The kinds of words I've collected

I was born in South Korea. Naturally, Korean words were the first ones I collected.
Korean words can be divided into pure Korean words, Chinese-character-derived Korean words, and other foreign-derived words.

I also spent part of my childhood in Germany. Thus I collected some German words, and they are mostly elementary.

The later part of my teen years were spent in Costa Rica and Mexico. Hence some Spanish words got added to the mix as well. During the transition between Costa Rica and Mexico, there was also some confusion because they have different word usages and accents.

And now I am somewhat settled in the U.S. of A. I had been collecting English words before I came over to the States though, as I had to take classes in English in high school. You could say English is my dominant language now, as my Korean has been declining.


Also, my mom had sent me to calligraphy lessons when we lived in Korea, and later, I had a major crush on an actor from Hong Kong, and thus started collecting words in Chinese as well. Though my crush spoke mainly Cantonese, the show he was on was from Taiwan, so I learned the Mandarin version of the pronunciations associated with the Chinese characters. I still think Chinese is a beautiful, poetic language, but I don't think I'd ever learn enough to be fluent in it. The tones are way beyond my phonetic capabilities. (In other words, I'm not willing to practice.)

During my teen years, I was introduced to the world of Japanese animations, and in order to sing along their theme songs, I learned how to read Japanese (a wonderful language in terms of its complicated orthographic system, with 3 or more types of writing). With my partial knowledge of Chinese characters, I can make (though very limited) sense out of Japanese text.

I also took two semesters of French in high school, although those words quickly got overwritten by Spanish, and two semesters of Latin in college. The similarity to Spanish helped me a lot in learning Latin, but it was still very complicated. I still have a copy of the first Harry Potter book in Latin, and some day wish to finish reading it.


If given the opportunity, I would like to learn more languages, but I don't know if it would be practical at all. I'm rather lazy, and often need to be motivated by other factors.. love for a particular author or TV show. Television was a great tool for collecting words in my case. Books and the internet, too.



The problem with collecting words in different languages is that you don't get to reach the depth of a language a monolingual does with his/her own language. The saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none" applies here just as well. While I say my native language is Korean, my Korean is far inferior to that of somebody my age at my education level who spent all his/her life in Korea. Same with English, which is my dominant language now. I still ask my husband (who is a native speaker of English and used to be fluent in Spanish but not any more) for the meaning of this saying or that word that I encounter in our everyday life. (True, part of it is not necessarily linguistic but rather cultural, but still.)

Some electronic appliances come with instructional manuals in multiple languages. Generally, they repeat the same instructions in different languages. Imagine that there is a handbook that has different chapters written in different languages. The installation is written in Korean, the programming is written in English, the additional features are in German, the troubleshooting part is in Spanish... though there may be parts that overlap, some parts are exclusively written in just one language. That is what I feel like I am. Other monolinguals are handbooks written in one language for the whole thing. I'm rather patchy and incomplete.

Then again, I have come to enjoy my unstable state of language. It allows me to compare and contrast the different uses of words, how people express similar ideas differently, etc., etc. It is a perpetual challenge to understand what is being said and how to say what I have in mind, how to weave the words to make my communication most effective, how to revise what has already been said, and so on and so forth. It is a game I play with myself, if I have enough working memory at the moment.