Code Breaker

3-31-2010
Day 24 of 365: I caught my first cold this weekend, so I did what anybody would do: I spent last Saturday at the movies. Turns out Korean colds are just like American colds; you get a sore throat for a day and then a stuffy face for four days after. No big deal. Anyway, I've got a 'To Watch' list, and I saw two of the movies on the list this weekend: Shutter Island and Solomon Kane. Shutter Island is a solid, 'Sixth Sense' type of thriller, and Solomon Kane is akin to Van Helsing, but more serious and with less personality. I give them an A- and B respectively. I'm not a critic, I just like movies. Anybody that knows me knows that it doesn't take much effort for me to go to the movies; I'm a RTF major (Radio, TV, Film). I enjoy going by myself as much as with others. However, since I began taking the Korean language course last week, I now have a new reason to go: To practice my reading with the Korean subtitles. Like I needed another reason to go to the movies...

Now that I've got 4 total hours of class time under my belt, I feel like I am qualified to speak on the subject. From what I'm told, the Korean language is very logical, and learning to read is easy. Supposedly, learning the grammar and speaking are the difficult parts. Obviously I'm at the reading stage right now. I've spent most of this week practicing the consonants and vowels that I've learned so far. One difficulty is that there are several characters that look like letters of the alphabet, but with totally different sounds. One example of this is "L", which has a "N" sound in Korea. Then there's a character that looks like a 7, but it has a "K" sound. It was hard at first to not see English letters when studying, but it's becoming easier. Also, the words read from left to right, just as in western languages, but many characters that are combined in a word are written from top to bottom. This can slow things down a bit when trying to sound out a word or phrase. For every word, there is usually one group of characters represented for each syllable or sound. So in the Solomon Kane movie poster at the top, there are three sounds - Sul, Lu and Mun; and two sounds combined to form Ke-Een. The English result sounds something like Sulumun Keen. Pretty cool.

So apart from proper names and other exceptions, the difficulty in learning to speak Korean is that knowing how to read a word is only the first step; the time consuming part is learning what the words mean. From here it just boils down to tons of memorization. I'm not even touching the grammar because I haven't learned any yet. The only thing I've inferred so far is that the subject comes first in a sentence. For example, "Have you eaten dinner?" may be phrased more like, "Dinner have you eaten?". I'm not an expert, so to any Koreans out there: Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I have class in an hour, so we'll see what they want to cram into my head tonight.

Speaking of class, I begin teaching my extra classes at school tomorrow. I had 22 classes when I started a few weeks ago. The principal has decided to bump me up to 28. They take place after school for the kids, but while I'm still on the clock; normally my office hours time (aka: Goof-off time). Three of the extra classes will be for the teachers and faculty, and the other three will be for 'advanced' students. Although the class is only available to 5th and 6th grade students, space was still limited, so I had to create an exam to test their listening, writing and speaking skills. Many students take private English lessons after school, but not every family can afford it. The importance of this class hit me when I realized that I was going to have to make the decision of who would get in and who wouldn't. What's worse is that this class is the only opportunity that some of these kids would have to be in an after-school English program like their peers. It didn't help that my co-teacher Sally told me to not make the exam too easy or too hard. Umm...ok. I guess she somehow forgot (again) that I've never taught before and have created exactly zero tests in my whole life. That being said, I think it was a pretty fair test. However, I was crushed during the written exam when one of the girls began to cry because she hadn't written anything for either of the essay questions. She's a bright student, but I found out that she didn't have the private lessons like many of the other kids, so her writing ability wasn't developed yet. There were a few similar cases. What's worse is that I couldn't console her because I didn't know how to say anything in Korean that would help. I felt miserable and useless. Sally stepped in and took care of her, but that experience made me realize that I want to work as hard as I can to make sure that the kids who are in the normal English class, especially the ones who tried but didn't make it into the extra class, have the best opportunity to learn during the time I have with them. It was a tough day for some of the kids and for me as well, but I'm excited to see where things go from here.