The Coursera Course I Actually Finished

July 23, 2023 · 1 min read

I signed up for First Step Korean on Coursera this month, and I actually finished it. The course itself was straightforward. Week one was the alphabet. Week two was writing. Week three was greetings, week four was 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.

The reason why I’m learning Korean is my girlfriend is Korean and I need to talk to her parents. But not the way you might think. It’s not so I can talk to them. It’s so they can talk to me. People speak differently in their first language, and I want them to be able to do that around me without feeling limited.

People speaking a foreign language often sound simpler than they are. Complex ideas get flattened into basic vocabulary. Jokes get lost. Personality gets reduced to whatever grammar you can manage. I’ve seen it happen to other people, and I don’t want it to happen to them. I want her parents to be able to express themselves freely, to be as sharp and funny and interesting as they actually are, without feeling limited by the language they’re using.

I don’t speak well yet. But I can understand more than I can say, and that’s the part that matters. The next time we’re at a dinner table together, they won’t have to simplify themselves for my sake.