kek.

Yeah, I hear you about finding places to shop. I'm living in a big metropolis now, and Korean food is becoming increasingly popular. That said, the city I live in is kind of famous for having access to just about ANY type of cuisine in really quality forms. It's a gustatory Disneyland. Wait, no strike that (blegh). It's a gustatory Las Vegas, sans the mafia.

japchae! Oh, my japchae! Really like this when I can get it, but man, it's such a heaping lot of work. A lot!

cinnamon hotteok...... oh, man. That takes me back. Nothing like walking in the downtown area on a cold winter afternoon when it's like - 2 or - 3 degrees (celcius) (= ~ 27 fahrenheit) and just stopping at some ajuma's hotteok stand and grabbing one of those bad boys and munching on it in the street. Which, you are allowed to do if you stand at the stall.

Maybe Seoul has changed, but in my day, if you ate food while walking, you'd get sniggers. That's because eating and walking at the same time is (was) really juvenile behavior; only little kids would do it coz they don't know any better. Or ignorant Americans..... And in the old days, any non-asian foreigner = American.

Took me about a year of full immersion to master the difference between ㅓ and ㅗ. In my particular native version of English, both these sounds are the same phoneme. Training the ear is a big part of training the tongue.

"I also can't hear any difference whatsoever between ㅂ and ㅃ or ㅅ and ㅆ, or any of the other ones." Well, yeah. That's coz the sound palate is different. In English, to a native English speaker, we simply do not distinguish between those sounds. In English, they are "the same" - they have the same phonemic value.

Just like for us, b and p are completely different phonemes, but for a Korean, they are one and the same!

Good luck and hope you make headways. Aside from JRR Tolkien, Korean was my doorway into the wonderful world of linguistics, which became my profession.

Oh, the things I could expound on the glories and the genius and the awesomeness of the Korean language. But, another time....

A blessing on your learnings.

And, remember the 3-fold rule. A language is not a knowledge set, like history or maths, or physics. It's an ability to communicate. As such, acquiring that ability requires work in three adjacent areas: intellectual (knowledge) + physical (skills and capabilities requiring training of the nervous system and the muscle system) + real world experience (actual use in communicative engagement).

At this point, the Iron is Out....