So I met Kris in the practice room after watching them practice again the day after. He only brought a few books. We both sat down in beanbag chairs with a short table in the middle of us.

"What shall we be learning today, duizhang?" I asked. Ugh did I just say that. My pronunciation was probably wrong too ugh my life man he's gonna make fun of my pronunciation and I have to explain that the only words in Chinese I know are duizhang, xiao lu, ni hao, and wo ai ni. Uiueiurviuenoernioe.

"We're learning Korean now, not Chinese, save that for a year or two from now." Kris said.

"Are we going to be doing these lessons for that long?" I asked cheerfully.

"Well if you want to become fluent.. yes. And you should pay attention while we're at it." He said. I nodded with all the energy I could put into my head at once.

I saw the English titles of the books. Learning Hangul, Hangul for Beginners, The Korean Alphabet, and more. "We're going to learn the alphabet first?" I asked.

"It helps a lot with pronunciation. It isn't hard, you'll have it down by the end of the week. I can't say the same for when we start Chinese, though.

"We'll start with The History of Hangul." The book was only a few pages long, and I understood it since it was in English.

"Up until the 1600's, Korean was written entirely using Chinese characters. Since this required learning several thousand complicated characters only those with lots of time and money for education were literate and only a tiny number of aristocrats were able to read and write fluently.

In 1446 the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, Sejong the Great, published a document called Hunmin Jeong-eum Eonhae that described a new alphabet that was specifically designed to be easy to learn. This document was written in Chinese characters as well as Hangul.

Hangul was very successful in spreading literacy to women and the under-educated but it was resisted by many scholars and elites who say it was a threat to their special status. They insisted that Chinese characters was the only legitimate writing system. In fact it was so successful that it was outlawed by the after Tyrant King Yeonsan-gun after commoners made Hangul posters mocking him.
After his death, Hangul made a comeback, often mixed with some Chinese characters.
Hangul was also banned once again in Japanese-occupied Korea right before the start of WWII in an attempt to make Japanese the official language.
As soon as WWII ended, Hangul once again became the official alphabet. Like before, Hangul was often mixed with the Chinese characters. However, over the last 60 years, Chinese characters have mostly disappeared except in scholarly documents. Hangul now reigns supreme."

"Do you understand that?" Kris asked me when he finished.

"Mhm. If it's English, there's a small chance I can understand it, unlike any other language. I know only English and Italian, nothing else." I told him.

"Well, do you think we can get into vowels now?" I nodded and Kris grabbed another book, one where you learn the properties of Hangul.

"Hangul is a very logical alphabet. But to understand it you need to keep in mind vowels, consonants, and syllables." Kris started. "Now, tell me what all the vowels in English are." Good thing he's starting out easy with me...

"A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y." Kris nodded without looking at me.

"Yeah, all the vowel sounds are represented with six letters. And then consonants in English are the other 20 letters."

"Now this is a little harder," Kris warned me, "What is the definition of a syllable in English?" Are you kidding? I obviously knew what it was, but how was I supposed to define it? It's like defining the word the. I shrugged my shoulders as an answer.

"I wouldn't know either, to be honest. The book says it's a unit of sound that has one or two vowels, but only one vowel sound. In English, a syllable can have up to three consonants before and after the vowel or vowels. Okay so as an exercise, break these words into syllables: Bullet, Strong, and Banks."

I stared at him for a second. "How exactly is this helping me?"

"I don't know, but the book says it so do it." I would have normally felt embarassed doing this, but he never makes fun of me, no matter how many opportunities I give to him, so I decided to do it anyway. I still need to use my hands to figure out how to differentiate syllables.

I started clapping my hands, but Kris didn't seem to notice. I started to think he wouldn't make fun of me no matter what I did. "Um," I said, "Bullet is two syllables, and Strong and Banks are both one syllable." Kris nodded. He seemed really different when 'teaching'.

"Yeah, but Strong has three consonants before the vowel and Banks has three consonants after the vowel. Hangul has 40 letters, but they are written in blocks that represent a syllable per block and they each contain two to four letters." He read from the book.

"Finally, we're getting to the actual Korean.." I complained. He rolled his eyes and smiled a little bit.

"The first letter in a block must be a consonant, so to write syllables that begin with a vowel, you write..." He stopped in the middle of the sentence and brought out his pen and drawing pad.

"What are you drawing now, Picasso? Another masterpiece?"

With the most serious face I've ever seen him have, he just replied, simply, "No."

He drew a circle on it. "Why couldn't you just show me the symbol in the book?" I complained some more. "Because it's more fun to draw, don't you think?" I then recognized the symbol is ㅇ.

I recognized it because it's the first letter in 으르렁, the Korean name for Growl, their latest album name. It says "eu-reu-reong", which is three syllables, so there are three blocks. The first syllable, "eu", starts with a vowel (and ends with the same one), so the ㅇ would come first.

"You've seen it before, haven't you?" He asked. I smiled and nodded. "Let me tell you, you're lucky to have someone as awesome as me teaching you. I had to memorize from books when I learned it. It was easy, but it wasn't fun." He said.

"I guess you could say this is a little like school, right?" Kris asked me. "If it is, then I must like school now."

I still couldn't imagine I'd be doing this every day for, according to him, a year or two. Maybe we could really kiss like we were about to yesterday...

ZESXRDCTFVYGBUHN I shall continue tomorrow, bedtime now, it's like midnight and I gotta get up early tomorrow. Sorry if it isn't creative, but I hope you non-Korean fans learned a little bit in this chapter :L

I was thinking their ship name would be Krisel or something c;