The Coursera Course I Actually Finished

I signed up for First Step Korean on Coursera this month and actually finished it.

The course was straightforward. Week one was the alphabet, week two was writing, week three greetings, week four family. I worked through it in the evenings. Nothing dramatic, just slowly building something I couldn’t do before into something I could do a little bit.

My girlfriend is Korean. I’m learning the language so her parents can talk to me in theirs.

It’s not about me speaking to them. It’s about them being able to speak freely around me. People speak differently in their first language, and I want them to be able to do that without feeling limited.

Speaking a foreign language often makes people sound simpler than they are. Complex ideas flatten into basic vocabulary. Jokes get lost. Personality shrinks to whatever grammar you can manage.

I don’t speak well yet. I can understand more than I can say, and that’s the part that matters for now.

I don’t know how far I’ll get with this. But the next time we sit at a dinner table together, maybe they won’t have to shrink themselves for me.