Korean Adoptee: What Korean Do I Need to Meet My Birth Family?

Far less than you are probably preparing for. A first meeting with birth family usually runs through an interpreter or an agency coordinator, so the conversation is covered. What is not covered is the handful of things you would rather say yourself, and those are short.

This page is about that handful. It is not about the search, the paperwork, or what the meeting will feel like, none of which we can speak to.

What the interpreter does and does not carry

An interpreter carries meaning. What an interpreter cannot carry is your own voice saying it, and those are different things.

So the useful goal is not to hold the conversation. It is to own the edges of it, the greeting and the ending, and one or two lines in the middle that you want to arrive in your own voice.

The lines that are worth having ready

Learn them as whole sounds. You are not building these in the moment and there is no version of that day where you should be.

That is the set. Six lines, all of them short, none of them requiring you to understand what comes back.

Why 저는 ~이에요 is the piece to get right

Saying your own name in Korean is the first sentence anyone learns here, and it is also the one you will repeat most that day, to more people than you expect.

The ending changes with the last sound of the name: a name ending in a vowel takes 예요, one ending in a consonant takes 이에요. Getting this right once means it is right every time you are introduced to somebody new in the room.

What nobody expects

• Fluency. Nobody in that room is assessing your Korean, and the interpreter exists precisely so that they do not have to.
• A speech. Prepared paragraphs collapse the moment the day goes somewhere you did not plan, which it will.
• Understanding the replies. You will not, and it is handled. Producing your own lines and following theirs are separate jobs, and only the first one is yours.

The part that is not about vocabulary

Speaking Korean badly to a stranger costs nothing. Speaking it badly to the people this meeting is with can feel like it means something about you, and that weight is a real reason sentences stop on the way out.

It is worth naming because it changes what practice has to look like. Repeating lines silently does not prepare you for saying them while feeling something. Saying them out loud, to another person, at normal speed, does.

If you want more than the six

The honest order is: get these six automatic first, then decide. Adding twenty more sentences before the six are reliable makes the six less reliable, not more.

If you have months rather than weeks, the thing that moves furthest is not vocabulary. It is being able to produce a sentence you did not rehearse, which is a different skill and needs a person on the other side.

What to do this week

1. Say all six aloud, standing, across three days. Out loud is not optional here, because the thing that fails on the day is the mouth, not the memory.
2. Check your own name against the 예요 / 이에요 rule and say it until it is automatic.
3. Ask whoever is coordinating whether an interpreter will be present and for how long. It changes how much you need.
4. Pick one line from the middle of the set that you want in your own voice, and practise only that one extra.

The short version

The conversation is not your job that day. Six short lines are what you might want in your own voice, and they are short because they have to survive a moment where very little else will. Get them automatic and let the interpreter do the rest.

Read next

• Korean Heritage Speaker: I Understand My Family but Can't Speak Back
• How Do I Stop Freezing When a Korean Person Talks to Me?