Post-117: “I Wanna Ride the Train!” (Or, Learning Korean from a Toddler)

“기차 타 볼래!!”

“I wanna try riding the train!!“

A Korean toddler taught me that phrase. I can’t forget it, having heard it several hundred times in quick succession.

On the bus going into Jinju City from the train station. In the seat in front of me: A mother. A small boy, small enough to still be held by its mother but old enough to speak (maybe age 3). He was mellow until the bus started rolling. Then the wailing. Loud. Embarrassing for all aboard. The mother did nothing, said nothing. The wailing continued, minute after minute. Some chuckles from other passengers. A pause; the boy catches his breath. More wailing. The same phrase. “I wanna try riding the train!! — I wanna try riding the train!!” (“기차 타 볼래!!”).

I presume the boy and his mother had just said goodbye to the baby’s father, who I presume was riding somewhere on business. The baby shouted“기차 타 볼래!!” because he saw his dad riding the train, and saw other strangers were riding it, and felt cheated that he was forbidden from riding the wonderful metallic monster, something he had never done. As the mind of a baby has it, shouting “I wanna ride!” enough times, loudly enough, is a winning strategy.

I tried to make sense of the toddler’s plea. I recognized “기차” (train) and “타” (ride), learned from my hundreds of rides on the subway. “볼래” I didn’t know. It t was explained to me later that it means “I wanna” ( informal).

After ten minutes or so, the mother finally spoke, and something I couldn’t understand except for the word “bus”. I presume, from her singsong baby-talk tone, that she was telling the small boy that “Hey, riding a bus is fun, too”. The boy must have found this convincing, because the wailing faded into whimpering. Still, he maintained an occasional “I wanna try riding the train” (“기차 타 볼래”) every now and then until we were in central Jinju and I got off the bus.