...the dog ate my homework and other excuses

So today I’m missing the first class and I’m going to use various excuses, but there is one reason in particular. Every so often we spend the first lesson of the day practising rote-learned dialogues from the textbook.

I am going to stay as culturally neutral as possible, but this is a total waste of time. I waste more than 30 minutes memorising it of my free time, I waste 2 minutes in class reciting it, and then I waste the next 48 minutes of class listening to other people saying the same thing over and over again. This is a totally outmoded and anachronistic learning method.

Lets go back 2000 years to the time of the great Roman poets, when there were no computers, there were no books and there was very little paper. In these times, the only way to remember large quantities of new vocabulary was to put them into your head, by literally learning books off by heart. Instead of referring to a page in your notebook, you could go into your memory and find the right lines etc, or even more likely, be reminded of the word when you hear it.

When you were a child do you remember misunderstanding songs, and only realising what the words meant later in life, but you could sing the song perfectly anyway? Learning things off by heart does not help you to use and understand new vocabulary. It helps you to recite the things that you have learned off by heart. Anyone can learn any group of sounds together, you don’t need to know what they mean in order to do this.

This teaching method is totally irrelevant to modern day life, is highly inefficient and ultimately pretty much useless. It restricts you to only the learned conversations, it makes you unable to put your own sentences together and it destroys your confidence in the language. By learning like this you will never understand anyone because people don’t speak the exact same dialogues as in the textbook.

그래서 선생님, 내가 결석 했다geureseo, seonsengnim, naega gyeolseok haedda / check google translate to see what that means

거든(요)

-거든(요)-geodeunyo is a phrase that I remember hearing continuously since I have been in Korea. It's really stuck! Perhaps it's because it goes at the end of a sentence and it often stressed. According to the teacher it's just another way for giving a reason, but then of course why would they have it? There are a million words for "because" in Korean. Luckily I have the infinite resources of the internet and Korean acquaintances.

• Firstly it doesn't require a qualifying clause, it simply gives a stand-alone reason “Because I’m hot.”
• Secondly it is emphatic because of its position and intonation, so rather than meaning "because..." it means "it is because..."
• Thirdly it stands out because it gives the other person you're talking to a chance to respond. It has a conversational function as the Korean grammar dictionary translates it, you can insert a "you see."

Ultimately explaining it isn't enough. You need to use it, and listen out for it whenever you can!

Colours in Korean

As a young child exposed to the vulgarity of philosophy, I was posed the question is blue blue? Well of course it bloody is. I think the point was that everyone sees colours differently so blah blah blah. A lovely linguistic cliché is to discuss the fact that different languages cultures have different concepts of colour and don't have certain colours at all. I have not yet come across a language like this in my experience, so I can't comment (though someone told me that Latin colours were more about brightness.)

Anyway as you would guess, Korean has many words for colour and of course many different colours. A great similarity between English being the poetic '파루다'pareuda it is azure to "파랗다"parata it is blue. The former being used for only natural phenomena. Intriguingly, traffic lights, despite being the same here as in any country, are referred to as turning blue "파래 지다"parae jida and not green. As far as I've learnt there is no adjectival/verbal form for green! Philosophers please don't get too excited.

Furthermore it seems like the phrase "my hat is red" "내 모자가 빨간색이에요"nae mojaga bbalkanseki-ye-yo or "내 모자가 빨개요"nae mojaga bbalkayo mean exactly the same thing... Although I think it is more likely that their difference is the difference between "좋아요"jo-ayo / it is good and "좋아 해요"jo-a-heyo / I like it(it is good). One meaning something like "its nature is red" and the other "it is red". Anyway I don't really understand why Korean has so many verbal pairs like this, but the more I learn, the more (however slowly) I understand.

How to talk to yourself in Korean

I don't want to write another post about today being slow, but it was slow... We practised the forms which go with the "plain style" (Korean grammar for international learners, Yonsei university press). Basically sticking -ㄴ/는다-n/-neunda on the end of verbs thus removing any kind of respect form endings. Interestingly the -시--shi- is maintained, and even more interestingly in the first person only the pronoun "나"na / I is acceptable.

The teacher told us that this form is generally used in writing, especially in newspapers and other accounts. According to my grammar book it is a form of paraphrasing, ie not relating the story directly, but rather indirectly. Note how in German and Italian the subjunctive can be used in similar contexts.

However 1st person stories in this style are permissible. Another European point of comparison would be from English grammar, teaching all verbs with their particle "to" eg. "to eat" rather than "eat"

Perhaps though, the most interesting aspect of this form is that it used for talking to yourself. As you have special forms for talking to older, younger, more important and less important people in Korean, there is also a form for having "one on one" conversation!

I've often heard Koreans saying quite loudly, but not to anyone: "춥다"chupda / It's cold and "맛있겠다"mashigetta / that looks delicious!. Often though this is in a group of friends, and often also when the conversation lulls. This is something which is also common to the Japanese (apparently). I have always been a little confused as to how to respond, but I suppose the very nature of this form is that it requires no response!

Why are Koreans so pedantic?

One of the mainstays of the Korean course so far has been the "dreaded" 받아쓰기badasseugi, better known as a dictation in English. We get dictated 10 sentences at random speeds which we have to write down. These sentences all come from the textbook, either from the selection of example sentences or from the dialogues. So the most studious of students just memorise the lot. According to the teacher, the purpose of this test is to improve writing and spelling.

The total score is out of 10 and even the smallest mistake means the whole sentence is wrong. This is something which has always baffled me. Because of the time constraints and speed writing a learner of a foreign language is naturally going to make silly mistakes ie: -먄-myan instead of -면-myeon. I know how to spell that, I just was in an unnatural situation and lost concentration! Yet they never take this into account.

Yesterday though there was a small mark on the paper, which appeared to change 니까-nikka to 나까-nakka / looks worse in English doesn't it?. An equally silly mistake, however the fact is that with a little bit of inspection it was obvious that this was just a mark. The teacher was looking so hard for mistakes, that even when they weren't there she found them. By focusing on this kind of error it shows that she is expecting students to make mistakes, whatever the reason! If they were actually testing spelling, then surely they should focus on difficult to spell words like the cursed "괜찮아"gwaenchana / it's ok instead?

As a teacher doing this kind of task, I would take away marks accordingly, accounting for the different kind of mistakes. But in Korea wrong is wrong, no discussion, justification and to the Westerner it seems just overly pedantic.

But in a way, they do have a point, even the silliest and smallest errors can cause confusion, at the very least! But why be so intolerant in such a controlled environment? Why the lack of task focusing?

I can think of a few reasons:

• Historical: When Koreans wrote in Chinese characters, even the smallest mistake can totally change the meaning of a whole word, not like a spelling mistake which often just looks weird. This tradition of learning and teaching has been inherited by modern Korean.
• Linguistic: Korean, in it's nature is very "pedantic" There are literally thousands and thousands of words which have extremely specific meanings. You don't know that word and you can't say the phrase. Same with the endings that they use. There are many different endings which have extremely specific, one off, meanings: You use it wrong and you can insult someone. So be careful from the beginning.
• Cultural: Mistakes are seen differently here. People will go to extreme lengths to avoid making a mistake, to the extent that they will actually remain silent when they don't know the answer to a question. Extremely rude in Western culture, totally normal here.

Perhaps then, by our standards, Koreans are "pedantic" when it comes to tests, but this is clearly just a cultural perspective. They find it equally difficult and confusing when an English native-speaker is completely "tolerant" of even the smallest mistakes they make! Finally a lasting testament to Korean accuracy can be seen in the Tripitaka Koreana, a collection of Buddhist texts written in Hanja: 52,382,960 chinese characters and not one error!

Slow Days

These past few days have been relatively slow. I am beginning to think that the Korean attitude to language is that it just as a set of unrelated phenomena that all have equal weight and value, and can only be learned individually. Don’t take my tone as critical or negative, it’s probably because I am sick!

The “grammar” points have basically been extensions of meaning in already learned forms. We have already studied the -지 않다-ji anta form which basically negates a verb, and we just recycled it as a question: 예쁘지 않아요?yeppeuji anayo? / she isn’t pretty? as opposed to 예쁘지 않아요yeppeuji anayo / she isn’t pretty. This seems to me to be totally logical and everyone has already been asking questions like this anyway, because it’s easier than inserting other question endings/particles.

Same with -는데-neunde, we recycled it again as -는데요neunde-yo. I shouldn’t complain because we got to practise this extremely flexible and useful ending which I still don’t understand fully. We just learned it as an ending to a sentence rather than as some kind of conjunction. Although I’m not sure what the difference is exactly, it probably is something like: “I don’t like strawberries though”. As opposed to “I don’t like strawberries, though I’m hungry.”

I suppose this kind of thoroughness helps students unfamiliar with grammatical forms and it might also help those who need the writing practice, but couldn’t we just learn something new instead… There’s so much I still have no clue about!

Just one of the reasons why I love learning Korean

It’s a bit long, but keep reading, and you might understand why I chose the title. By studying Korean at a university, I’m not just learning a set of words or a grammatical code by which to interpret them and I’m not just learning about Korean culture and my culture. I am also learning about how Koreans see their own language and culture and by extension all language and all culture.

Unsurprisingly the Korean text book is divided into the same sections in every chapter, one of which deals with grammar and another vocabulary. Today’s grammar was about turning verbs into nouns and using them as the subject of a sentence: “Swimming is difficult” as opposed to “I swim with difficulty”. This can be done in different ways in Korean, but today we dropped the -다-da and added -기-gi to the stem: 수영하다 > 수영하기suyonghada > suyonghagi / to swim > swimming. Then to make it clear it’s the subject added the subject particle -가ga. 수영하-기-가 어려워요suyongha-gi-ga oer-yeoweo-yo

In fact we had already learned this -기-gi form in the context of 때문에ddaemunae / because of . So 수영하기 때문에 피곤해요suyonghagi ddemunae pigonheyo becomes because of swimming I am tired (not great English, but you understand it!). Now as a student of European languages and culture, it seems obvious that 수영하기suyeonghagi / to swim can be used anywhere in a sentence where you would use a noun. As the subject, object, indirect object, following a preposition etc. etc. So I was a little confused.

Why teach it as the subject only. Can this -기-gi form only be used as the subject? My European brain was instantly applying some kind of order or grammitcal pattern to this and I began to question the the whole schema, why would they teach us this in only one case when you can learn all of them at once? (see how latin is taught for reference). So I asked the teacher “can -기-gi nouns only be the subject?”

Can you guess her answer? If you’re Korean you probably can, if you’re European, you probably can’t!

She told me “this(어렵다oer-yeopda / to be difficult) is an intransitive (descriptive) verb (ie, it takes only a subject eg. sleep), so it can only be the subject”. ARRRGHHH!!! She didn’t answer the question. She saw my problem in terms of only the example sentence. My question on the other hand dealt with rules and grammar, and not the example sentence.

This experience highlights the day-to-day communication breakdowns that occur when West meets East. In the context of language learning it specifically demonstrates how Eastern and Western views of language differ. Essentially for a Korean 수영하기suyonghagi / swimmingas subject, object etc. etc. is a different 수영하기suyonghagi / swimmingevery time. Where for the European it’s always a “gerund” (or whatever name we choose to give it). With these parallel views, everything must seem different, depending on the language you speak and the culture you grew up in. And that’s why I chose the title!

Day 2: At the doctors

Korean is a vocabulary heavy language and the lesson today was extremely vocabulary heavy. At the moment I am focusing most of my energy on learning new words and so far the effects have been odd. Using memorisation software I input about 15 words a day and then do various tasks until I am able to recall the words from English into Korean. I have found that more than this number actually means I forget the words.

However I use recall carefully. Generally with the rote learned words I am unable to use them in future conversations. Often I am able to recognise them in a text and sometimes in speech. In class, I do my best to artificially insert them into conversation, often at the expense of politeness or conversation, but I know that despite all this effort, the only real way to “know” a word is to use it, use it, use it.

Interestingly on the subject of health, the words repair and heal/recover are covered by the same verb 고치다gochida / to heal or repair. Much to my amusement, Koreans with their special breed of English refer to their health as “my condition” and evaluate it by percentage. Further confirmation that Koreans are in fact, friendly robots.

Day 1 (Week 12, day 2 of Korean study at an average korean university language school)

Today was a typical day at the school. It’s hard not to compare the Korean style of teaching to the Western style, especially in relation to language teaching, as I am in some ways, an English teacher (TEFL, not school). However to help keep an open mind (a pre-requisite to language learning) it is useful to know that Koreans see language in an entirely different way to us. Not just because their language in it’s nature is very different.

Back to today. It was a big mix of mainly writing example sentences and listening in silence to the teacher creating example sentences. This teacher occasionally gives us pair-work speaking activities and there was some of that today. The questions that were raised through this exercise (not to mention the errors that I made) helped me to begin to make some progress into understanding the construction “-ㄹ 태니까”-eul thaenikka. As in the example sentence 네가 청소 할 태니까 너가 설거지 해nega cheongso hal thaenikka noga seolgeoji hae / Ill do the cleaning so (that) you do the washing up.

Im not going to go into detail here and I will avoid grammar as much as I can but the key part to this is the -니까-nikka.

-니까-nikka creates some kind of causal relationship between the first and second clauses, and because of its specific meanings, can only be followed logically by a few constructions. Here, namely, commands and suggestions. So this means “I’ll do xxx so you should/must do yyy” Not as is tempting to do “I’ll do this so…”

Keen as everyone is to make language learning as complex as possible, using “-ㄹ 태니까”-eul thaenikka in the second person appears to change its meaning. But just like “going to” in English becomes more of a prediction, so does ““-ㄹ 태니까”-eul thaenikka in the second, third etc. person also lose it’s concepts of intent.
The library does not intend to be full, It’s going to be full! So luckily for the native English speakers, we don’t have much extra work to do!

Welcome to Korean with John – 어서오십시오

Sometimes you just have to start, and spring is that time. I have been thinking of sharing my language learning experience(s) for quite some time now, though as this blog evolves and changes, I am sure it’s purpose and nature will evolve.

In a similar way, through the language learning process, I will evolve and change, and as you learn a new language you will too. If you don’t, you’re not doing it right, mate! There are other goals too, both self-centred, self-righteous and self-indulgent, but the ultimate hope is that this is a medium for me (and you) to expand our world views, and improve the art of language learning.

One final note, my comments on this blog are observations and not facts. Use this blog as a basis from which to learn, but not as a source of truth. You have been warned.