Significance of starting something new

I started to learn Korean out of mere curiosity. Honestly, at that time – more than 10 years ago – I hardly knew anything about Korea except that it was located in Asia and divided in two, just like my home country Germany used to be. I learned the first words of the language without ever having listened to a single tune of K-Pop, tasted only one bite of Gimchi or even without the slightest intention of visiting there one day. When I learned how to order Gaggdugi in one of my first language lessons I thought to myself: “How interesting, they eat spicy fermented radish cubes there, but I’m certainly never going to taste it.”

I don’t really remember which the first word of Korean I ever learned was – we started by trying to master the Korean script, Hangeul, and approached it by memorizing a long list of rather random words. It contained some more useful terms like “milk” or “child” but also rather fancy ones such as “scarecrow” (a Korean word that still hasn’t made it into my active vocabulary).

However, I’m pretty sure that the first sentence I ever learned in Korean was “Sijagi banida.” – “Beginning is half”. You could interpret it as a Korean version of “Just do it!” but I certainly didn’t understand it in that way back then. Instead – maybe a result of my training in public economics – the sentence triggered a vague idea of the sunk costs  I already had created by attending the class. Sunk costs are a vicious motivator that helps you to troop on, even though rational consideration would clearly tell you to do otherwise.

Looking back on it, at some point it seemed rather ridiculous that this first Korean language class might in anyway compare to the thousands of words I was going to memorize, and the frustration I was going to feel when at some point I discovered that if you only know 100 words, 50 additional are a huge step, but if you already know 3,000, knowing 3,050 words somehow doesn’t really make a difference.

Still – this first lesson of Korean was definitely the beginning of something big. It actually was going to change my whole life. I just didn’t know it yet. Not only would I visit Korea, I was going to live there. I would learn how to write with a brush, and that six hours of sleep can be considered as “plenty”; I would meet many amazing people, but also was going to almost lose my life twice. Yes, this beginning (the “first half”) was indeed a big step, just that the “second half” still hasn’t stopped to totally grow out of proportion day by day. Sijagi banida. Just try and start something new today yourself!

*
[1] Sunk costs: An economic term to describe costs of an investment you cannot retrieve even if you immediately give up on the project. If you happen to buy a bowl of ice cream in a flavor you – to your own disappointment and surprise – don’t like, the money you spend on it is your “sunk costs.” Here the rational thing would be to throw the ice cream away in order to not add additional costs in form of the discomfort you feel by consuming something that tastes awful. The “sunk cost paradox”, however, suggests that many people just go on to eat the ice cream anyway because they feel sorry for the money they have already spent.

news@theasian.asia