Learning how to read again

I am learning Hangul (the name of the Korean alphabet.)
Having spent four years here in India NOT knowing the language, I am quite eager to begin learning a language that will be useful for me when we move to Korea in just over 4 months. I really enjoy learning languages, but most of them served their season of usefulness in my life and then faded away into the recesses of my memory - almost completely forgotten now. Here are the languages I've learned so far in order of current fluency: English (as fluent as I'm going to get!), French, Swedish, Hindi, Lingala(almost all forgotten), Spanish (never knew much) and now Korean(just beginning). People say that when you get back into a situation and start using the language again, it comes back quickly. I have yet to witness that... maybe SOMEDAY we'll move somewhere where I already know the language! : - )

Anyway, I have always wanted to learn a language that uses a different script. Hindi came into my life at a very stressful and difficult point for me, so I didn't manage to learn the script at all, and just learned spoken 'survival' Hindi so I could communicate basically with the woman who was caring for my son at the time.

I find myself thankful for another opportunity to learn a language that has a different script. To stare at a page of characters with no comprehension of what meaning they might contain, and then to slowly attach meaning to them and begin to make some sense of what I'm looking at - which is someone else's native language. It's fascinating to me and I'm enjoying some time and energy to work on memorizing the Hangul characters. I know I will thoroughly enjoy being able to read and understand some things when we get to Korea. It's also a precious experience for me since I have most recently been a language teacher- as a teacher, it's so easy to forget what it's like to be a student beginning to learn something so completely foreign. Languages are so neat!