i can read

Mom and Dad came by my tournament yesterday to come see me captain/play one more time before I graduate from the Wellesley Whiptails (oh god, the nostalgia. sorry. i'll try to stave it off, but when it comes to emotions and feelings and touchy-feeliness, i'm like a neverending fountain of sappy), and they left me with some crackers and food, including a bag of crackers which I'm eating right now as I finish my application for a summer internship at ETS.

There was this random small plastic packet with white ball-like things in it, and I thought it might be those poisonous silica gel things or something, and the packaging was in Korean so I thought I was just going to have to throw it out in case I read it wrong and accidentally ate something that would kill me.

BUT THEN SOMETHING AMAZING HAPPENED. I read the characters out loud, which looked like this:

I sounded it out, "byul...sa...tang," and then I was like "oh, star candy. sweet. I can eat it." And then I realized that I had read it and understood it! YAY. For those of you who don't understand why this is so important, well, let me tell you a story about me. Again. Whatever, this is a blog, my blog, actually, so it's just going to be stories about me anyway.

When I was very little, I spoke Korean fluently with my parents. I learned English with my parents and quickly switched over to English as my dominant language and now I can barely speak any Korean at all. It's really quite tragic. It never bothered me before, but now that I'm going onto my second foreign language (first French, now Spanish), I kind of have been itching to learn Korean. It's also a point of sensitivity, the fact that I can't really communicate that well with my extended family, but I think that that's something I can amend.

So, basically, everytime I'm able to understand/read/speak Korean, I get really excited. Pretty cool, huh?