Some Deutsch written on a wall in Gangjin, inspired by a BMW slogan.
The Goethe-Institut Seoul is turning 40 this year, and as a recent Joongang Ilbo article tell us, a German film festival will begin on July 31st and run through September 2nd at the Seoul Namsan Culture Center (I think that link is right, but I don't know).
One of my bigger regrets is never following up on my adolescent interest in the German language, and nowadays it's only in moments of unblemished optimism that I think I'll ever sharpen my skills. In my favorites folder is a link to a "deutsche-koreanische Forum" with posts written in both languages that would be a good way to kill two birds with one stone. And I recently stumbled upon some German-language blogs, such as Madang and Swiss Kimchi, and the aggregator Korea Blog Presseschau, that are not only interesting but decent resources to practice reading comprehension. Remarkable that after three years in Korea, and three years away from university, I can still read German much better than I can Korean. I attribute that to a few factors: (1) my laziness in studying Korean and my lack of patience with my slow progress; (2) that German uses the Roman alphabet; and (3) the numerous lexical and grammatical similarities between German and English.
There is also a Facebook group called "Deutsch in Seoul." It's not what you think, because I'm actually still in Suncheon. Ha, High Five!
2 comments:
Ironic that you regret not continuing to learn German. I regret taking German in college as a second foreign language (Spanish was first) instead of Japanese because I thought Japanese would be too hard.
When I was in high school I always figured I'd stick with German and eventually major in that. But I became interested in other things, and when I transferred to a different school it didn't have a German department so that was the end of that. I couldn't afford to study abroad in Europe, so I looked to Asia instead. I had a lot of downtime in high school and I regret not studying languages more (and studying more languages). Just think, if I'd had learned one Chinese character a week, or one Japanese phrase a week, that'd be really useful to me now.
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