I came across this sweet story last week describing how 14-year-old Alyssa Donovan of Maine became the first student of non-Korean heritage to win an award in a Korean speech contest hosted by the U.S. National Association for Korean Schools in Burlingame, California. She beat out over 300 other competitors to win.
Donovan became interested in studying Korean because she had a crush on a Korean American boy. She never had a chance to reveal her feelings to him since he and his family moved away. I imagine there are not too many Koreans that live in Maine to begin with! How did she learn Korean – especially in Maine?
Donovan started learning Korean using Internet websites and had reached a reasonable level of conversational and written fluency within just six months, including difficult words of Chinese origin. She progressed through various literary translations and recently read the four Shakespearean tragedies in Korean. In the preliminaries of the New England Chapter, Donovan had raised herself to such a level that even students of Korean origin were unable to compete with her.
That is pretty amazing. I went to Chinese school for years and my father tried teaching my brother and I Chinese by giving us lessons and exercises during our summer vacations. But if you are motivated these days, there are a lot more tools available on the Internet now to learn.
I took a semester of Japanese after spending three weeks in Japan while on a Japanese corporate sponsored engineering and culture seminar. Unfortunately, I suck at learning new languages and was super busy looking for a job my senior year in college during the middle of a recession. I’ve also forgotten all of the French I studied in middle school and high school. I wonder if a Korean woman could motivate me to study Korean – maybe if Yu-Na Kim or Michelle Wie were interested in me!
