"Oh, yeah, and... here's my card. Send me a fax".

A fax? wait a second there....
A fax? You mean, that old machine..where you insert the page (or fear, more than one), dial a number, wait for the call to go through (hopefully it's automatic so no one will answer, sparing you the pain of having to say: "I am trying to send a fax, could you please press the "OK" button or just hang the phone so I can dial the number again?"), then wait for the confirmation message to come in, then perhaps, just to be on the safe side, you call and ask: "did you receive my fax"?....

Is that what you are talking about?

Arguably the best sounding language on the planet, or simply the most beautiful; warm, sweet, funny, moody, articulate, enriched by unique gestures (which should be studied as an integral part of the grammar, as they do have an important role in everyday Italian conversation), Italian is my mother tongue, the language of some 60 million people in Europe and numerous immigrant communities all over the Planet, the language of the Divine Comedy, the language used by Leonardo da Vinci and other countless cool dudes, the key to understand the variegated puzzle made of genius, creativity, laziness, generosity, anarchy, humour, cynicism, ancient history and contemporary problems that is Italy. The standard form used throughout the Peninsula unifies a country with multiple cultural influences, while preserving a multicoloured variety of regional dialects (more than that: sometimes two dialects within the same province can differ quite a lot, even in a radius of  40-50km) which deserves to be explored, if one wishes to understand what real Italy is.

What works like an alphabet, looks like ideograms, has a perfect structure and can be learned in 24 hours? The answer is: Hangul, a unique writing system developed around the year 1443 by King Sejong the Great, during one of the highest periods of  Korean history. Widely regarded as a very advanced linguistic inventions, the Korean alphabet is perhaps one of the best tools to deepen our knowledge of the uniques features of Korean people. The picture on the left portrays a few paper rolls (exposed and sold in the traditional area of Insa-dong, in Seoul), with the Korean alphabet and the relative Chinese characters shown side to side.

In 2000, right after graduating, I decided to take a one-way trip to Korea, with little or no money, little or no clue about the language spoken there, the culture, the people or everything else. I paid myself a 6 months language course at one of the biggest Universities in Seoul, and that was it: "let's see what happens". The rest of the trip, I thought, would have been figured out while there. Although the trip proved to be successful in the end, and my staying there went on to be over 2 years, my first months were (of course) the closest thing to hell I had experienced up to that time: cultural shock, diet problems, climate change, and most of all, nearly complete obscurity in terms of social and personal communication, due to the language barrier.