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!