study

Yesterday, a student of mine, a middle school boy, walked into class about 15 minutes late. He was limping a bit and had a big brace on his left leg. I asked him why he was late. "A car hit me," he said.



Now, he hadn't just been hit by a car. It had happened that morning at about 7 o'clock as he was walking to school. He was crossing the street as a truck was turning the corner. He said the truck was going about 30 km/h. He was taken to a hospital to get checked out, and was in school before lunch. Then he had to come to my English academy at night. I pitied him. If getting hit by a truck can't get you out of classes for a day, what will?

I've been studying Korean lately. I've felt motivated. I think it's the knowledge that by the end of this year I will have spent 5 years living in Korea. I don't want to be the kind of person who lives in a country for 5 years and still hasn't picked up the language. And there's another thing, too. See, by and large I shun my fellow foreigners in this country. Call it projection or self-loathing or what you will, I actively avoid and have a strong aversion to all but maybe 3 people. Sometimes I'll meet someone and they'll be so clueless about the language and culture of this country that they repulse me. Those people inspire me to be as unlike them as possible. So, I study.

My Korean is not bad. In the past I've heard people describe their knowledge of a foreign language in these terms: I can't speak it well, but I can understand it. That statement always seemed incongruent to me. Surely if you can understand a language as it's spoken to you, you can simply regurgitate it. But now I get it. I'm about at that point with Korean. I have my base knowledge which I've accumulated without even trying. Add to that the maybe 50 hours of actual studying I've done over the past 5 years and you have a pretty broad vocabulary and a fundamental awareness of grammatical constructs. Combine that with contextual clues that accompany a conversation and it's not hard to fill in the gaps and understand the idea being communicated. But then, when trying to express your own thoughts, you can't place those inferences in the mind of the listener, and so actual fluency is crucial.

Also, the basic structure of Korean grammar is antithetical to English. Subject-Object-Verb rather than Subject-Verb-Object. It's really hard to think and speak on your feet in such a radically different way.

The important thing, at least with students, is to make them think you can speak Korean better than you actually can. If a kid says a curse word and then here's me say, in Korean, "Don't curse!" he or she straightens right up. Also, commands carry a lot more weight in their native tongue. I can extoll them to sit down or be quiet until I'm blue in the face, and even thought they know what I'm saying it's easy to ignore because it's English. But a curt anja or jo-yong-hae really gets results.