I came to the States before elementary school, so I had no formal education in my native tongue. I picked up English quickly and forgot even the little Korean that I knew despite my parents' attempts to teach it at home.

Many of us Koreans who came to the State at a young age forgot much of our first language. However, recently, I'm noticing that more and more children of Korean immigrants are maintaining a fluency with the language. I attribute it to the development of Korean popular culture in terms of accessibility and desirability. There were Korean dramas and miniseries back in the late '70s but it was definitely geared toward an older, more traditional audience. Those VHS tapes weren't widely available until the '80s. As for music, if you've ever seen some of the Korean variety shows with the old soloist singing melodies that sound distinctly Asian and backed up by an orchestra, that's 95% of what domestic Korean music was like back then. So, you couldn't blame the immigrant kids for watching Battlestar Galactica and listening to the Bee Gees.

I've got cousins down in LA, born in the States, who consume, almost exclusively, Korean culture: TV, music, film, and even books. So very different than when I was growing up.

When I meet older Koreans nowadays, some of them are surprised that I speak so very little Korean. I can speak the language to an extent, but certainly not in a professional capacity. In fact, I try to avoid situations where I may have to dig into that linguistic memory to muster some Korean. I'm in my 30's and I hate speaking to strangers using a third grader's syntax. I also get this sense that a few Korean immigrants, even those who gained US citizenship, harbor a degree of immigrant shame and never commit to learning English. They may have come to the US because they exhausted all prospects in Korea, but they pretend as if they're in the US temporarily as some international scholar. In certain contexts, pretty funny.

So, how fluent are you all in your native tongue, whether it is Korean, Chinese, Japanese or any other language. For the ladies of AL, how fluent are your fellas or your prior boyfriends?

^Masters of killing it softly.