Eat kimchi

Koreans will tell you that you need to eat kimchi to learn Korean.

They are right.

I won't try to extol the virtues of Kimchi. Just find a Korean and ask, and they will tell you how it is the most wonderful food in the world.

I will tell you this, though: If you want to speak Korean, you have to think and act like a Korean. And that means understanding why you need to eat Kimchi.

If you persist in your Western notion of things, you'll never grow to appreciate the Korean mindset. You'll never grow to love their palate. You'll never grow to love who they are, and not what they aren't.

There is the story of a Westerner who came to Korea in the 1850s. At that time, Korea was worse than a third world country. The people were malnourished, the streets were just mud, and there was filth everywhere. There were definitely two classes of Koreans, and everything, by Western standards, was backwards. By the end of that foreigners visit, however, he came to understand what the Korean people felt was most important in life. His declaration was that there was not a more caring or compassionate people on the planet. Behind the layers of filth and crudeness was a people who sincerely enjoyed people for being people. That's what you'll have to learn to grow and understand.

One more note: You're probably never going to have a friend like a Korean friend. Korean friends accept all of you, warts and all, and embrace you without hesitation or second-guessing. The magical moment when you realize that what you've agreed to is a complete loss of privacy, that's the moment you'll begin to learn to accept someone else for who they are and embrace everything about them, warts and all. That's the magical moment you realize that life isn't supposed to be perfect, and things are supposed to be hard, but that's ok. That's why it is great to be alive.