17. Learn a new foreign language

I am bilingual in Korean and English and took Spanish from middle school to college. I wanted to master Spanish, so I tried my best to keep in touch with many of my Spanish speaking friends from Guadalajara. I visited them several times, always having a good time with them despite our language barriers. I wanted to push myself to learn a new language other than Spanish, so I took up Vietnamese. I hired a tutor who had studied in Ho Chi Minh City, and we met once a week to go over grammar, phonics, reading, etc. She could not speak English, so it was a new experience for me learning a new language in Korean. After only a couple of weeks, I had mastered grammar and the diacritics (stress symbols for tone). Surprisingly what I found about the language of Vietnamese was that it had a lot of influence from British English, hence their order for grammar parallels English. It also had a lot of influence from Chinese, hence the diacritics. I found Vietnamese grammar to be much easier than any language I knew, and it actually wasn’t as difficult as I had expected. Learning a completely different language made me appreciate the culture and people more, and although I have yet to visit Vietnam, it’s definitely on my list! Unfortunately, I could not continue my tutor sessions due to my travels and now I’ve forgotten a lot. But, whenever I see some words I recognize, I get so excited! Like when I go to a Pho restaurant haha. Learning a foreign language really has major merits and I hope I never stop attempting to learn new languages, even if I don’t plan on visiting the country. Whenever I do travel though, I try to learn a couple words beforehand, and naturally, I end up learning new words that I hadn’t expected to learn. I went to Germany and left Germany learning “PROST!”