand a lot of the dictionary obviously of course but it somehow helped. I even started to read the dictionary from A to Z like a book. I started writing my own stories a couple of years later. I remember doing this in 2nd and 3rd grade. I think my speaking was OK too though I was really shy back then and didn't mix with many people. Then I started to study grammar and spelling and vocabulary on my own. Then I started reading classics like Jane Eyre on my own in elementary school. I even read Charles Dickens which I didn't like. If I hadn't taught myself English I wouldn't be able to spell properly or write sentences grammatically well. The Australian education system is very bad and I see it in the writing of many Australians. I was never taught grammar and spelling in school. It wasn't fashionable to teach those things back then. I think things are a bit better but not by much. Those who are good at writing are usually people who did their own self-study or went to good private schools.
