Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Involuntary Eavesdropping

Living in a country in which English is rarely spoken in public definitely has it's challenges.  However, I have always told people that is one reason I love living in Korea, because it is a challenge and forces me to learn a new culture and language if I want life to get any easier.  On the other hand, the language barrier has some advantages too.  I often get neglected by pesky promoters trying to hand me a flier that inevitably gets thrown away, I have made friends with strangers simply by asking them for help or using them as a translator in a certain situation, but most of all it is extremely easy to zone out and relax in public as I can easily block out all the conversations around me due to not knowing what they are saying (unless I intently focus on the conversation, then I can usually get a general idea about what people are talking about).  This is nice because there are times, such as on my bus ride home after a rough day at work, where I just want to zone out and not have to hear the blabbering of the other commuters around me.

But, occasionally my linguistic ignorance is ruined when I find myself on the same bus or train car with other English speakers.  Because it is a rarity to hear conversations in English, I find myself subconsciously listening to these conversations, despite the fact that they are almost always intolerably superficial and boring.  For example, just the other day I listened for almost 15 minutes to an American about what her favorite fruit is, which was strawberries except when in a smoothie she likes blueberries, and attempting, but failing, to explain what the air quotations (" ") with your fingers means.  Listening to these superficial and sometimes ignorant conversations of my fellow compatriots annoys me, but it is something that I cannot turn off. 


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