Skip to main content

An Honest Assessment of My Korean Language Progress

Okay, six months of 한국어학당 finished (20 weeks x 20 hours per week = 400 hours of instruction), so I figured I should self-assess my Korean progress.

First, the positives:

- I speak better Korean than most foreigners here, which isn't saying much, since the bar is embarrassingly low. That is, if you can properly order food, say hello, goodbye, thank you, and pronounce (and remember) Korean names properly, then you are already ahead of probably 95% of foreigners, and Koreans will call you a "genius". It's 2013, people. This is sad.
- I can get around Korea just fine. I have no trouble with daily life.
- I can have conversations in just Korean about various topics, sometimes for hours.
- I can read and write better than I can speak.
- Occasionally, I can express complex concepts by mashing together words I already know.

Now, the negatives:

- My Korean is nowhere near "natural". The word and grammar choices I make are decidedly strange, and I don't sound like a Korean when I speak.
- My pronunciation is decent, but not great. I can make myself understood perfectly well, but I still mess up certain sounds, especially distinguishing ㅅ from ㅆ, ㄱ from ㅋ, ㄷ from ㅌ, etc. I have trouble hearing the distinctions between these sounds, too, which is obviously not a coincidence.
- I am functionally illiterate. I often look at advertisements and come across multiple words I haven't seen before, often different enough that I can't just guess. The informational mailings from my apartment building and the town are incredibly difficult. Forget about the newspaper, magazines, novels, let alone subtitles.
- The gap in my basic Korean is embarrassingly large. Recently, I found myself able to discuss the exchange rate, but didn't know the term for "to wash your hair" (머리를 감다).

So what's the deal, here? Didn't I just spend six months at one of, if not the highest-rated Korean language institutes in the country? How come I'm not fluent?

Basically, I think Korean language instruction is broken. Some of the ways:

- We barely learn how to speak. No, seriously. Let that one sink in for a moment. Speaking is skipped in favor of reading, writing, and listening. Although mostly, all of this is skipped in favor of listening to the teacher talk. As a result, unsurprisingly, I can understand nearly 100% of lectures about learning Korean and Korean grammar, yet I didn't how to say "to wash your hair".

- When we do speak, it's with other students, so we spend nearly 100% of our time speaking incorrect Korean and reinforcing our mistakes. The teacher corrects us about 1% of the time. It's not their fault - they simply don't have the time to correct every mistake.

- Despite being able to understand close to 100% of what the teacher says in class, that translates to much, much less outside of class. The reason is that the teachers don't speak like normal Koreans inside class. They are trained to only use words that they know we've learned, and even more frustrating, they don't speak at a normal speed. The first day our teacher came in last semester, she asked how fast she should speak, and I voted for "as fast as possible". She chose "as slow as that drugged up kid after the dentist". Every now and then the teachers get excited and speak natural, fast Korean with phrases that are often used but never taught in textbooks. I take furious notes during those times. They often ask me why I'm taking notes for stuff that's not on the test.

- Speaking of the tests, they mostly don't test our actual Korean ability. It's not that hard to pick grammatical forms or words to fit into a sentence blank, but this IN NO WAY means you know how to use those words or grammatical structures. The writing section is perhaps the best test of language ability. The listening, not so much - on our final exam last term, the listening portion was recorded at an embarrassingly slow rate.

- The stuff we read in class in mind-numbingly boring. It's also often written in an awkward way. The goal is to pack as much new vocabulary into the readings as possible, and sometimes reinforce recently learned grammar patterns (a good thing). But mostly it's just insanely, want-to-gouge-my-eyes-out boring.

- Korean is mythologized, both in and out of class. We're constantly told how hard it is to learn. Koreans for the most part believe that foreigners, especially non-Asian foreigners, are incapable of ever speaking proper Korean. If your expectations are as such, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I still often encounter Koreans who refuse to allow their brain to understand me, despite most people having absolutely no trouble understanding my Korean.

I really liked some of my teachers. I even asked one why they teach the way they do, and she said that the students want to learn a "large quantity" of Korean. So there it is. Quantity over quality (yet our school brands itself as teaching "precise" Korean). Supposedly demanded by the market.

Anyway, the only times my spoken Korean has gotten better are when I actually speak Korean with Koreans outside of class. Same for my listening. My reading got better from reading song lyrics and comic books. My writing got better from writing Facebook posts in Korean, which require a lot of time spent poring over example sentences in the dictionary to try to figure out how to use certain words and grammar patterns (yep, you figured me out - those aren't naturally occurring fluent Korean thoughts floating around in there).

If I were to design a Korean language course, it would be strikingly different from the one I took:

- For starters, it would spend way more time on the basic stuff. There are word frequency lists for every language. It's the biggest bang for your buck to learn the most frequently-used words first.

- Same for grammar patterns. And speaking of grammar patterns, I would teach them in context rather than piecemeal. We learned like ten different forms of indirect speech (-는다고 ...), and every damn time we went through "If the verb stem has a 받침, then it's -는다고, otherwise it's -ㄴ다고". Seriously, when you're speaking, you don't have time to think of these rules. Nor do you have time to think of grammar. You just speak. If you're thinking about 받침s, you're doing it wrong. If you hear "한다고" enough times, you will never accidentally say "하는다고". Cause it sounds off.

- I would use real material for reading rather than boring-ass contrived crap meant to teach us about the virtues of 떡 and how to properly celebrate a 돌잔치. Comic books, novels, songs, etc. Real stuff written by real Koreans, not academic educators.

- Listening would only use real material too. Korean dramas, movies, even television commercials (as long as they don't have Psy).

- I would teach speaking. This would involve actually speaking. This one seems pretty obvious.

Well, that's it for now. I'm exploring building something for myself to help accelerate my own Korean study. Stay tuned.

Comments

  1. So my question to you... you were in China, Japan, and Korea. Exposed to all three languages within your field.

    So... why Korean? (and why Korea. Why Shanghai or Tokyo etc)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I originally really wanted to move to Tokyo, but it was too expensive, seemed impossible to get a visa, and seemed like a bad place if I ever wanted to open an office there. I never want to live in China again. Korea is in between China and Japan on a number of dimensions, and things move faster than Japan. Unfortunately, it turns out it's also extremely hostile to foreign entrepreneurs. Would absolutely love to come back to Japan some day.

      As far as the languages go, I like all three for different reasons, but my Japanese is embarrassingly bad. I would love to properly learn Japanese, sooner rather than later.

      Delete
  2. Nice idea having a blog! Here's a polyglot who's been learning korean recently on his own: http://www.mezzoguild.com/
    파이팅!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

영어가 모국어인 사람들은 왜 한국어를 배우기가 어려운 이유

이 포스트는 내 처음 한국어로 블로그 포스트인데, 한국어에 대하니까 잘 어울린다. =) 자, 시작합시다! 왜 외국사람에게 한국어를 배우기가 어렵다? 난 한국어를 배우고 있는 사람이라서 이 문제에 대해 많이 생각하고 있었다. 여러가지 이유가 있는데 오늘 몇 이유만 논할 것이다. 1. 분명히 한국어 문법은 영어에 비해 너무 많이 다른다. 영어는 “오른쪽으로 분지(分枝)의 언어"라고 하는데 한국어는 “왼쪽으로 분지의 언어"이다. 뜻이 무엇이나요? 예를 보면 이해할 수 있을 것이다. 간단한 문장만 말하면 (외국어를 말하는 남들은 간단한 문장의 수준을 지낼 수가 약간 드물다), 간단한 걸 기억해야 돼: 영어는 “SVO”인데 한국어는 “SOV”이다. “I’m going to school”라고 한국어로는 “저는 학교에 가요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I’m school to go”이다. 두 언어 다르는 게 목적어와 동사의 곳을 교환해야 한다. 별로 어렵지 않다. 하지만, 조금 더 어렵게 만들자. “I went to the restaurant that we ate at last week.” 한국어로는 “전 우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당에 또 갔어요"라고 말한다. 영어로 똑바로 번역하면 “I we last week went to restaurant to again went”말이다. 한국어가 왼쪽으로 분지 언어라서 문장 중에 왼쪽으로 확대한다! 이렇게 좀 더 쉽게 볼 수 있다: “전 (우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당)에 또 갔어요”. 주제가 “전"이고 동사가 “갔다"이고 목적어가 “우리 지난 주에 갔던 식당"이다. 영어 문장은 오른쪽으로 확대한다: I (S) went (V) to (the restaurant (that we went to (last week))) (O). 그래서 두 숙어 문장 만들고 싶으면 생각속에서도 순서를 변해야 된다. 2. 첫 째 점이니까 다른 사람을 자기 말을 아라들게 하고 싶으면, 충분히

10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else

Recently this article about 10 things that South Korea does better than anywhere else  has been making the rounds on social media, but when I first read it, I couldn't tell if it was sincere or satire. A few of the items on the list are not very positive, such as "overworking" and "using credit cards". So, I thought I would try to put together a better list. Here are 10 other things South Korea does better than anywhere else: 1) Small side dishes, a.k.a. " banchan " (반찬) Banchan are by far my favorite aspect of Korean cuisine. Rather than the "appetizer and main dish" approach of the West, a Korean meal is essentially built around small dishes. Even a 5,000 won (about $5 USD) meal at a mall food court will come with two to four banchan in addition to the "main", and often people will actually choose restaurants based  on the banchan (e.g., seolleongtang , or beef bone broth soup, places tend to have the tastiest kimchi). Ther

The King's Speech (and me)

Tonight, I finally gathered the courage to watch The King's Speech . Why did I need courage to watch a movie, you might ask? The reason is both simple and intricately complex: I'm a stutterer (Edit: person who stutters; "stutterer" is not who I am, but something that I do from time to time), and I have been for as long as I remember. Well, there it is - I've said it. To be fair, I actually don't remember stuttering when I was little. My first very distinct memory of stuttering was sometime in seventh grade, when I had trouble saying "nosotros" (we/us) in Spanish class. But I also remember knowing I was going to have trouble saying it, because we were going around the room, and I counted ahead to see what I was going to have to say. Which means by that point I was already stuttering. When did it start? That's a question for another day. So why am I publicizing this fact now? First, I'm in the midst of a lifelong attempt to "cure&quo