Life In Limbo

Oedo Island, Geoje, Korea

September 22, 2014

I spent the weekend on Geoje island exploring and eating good food with good friends. Yesterday we took a ferry to Oedo island, a completely stunning tropical paradise. The island was created by a husband and wife team for more than 30 years before unveiling it to the public. Apparently it used to be a rocky island like neighbouring ones in the area, but to see it you’d never believe it. The whole place is lush and green with spots of colour and absolutely gorgeous views.

The ferry made us nauseous (big time) but when we docked at Oedo, it was instantly worth it. The place is wonderful, with sweet gardens tucked away in corners, interesting and modern statues everywhere, palm trees and pathways with a roof of branches. Any way you look there is a beautiful vista, and in the end we just sat in the spot that offered the best panorama of the place. It was easily the highlight of my weekend and one of the best places I’ve visited in Korea.

Inspiration | September 19

September 19, 2014

I mentioned it in yesterday’s post, but I loved this short video about productive morning rituals. It inspired me to make a few changes this week.

This post made me feel feelings about life and home and family.

Meal-prep inspiration from Shutterbean! I also spent a long time on her Instagram hashtag #shutterbeandinner this week. Love it.

I signed up for the Braid Creative newsletter called Letters For Creatives after listening to Elise’s podcast interview with Kathleen.

If I was settling into an apartment right now, I’d be excited about these 37 cheap ways to make your Ikea stuff look good. For the record though? I’m actually really grateful I’m having adventures and not settling into an apartment right now. Still, they’re great ideas!

I went on a research SPREE this week regarding South East Asia. I use the term “research” lightly, because I was basically reading about awesome places and looking at beautiful photos and getting myself so excited for the next chapter in my life after my time in Korea. I spent a ton of time on That Backpacker – I particularly loved this article about Audrey’s favourite places in South East Asia, but she has so many inspiring posts. Go get sucked in the way I was!

I’ll be slowly adding a few more things to my travel photography shop over the next couple of weeks – including some photos from Japan! – so if you’re interested head over and have a look!

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This weekend, my friends and I are heading to a nearby (bus-accessible) island to catch some rays and see some beautiful natural sights. I’m looking forward to exploring and relaxing. As always, you can follow along with me on Instagram @lifeinlimboblog. I hope you have a great weekend too!

On Practicing & Starting Small

September 18, 2014

I’m not very good at starting small. I am excellent at jumping into things with two feet and a long list of requirements for success, and after some time (a week, three weeks, 3 months..) getting burned out and giving up entirely. I’m grateful that it’s in my nature to be so enthusiastic about things, but my follow-through has always needed work.

I often read about trigger habits and doing the minimum, tiny goal in the hopes that it will eventually prompt you to do more but without the expectation of needing to do more. For example, setting the tiny daily goal to put on your running shoes and get outside your front door. The idea is that just getting outside is enough on its own, but that it’ll also probably prompt you to go further, do a little run or maybe even a long one before you go back home. You’re taking away the pressure by giving yourself an incredibly easy small win right off the bat, which will hopefully lead to more small wins over time.

Unfortunately, it’s also in my nature to barrel ahead and do too much at once. I don’t tend to care about small wins and I don’t give myself credit for them. I always feel like I can and should do more, push harder, have bigger wins. It’s not hard to see why eventually I get burned out and give up – I’m not very good at lowering my own standards for success or being gentle with myself. This, I realize, is both a blessing and a curse.

In the spirit of small trigger goals and daily practices, this week I’ve started using the free workout app Seven. I learned about it on Entrepreneur, and The New York Times also had a great piece about it in Well. Sure, it would be better to go for a 30 minute run every day, or hit the gym a few times a week. True to form, when I first started using the app I wanted to try doing two of the circuits every day, or maybe three! But that kind of all or nothing thinking is what ends up burning me out. I never start by setting the bar low because it never seems like enough for me. This time around, I’m letting a (challenging!) seven minute workout every morning be enough. I know I can do that much. Maybe it will trigger more habits, maybe it will be enough on its own – it doesn’t matter. I am starting very small. I am hoping to stay with it. I am hoping to come back to it every day.

I’ve realized lately that I’m not good at practice. I like things that I can finish and be done with, wrap up, move on. I think this is a common attitude but unfortunately that doesn’t make it much easier to deal with or overcome. Most things in life that I think are important are daily practices that we are (hopefully) never, ever finished with. Meditation, exercise, creativity, staying in touch, eating well, patience, gratitude: all are practices. You don’t get to an end point with exercise and get to stop. You don’t ever reach the pinnacle of success in gratitude and then are set for the rest of your life. You have to keep practicing, each day, slowly but surely, over and over – and there is no “until….” because there is no end point.

This is very hard for me to grasp, let alone put into practice. This is why I flame out every running season, or after a few months of consistent yoga practice, or after a week of meditation when I don’t feel like I’m improving. I find it difficult to stay with things that can’t necessarily be measured quantitatively, or shouldn’t be.

With many of these important practices, I’ve been trying to keep myself in the mindset of taking it one day at a time. Building up slowly a chain of successful days, and trying not to break the chain. Starting fresh each morning. Showing up at the mat or in the chair or in my running shoes as if for the first time and seeing what happens. Being less invested in a particular outcome, and especially less invested in ever being “finished”. This is not easy for me, and I am usually not very successful in embracing this perspective. But investing in and sticking with things that are practices with no end point is in itself a practice. So at least I can try, every day, for as long as I have.

Right now I’m practicing a seven minute workout, eating mindfully, showing up to my yoga mat, morning pages and meditation. What about you?

How to Learn Korean

September 17, 2014

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been making an effort to learn more Korean. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve been here for six months, so what have I been doing all this time?! My mom agrees with you, and is always (rightly, I might add!) reminding me to learn more of the language. I think after the initial period of getting settled, coupled with the mini-upheaval of changing jobs, I never felt like I had the mental space to tackle such a task until lately.

In my defence, Korean is one of the 4 hardest major world languages for native English speakers to learn. The others are Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. The research estimates that you would need 2200 hours of dedicated study to become proficient in any of those languages, which makes the whole thing seem a bit hopeless! But fortunately I spend 8 hours a day talking to cute munchkins who are incredibly skilled at speaking and writing Korean, so I’ve been using them to my advantage.

1. Learn to read Hangul

Hangul is the Korean alphabet with 24 vowels and consonants. It’s actually one of the easiest written languages in the world, even though it looks a bit scary at first. Unlike Japanese and Chinese character systems, Hangul is based on sounds. It was created by King Sejong, quite a popular guy in Korea, back in the the 1400’s. His goal was to improve the literacy rate of the Korean population by making a system so simple that anyone could learn to read it. It was said about the characters: “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.”

It’s true though! It doesn’t take long to learn the alphabet, maybe a couple of hours.

I had a lot of success with this infographic, Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes. It’s a cute cartoon, but it’s also really effective. I still remember most of my consonants based on the memory aids they give you.

I also love the app Memrise, which I used to solidify my knowledge of Hangul. The system uses smart, user-submitted memory aids to help you learn new letters and words, and they’re usually very on point and helpful. Memrise has all kinds of courses for language, trivia, general memory training and more, and it’s all free. I used this course for Hangul.

Of course, learning the characters often doesn’t help much because although you can sound out and read words, you don’t actually know what the Korean word means. So while I can sound words out phonetically, it doesn’t really help me unless I learn the word itself.

2. Learn some basic phrases

To my credit, I did learn some basic phrases when I first moved to Korea. I try not to go anywhere new without knowing the words for “hello” and “thank you”, and Korea was no exception. Here are my top 4:

????? (annyeong haseyo) = Hello!
????? (gamsamnida) = Thank you
????? (mian hamnida) = I’m sorry
???? (eolma eyo) = How much is it?

You can also learn phrases from an app – there are tons on the app store or online. One that I downloaded (but admittedly have not used much) is this Learn Korean Phrasebook. It’s fairly extensive, very easy to use and has voice recordings of each phrase from a native Korean speaker. It’s helpful to have around in case you need to learn something new in a jam, but I usually prefer learning phrases organically from my students or my friends. I also know how to say “I love you!”, “stop that” (3 different ways), “let’s go”, “don’t go”, “turn right” and “turn left”, among a few other things.

I also very recently discovered the Youtube channel Talk to Me in Korean which will hopefully teach me even more!

3. Learn helpful words

This is where my students come in. I have a few classes that have an English spelling test every 2 weeks. I recently began telling them that on the day that I teach them their new English spelling words, they could teach me Korean spelling words, and that we’d have our tests on the same day. This doesn’t take up too much class time, they absolutely adore teaching me Korean words, and I get to learn something new! I’ve been writing out my words on an index card with the English translation, and practicing them each day while saying the words out loud.

Thus far, I know the words for chair, eraser, orange, pencil, crab, flower, book, earth, sun, bag, hand, finger, face, he, she, we, and person. It’s pretty awesome to see the patterns between the letters and start to recognize some words as I hear them spoken in class.

There are some courses on Memrise that look great for learning individual words as well, like this one for the 100 Most Frequent Korean Words.

4. Practice!

Of course, the most helpful thing you can do when learning any new language is to practice, practice, practice. I’ve been trying to practice saying the phrases I’ve learned to my classes (and laugh when they gasp and ooh and ahh and get excited over my attempts to speak Korean) and to shop clerks (it’s thrilling when they understand and reply without batting an eye). I try to learn new phrases from native Korean speakers both mini and adult, and use the new words I’ve learned as much as I can.

Despite the title of this post, I have definitely not finished learning Korean and it’s very possible there are better ways to learn it that I don’t know about. Do you have any tips on learning Korean, or languages in general? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.