Language

Introduction to Creative Writing: Poetry
...try to recall a very early experience you had reading or hearing language that interested or excited or confused or enlightened you. Now write about that experience, trying to describe what about the text got to you and why.

When I was younger, I assumed that all languages were the same. When I heard people speak different languages, my explanation for that was simply that they knew more words than I did, and one day, I would know what they were saying. My best friend, for the last nine years, is South Korean. I enjoy listening in on her conversations with her mom, carried out completely in Korean, listening to the way they talk, holding onto syllables longer than you hold onto English words, making it sounds like they were perpetually whining. But it lilted more, it had more texture, it went farther than the flatness of my own language.

After school one day in the sixth grade, I went over to my friend’s apartment. She had recently gotten into reading manga, small, overpriced, anime graphic novels. Spread out around her were multitudes of little books. She was reading them when I came in, and so excited was she about them that she dragged me over to the couch to show me them. She flipped through the books, telling me the general plot, “All of them are in a band together”, and noting some of her funnier observations. “All the guys look like girls!” she giggled, “especially this one” she said pointing to a drawing of what looked exactly like a woman. Soon her enthusiasm became my own, and I wanted to read manga, too. Only one problem stood between us sharing a hobby. I couldn’t read Korean.

I told her that, and she looked at me for a second. “Oh, it’s okay”, she said, but I couldn’t remember how hard it was to learn how to read when I was little, and I imagined it would be quite difficult. I told her this, but she rebutted, “It’s not that hard, I learned how to read in like a month, it wasn’t that bad”. I looked at her skeptically. She pointed to a series of symbols, and sounded them out. She looked back at me like it must’ve been the easiest thing in the world. “Cool,” I said, because I was now convinced, more than ever, that I could learn Korean in a couple of weeks. There are twenty-six letters in English, and I figured there couldn’t be many more sounds in Korean. And for the next couple minutes we trekked on through pages of, to me, indecipherable symbols and anime drawings.

And then, like an elephant walking into a room, or a piano dropping out of a building, it occurred to me that something was terribly wrong. Even if I learned how to pronounce the letters, I would still never understand what I was saying. My hopes plummeted, and I told my friend. She thought about it for a second, and started laughing at our momentary lack of comprehension. Still, I was determined to be able to read the Korean alphabet, but even this hope dissipated when I found myself unable to escape the embarrassment of thinking that learning a language could be accomplished within a month.

There are relatively few differences between languages if one simply listens to sounds, made by vowels and consonants. That is why, listening to a different language, I sometimes hear something similar to an English word and get excited. But there are millions of differing combinations which create the vast vocabularies of individual languages. While I listen to my friend talk to her mom, I may quietly admire the beauty of a foreign language, but must have the final piece, understanding, denied to me.