Day 2: At the doctors

Korean is a vocabulary heavy language and the lesson today was extremely vocabulary heavy. At the moment I am focusing most of my energy on learning new words and so far the effects have been odd. Using memorisation software I input about 15 words a day and then do various tasks until I am able to recall the words from English into Korean. I have found that more than this number actually means I forget the words.

However I use recall carefully. Generally with the rote learned words I am unable to use them in future conversations. Often I am able to recognise them in a text and sometimes in speech. In class, I do my best to artificially insert them into conversation, often at the expense of politeness or conversation, but I know that despite all this effort, the only real way to “know” a word is to use it, use it, use it.

Interestingly on the subject of health, the words repair and heal/recover are covered by the same verb 고치다gochida / to heal or repair. Much to my amusement, Koreans with their special breed of English refer to their health as “my condition” and evaluate it by percentage. Further confirmation that Koreans are in fact, friendly robots.