Ok, here are six things about me

Thanks to Stefan, my visitors have a chance to know six personal things about me:)
Actually it sounds a bit tough to tell you SIX things about myself that would be interesting.
But I'll take it easy and will begin with some stories about my blog and other things related to it.


1. I started blogging in English in April 2004. I got the idea from a Chinese friend I met during my trip in summer 2003, and I thought it would be fun to blog in English. It was a tough job, though, because I've never written long articles in English before except some emails I used to send to my family and friends while travelling abroad when there was no way to type Korean.
I'm not sure whether my English has much improved for the last few years - maybe, or maybe not. It is hard to improve a foreign language you don't use in your daily life, with no teacher or somebody to correct your mistakes. I know there must be a lot of incorrect expressions, grammar, and 'Konglish', and from time to time I get tired of blogging in a language that I have no confident. That's one reason why I sometimes stop blogging for a few weeks or more.
I didn't study English in my undergraduate days, and I didn't even go for a 'language training' like many Korean students do thesedays. I've never been to any English speaking country except a short trip to UK in my childhood with my family. All I learned was in my middle- and high school days as an ordinary Korean student. Some of you may think that I learned English in Germany, but that's not true. I didn't learn a word of English during my stay in Germany. I came back to Korea after the first semester in my fourth grade in the primary school, and usually children learned their first foreign language in the fifth grade that time.
Reasons for blogging in English are mostly for my own pleasure and having fun than improving my English.
My first English blog is somewhere else, not here in blogspot, however. I moved to blogspot in May last year. Those interested to read my old blog entries can still find them, but I don't want to tell you its url here - if you have read my previous articles, you probably can find a link to it.

2. A personal story about my childhood that now just a few people around me knows is that I spent about seven and half years in Berlin, Germany. I returned to Korean in January 1990, and now it has been such a long time that I'm 99.999999....% Koreanized (and actually I AM Korean, am I not?). But there were some cultural shock shortly after I came back, and there must have been a certain time I needed to recover from it.
One of the most embarrassing thing I face till now is that some people still expect me to speak German fluently. I would like to tell them kindly and clearly that children learn a language fast and easily than adults, but they also forget it quickly if they don't use it. And -sorry for my German friends who are reading this- unfortunately(or is it the opposite?), German is not a language that is widely used or even preferred thesedays in Korea. Of course, there are some parents who want their children to keep a foreign language they have learned once, but my parents didn't think it as necesssary. And there were already so many things I had to get used to, so why should they press me to 'keep' it when there's no desperate need for it?
Fortunately there was one thing totally different from my younger brother's case who doesn't remember a word German now. (But he was also much younger that time.) It was my interest (and talent, maybe^^) in languages that still makes me able to read and understand German. Stefan and other German bloggers may have been wondering why I don't leave comments in German but in English on their blogs, but the reason is very simple: I haven't used that language for more than fifteen years, and only a small part remains in my head. Like many 'Kyopo'(Overseas Korean) children and youngsters who do not speak and write Korean well but still manages to understand it, I am the same case in German. In contrast to English (that is 100% a foreign language to me), German is still something not really apart from me. I know English, and I am able to use it according to what I have learned at school, but I feel German eventhough there's nothing left but a few parts that is spread over my memory like broken pieces I don't know how to put in order. It would be interesting to analyze this weird experience in a linguistical view.

3. My first trip abroad as a grown-up was in autumn 2002 to Europe. (I have been to most of the countries in Western and Northern Europe in the 80s as a child.) I like to describe that trip as a 'journey back to the past'. Having left Berlin in January 1990, a place full of my childhood memories, I visited it again in September 2002. My first impression of Germany that time, however, was 'cold' and even 'unfriendly'. Don't know why I got that feeling, but I felt being lost, disappointed, and grieved. That feeling lasted until I left Germany and headed to Czech from Berlin. I guess it was something that everyone has to go through in one's life, like saying Good-bye to one's childhood and adolescence, and looking straight forward.
I visited some countries near Germany including those in the Eastern part of Europe like Czech and Hungary which were not allowed to visit for South Korea nationals in the past, and headed to Greece and Turkey.
It was a great experience, a great chance to be alone on the road, to be "really" away from home for the first time, and it was the starting point to look at those parts I've never paid attention before.

4. My longest trip was the eight-month's trip in Western China, Tibet, and Nepal from the end of August 2004 to April 2005. After working for an half year to get the money, I left home, took the ship from Incheon to Tianjin, crossed the huge land by bus and train, arrived at Kashgar, then headed south-weast to the Great Himalayan Plateau in Tibet and Nepal and India, then took the plane to Thailand, headed north to China again, and got back home taking the ship from Tianjin to Incheon. The total travel expense I spent was about or less than the amount of one semester's tuition fee in Korean graduate schools.

5. I feel embarrassed when foreigners ask me about some typical Korean features or expactations which I do not really meet. There's a short article about that in my previous blog entries.

6. I hope to be able to speak fluent English, Chinese and Japanese some day. I once planned to master these three languages before my 30th birthday, but now I think I must give up that plan^^;;







Ok, this is enough.



The next blogger to write about his/her six personal things is -



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Equinox!!!




*Update:


7. "Song", my nickname on internet(English) or the way how my non-Korean friends call me has originated from my childhood name. My parents are from Daegu city[대구] in northern Kyoungsang province[경상북도], and people there used to call kids by the last syllable of their name. They often let the last consonant omitted in talking, such as "소이 왔나(은송이 왔니)?".
I wonder why this is happening, and I thought that probably Kyoungsangdo's people are too lazy to pronounce the whole name.
While living in Germany, it was awful to see whenever German people don't know how to read my name correctly and always ended up pronouncing it as "Oooin Zzzzong". So my parents made it in a more simple and easy way - "Song". (But not a few people still pronounced it with a 'z' sound instead of the 's' sound.)
Next time when there's a German still pronouncing my name in such a terrible way, I'll give up to correct him/her and rather say good-bye and run away:P