Baby Steps All the Way

이해진 (Haejin Lee)

 

It was a Sunday. In Seongnam City, a south-eastern part of Gyunggi-do, a baby with unusually bright skin and brown hair was born as a second daughter of a young couple. And she was making nurses squint with distinctively loud noise at the dawn of a sunny June morning.

Over the two and a half years in Seongnam I learned todistinguish the sounds that the tall people around me were making to interact with each other. Those sounds must have been quite a variety ranging between teenagers and my then middle aged grandparents, from southern dialects to strict Seoul accents. After all, it was a big family of nine with my grandparents, uncles and my aunt in their teens and twenties, my parents and a toddler sister.

My family tells me I was pretty early in picking up sounds and words. Of course that's a part of my life I don't recall. What I do remember from my childhood is that I have always been interested in or fascinated even, by all kinds of sounds and music and the way people talked.

By the time I was beginning to add more words in "baby talks" into my third year, my parents decided to continue their studies in the U. S. They brought along their two young daughters, one in kindergarten and one two-and-a-half year old toddler.  (Later my father confessed that at that time he didn't realize what seemed like his academic path would turn out to be an early academic move for his daughters.)

So the family of four, knowing barely anything what lies ahead of them, moved to a town with a large German population in Martin, Tennessee.

To the young couple dazed by the new settings, the church and local community was a welcoming environment, and they were blessed with mentors and neighbors who cared much about them and their children.My mother remembers her children having a short period of struggle.  It was a struggle to get used to – or maybe at first, to make sense of – the absolutely different and new environment, most of it being the language spoken in it.Her elder one – my sister – was a bright girl, whom people thought was probably a genius, took it hard at first. She was confused that she couldn't communicate with these friendly looking strangers as she would have at her hometown.  The younger one – that would be me – was curious about everything, but still trying to put the situation together and going through her second "baby-talk" phase.  My mother says I would always comerunning, explaining that my friend, or the lady next door couldn't understand a Korean word and ask "what that friend called it."

In six months for my sister, and much shorter for me, we both quickly forgot a great deal of Korean and learned English.

​My sister and I had our advantages in learning, especially when it came to language. Both our parents being students and book lovers, we were surrounded by books, scholars, families of scholars, students and families of students.  My father was an English Literature major studying Hotel Management and Marketing by that time. My mother was exceeding in her class as an English and Educations major.  Later she had to quit school to provide for the family, but that didn't stop her natural talent as a teacher and her love for reading and writing.

There wasn't much entertainment other than playgrounds, books and church activities.  There was no TV at the beginning. All I knew about TV shows and celebrities was that Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers was famous because they knew how to make funny songs make sound so swell at a huge stage in Tennessee, and that Michael Jackson must be popular since everybody knew his name.  Naturally, never having been introduced to entertainment through media, our favorite pastimeswhen we weren't playing outside climbing trees, were reading, drawing pictures of what we read about, coloring, singing, and some more reading.

​After a year and a half, our family moved to New Haven, Connecticut where my father was going to a newschool. (Later on I learned that new school was called graduate school.) By then I had learned how to spell "A fat cat sat on a rat" and could recite verses from the Psalms.  I remember having trouble with some Korean words. My sister and I would try to speak in Korean, but end up saying all the verbs and most of the nouns in English.

This became more obvious when we were visiting our family in Korea for several months.  But, interestingly enough, by the end of the third week or so, my parents realized their children were quickly forgetting some of their English and building vocabularies in Korean.

The experience of forgetting and acquiring English and Korean back and forth combined with the experience of noticing the difference of how some words were said and used in Tennessee and in Connecticut gave me a sense of speaking in different languages.  I started to understand that not all people felt comfortable having to learn or speak different languages or dialects.  Sometimes you might be an amusement to others just for speaking another language, but it made it easier to make new friends.  New classmates who struggled with English as their second language usually seemed timid and shy, and even though I didn't quite remember it all, I could get a better understanding of what they were going through.  

Learning to write seemed relatively easy.  Most of it was because learning to write in Korean was a little bit harder to grasp at first.  I did learn how to read and write with some misspellings in Korean while my family was living in New Haven.  But reciting our ABCs at school every morning, discovering the excitement of reading in English, which was my first language then, all rounded up to a limited amount of time spent reading and writing in Korean.  At the same time, I had found my favorite stories, books, and characters in what I read and saw in English.  On some Mondays, my kindergarten teacher would let us write about our weekends.  Before I knew it,I was getting ready for elementary school.

All that happened in three years. Then my family decided to come back to Korea.  By this time, I didn't remember much about Korea and the idea of going to my home country sounded much rosier than reality.  

As it turns out, starting another stage in Korea meant having to learn to express my thoughts in Korean as much as I was used to do so in English.  It felt like learning my ABCs all over again.  This time I was learning Korean as a second language.  Everything was an excitement for me.  I had no time to get bored.  While my sister had to go to school right away, I wasn't the legal age to enter school yet, and that gave me time to learn the cultural gaps while acquiring the language.

Looking back, I understand that learning another language is harder when you're older, not just because how your brain reacts, but also because there are more cultural boundaries and codes you need to keep up with.  For me the hard part to learn was the fact that you"must" write with your right hand and your right hand only; you must start your strokes at the left and carry on to the right; you must never place your paper sideways; etc., etc.  There were certainly a lot of "must" and "must not" rules in detail.

Now that I have finished high school in Korea and I am using English most of the time in university, I still often have moments when I seem to be drifting somewhere in the middle of Korean and English as my mother tongue.  I am quicker at understanding the nuances in Korean than English, but it's easier to find the right word to express my emotions in English.  I would have to write reports in Korean more often, but there are more occasions I would give presentations in English than in Korean.

There is much to learn, and I am glad to know I am still learning.  I was never confident in my writing skills in either language, but there is room for improvement, and I certainly will try to improve.  I might be taking baby steps just as I had numbers of "baby talk phases."And I am grateful that I still have that opportunity and ability to learn without quitting.