Alphabet

I always knew that I had some trouble in learning Korean. I'm not the kind of person who has too many difficulties in learning a language but apparently (well... I'm having troubles with Mandarim but -what the heck!- who hasn't?), I got stuck with my poor Korean. I realized this after spending some time in Korea and after I spent some time with my sister who's been living there for almost a year. You see, Koreans are really hard working and they study a lot, especially English but somehow, they are not really good in speaking. I used to blame the Korean methods of teaching English - that kind of critics that we make when we don´t know someone else´s culture deeply- but my sister told me something that I just understood now - even though I've been to Korea a few times before. The truth is that they were brought up using the Korean alphabet which is totally different from the latin alphabet. You may think that this is sth obvious but it's not. Introducing and changing are never easy, imagine learning a new alphabet that you are not used to. When I was in Vancouver with some Korean friends, I went to a coffee shop (what was the name?). Anyways, it was like a a Canadian version for Starbucks... Blenz. There you go. This friend of mine looked at the menu and got terrified. She told me I was lucky because even though I am a Brazilian, I could manage to order anything I wanted - she meant that I am used to words written in the Latin alphabet. But in her case, all those words were difficult for her. For people who live in the East, seing things written in the latin alphabet is somehow terrifying because it is new. I guess that for us it´s the same feeling of going to Korea an Japan and notice that everything is written in an alphabet in which you can´t tell the difference among the words. Even though I learned Korean, there is a huge difference between learning at school where you see words written in Korean once a week and actually going to the country where everything is written in Korean. HUGE difference!