Korea According to Margaret

Teaching Approaches and Methodologies - Final Reflections

2011-04-24T23:56:00.000-07:00

By now I have experienced being the recipient of quite a few different teaching approaches and methodologies, and I have already written quite a few entries on the plusses and minuses of different ones.

I am reinforced in my conclusion that almost any methodology can work if the teacher is committed to it and the student is motivated.

I did not find any methodology that seemed particularly better than what I already generally do (!) so I guess there won't be big changes in my methodology.

But there are already changes in some of the ways I relate to students. For example:

When I give an assignment or a test or ask a student to perform in class, I try to be more conscious of how the student may be feeling, and am more likely to take the feeling into account. I try to offer more choice. I am more ready to change something that seems to make students uncomfortable. I am more patient with slowness and error.

Rather than lecture students on how they should study or practice, I rely more on the students to share what they have found useful and effective with each other. I try to give students more time to talk to each other in pairs and groups, and don't worry so much that I can't be on top of each group to make sure they are doing what I want.

I don't rely on high-stakes tests so much. I don't call tests "midterms" and "finals" or place so much importance on them. I try to give students several chances to show what they can do and make sure there are other ways besides single tests (portfolio, makeup test, alternate assignment) to find out if the student knows the material and has the needed skills.

For stressful assignments like speeches and class presentations, I try to offer alternatives to coming in front of the class. Students can videotape, or present to a small group, or present just to the teacher or even do an alternative assignment. I found that if a student can control whether or not to speak, and how long to speak, and whether to sit or stand, and so on, the student is much more likely to choose to do the assignment and do it well.

I try to schedule more time for student practice, and less time for teacher lecture.

All of these are things that I wanted more of as a student. They seem like obvious things, but they are easy for a teacher to forget. Too much stress and too much arbitrary control by the teacher can hurt a student's internal motivation. Finding ways to foster that inner motivation, to help students feel that they have the power to learn and succeed within themselves. are among the best things a teacher can do. I have learned this more powerfully through my experience of being a student.

Final Entries on the Korean Experience

2011-04-22T22:43:00.000-07:00

All is not quite over yet with this blog.

Once I got back to full-time teaching at San Jose City College last fall, I let this blog drop. I got busy with work, and I was still handling affairs and adjusting psychologically to my husband's death in July. I never finished writing up my final reflections and conclusions.

But I must! That is a requirement of my sabbatical project.

I CAN NO LONGER PUT THAT OFF.

So there will be a few more entries coming to include my final reflections on my Korean experience. I'll bet you can't wait!

Immersion Activities in the US - Final Reflections

2011-04-22T18:44:00.000-07:00

On returning to California in the spring, with no real prospect of returning to Korea, I submitted an alternate plan in which I would seek immersion activities right here in the Bay Area. There is a huge Korean population in Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara now; a drive down El Camino Boulevard reveals many bill boards and signs advertising restaurants and car shops and all kinds of businesses in Korean.

So I set out to see what I could find to do.

Here are the activities I eventually logged:

150 hours: Doing homework for courses
100 hours: Watching Korean dramas and movies
5 hours: Learning Korean song lyrics
1 hour: Conversing with local Korean shop keepers
10 hours: Speaking in Korean with Korean conversation partners
5 hours: Writing letters in Korean to friends in Korea
5 hours: Reading Korean books, newspapers, etc
5 hours: Using Korea while traveling during trip to Korea in March

It is obvious that most of the hours were spent by myself, in the privacy of my room - doing homework and watching dramas and movies over the Internet, writing letters, and reading - not really the type of immersion I had envisioned, and certainly not what I would have had in Korea. Except for my week traveling in Korea, I only spent a little time out in the Korean community - although even one total hour of conversation with local shop keepers meant quite a few visits to Korean markets and restaurants.

My best practice was with the Korean conversation partners I met at De Anza College; thanks to those meetings, I feel I was able to progress a bit in conversation.

So this part was not as successful as I would have liked. Undoubtedly the unexpectedness of having to do this part of my immersion practice in the US and dealing with a difficult family situation played a role. Life changes things. At least I know some things that I wouldn't have known had I stayed in Korea. I have made local contacts and know where to find people and where to go to practice if and when I have the inclination. I think this bodes well for future practice and maintenance of the language.

Continuting Relationships with Koreans - Final Reflections

2011-04-22T18:05:00.000-07:00

This spring I have 2 Korean students - a brother and a sister - staying at my house. The sister was one of my Korean language partners in Seoul; I visited her hometown while I was in Korea and visited her home and met her mother. Now she is studying at De Anza College, and her brother is studying at a private language school near here. They are wonderful, friendly, talented, smart, ambitious young people, and even when they go back to Korea, my relationship with them is one I trust will endure.

The professor that I met at Ewha University - the one who introduced me to the students who became my language partners - spends half the year in Seoul and half the year in California, when she returns to stay with her husband in their home in Morgan Hill. She was the main person who helped me wrap up my affairs during my short return trip to Seoul in April - she translated for the landlord, went with me to the bank, etc.. Last summer she brought a group of her Korean students to the Bay Area for a week-long field trip and I helped her with some of the planning. She has just returned from her last 5-month stay in Seoul, and we already have plans to get together next Saturday. Since Myunghee spends so much time in the US and we can easily get together, that is another relationship that I believe will endure.

I still correspond with a few others I met in Korea, but not often, as it takes me so long to compose an email in Korean. Time will tell if I ever see them again.

Here in the Bay Area I still meet with 2 of the students who were my language partners while I was studying at De Anza last spring. We meet on campus or at a coffee shop and continue our practice with English and Korean.

I still feel connected to my teachers and fellow students at Adroit College. Even though I haven't taken classes there for a while, I follow them on Facebook, and I plan to return for a class this summer.

I have not been able to keep up with all the people who showed an interest in maintaining contact with me. I wasn't in Korea long enough to know which relationships would deepen, and I ended up blessed with more potential but still superficial relationships than I could handle. I decided to nurture a few relationships and let the rest go for the time being. If we visit each others' countries in the future, we may well look each other up, and then we'll see what ensues.

I believe that it is through these relationships that my interest in Korea and the Korean language will continue to grow, and ideas for more interaction with Koreans, personally and perhaps even in academic partnerships or projects at our colleges, may emerge.

Korean Literature - Final Reflections

2011-04-22T16:30:00.000-07:00

In her memoir The Language of Blood American-raised Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka reflects on the drama of what happened in her own Korean family and the events leading to her being left in an orphanage at the age of six months. She writes, "Almost every Korean family has such a story. The characters are always the same: starvation, lost family members, bitter cold, poverty, men unable to support their families, drunkenness, disappointment, despair."

I want to respond, "Oh, how true, how true!" I have no such family, no such experience - so how would I know?

I've read modern Korean literature!

By now I've read about 15 Korean novels and collections of short stories and novellas written by Korean authors and translated into English. I've only written about one of them so far: The Wings by Yi Sang on March 20. I had intended to write more, much more, but now it is summary time, and I must resign myself to the fact that it is too late. I will do my best to keep it short.

I was able to choose these books to read thanks to Charles Montgomery, former employee of San Jose Evergreen community College District, good friend in Korea, and guide par excellence to modern Korean literature in translation. For anyone interested in the subject, please ignore anything else I might write and go immediately to Charles's Korean Translated Literature (ktlit) website.

As Charles has often pointed out, the themes of most of the modern works of translated fiction relate to division, abandonment, betrayal, poverty, loss. Clearly these are writers' responses to the traumatic events of modern Korean history - colonization by Japan, the Korean War, the division of the country, the repression of the early governments of South Korea. In these stories characters mourn for or seek relatives or comrades lost during the war, deal with haunting memories from these events, struggle to survive desperate poverty, seek ways to escape situations they cannot cope with, and so on. It often seems that there is no other theme! So one has to know something about modern Korean history to grasp much that is in these books. (But reciprocally, the books also provide a way to learn more about the history from the inside of people's lives and feel the depth of its impact. Each successive book reveals a little bit more.)

There are other difficulties in reading these books. I have already written about the problem of reading a translated work and not being able to trust the translation. Another is being an outsider to the culture, not understanding that a look, or a word, or a word unspoken, or a gesture, or an argument, or a joke, or bottle of soju, or a vacant stare, or a statue of Buddha, or a chicken, or an apparition in the night, or the way a name is written, or a red dress, or so many things may have a meaning to Koreans that is missed or misunderstood by the uninitiated. That must be the case! That must be why so much in these books... often doesn't seem to make sense!

Actually the very first novel I read in Korea wasn't written by a Korean at all, but by Chaim Potok. Chaim Potok!?! Yes, he wrote a book, titled I am the Clay, about an elderly childless Korean couple who are among the thousands of poverty-stricken refugees fleeing the invading North Korean army during the Korean War. Even then I wondered, where did HE get the chutzpah to imagine what it was like to be a Korean during the Korean War?? He was so good at writing about what he knew - I had sometimes had my students read his book The Chosen, about young Jewish men growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in similar circumstance to how he had grown up, and even shared with my students Potok's comments about the value of writing about "what you know," and the way he admired James Joyce's choice to write primarily about Dublin. I then learned he had been in Korea for a short time during the Korean War as a chaplain, and he had written a novel about that too. So I read that book, but got no clue from it how he got himself into the minds and hearts of Korean refugees.

Then I read the books by Korean authors. I sensed that most of these books were better than Potok's. But - I never understood the characters in the way I understood the characters in Potok's book.

And then I figured it out. Potok's characters thought and acted like Americans do. Oh, he pretended they were Korean, with their pagan beliefs and ability to dog meat and the like, but their motivations, their reactions, their feelings all seemed perfectly logical, perfectly connected to what was going on around them - in a familiar Western way.

Not so with Korean books. Characters act - and I can't understand why. A character gets angry, or restless, and I can't see why. Something happens to a character, and I may think the character would logically be astonished, say, but then I read that the character is "abashed" or "suspicious." In The Gray Snowman, a messenger who has news of the fate of the main character's comrades in an antigovernment protest movement shows up. We've already been told of the "utter gloom" of the messenger and the "spirit of deep trust" that has emerged between them. Then "From her bag she handed me a thin, sealed envelope with worn edges. Instead of opening it in her presence I impulsively tucked it in my pants pocket and hurried out to the kitchen. The arrival of news, so long in coming, had made me giddy." Giddy?!? I don't get how the characters are seeing and reacting to the world.

Yet another difficulty is getting used to what seems an exaggerated passivity of the characters. Strange and often terrible things happen to these characters; they tend to be mystified by what happens to them, haunted by half-remembered past events, unsure of what is "real"; they choose actions more to see what will happen than to achieve something specific; they often act capriciously, without apparent motivation or understanding of why. In The Cry of the Magpies, the main character, a soldier having returned from terrible battles in the Korean War, beholds this recurring chain of events: magpies start to caw in the trees nearby, his mother starts coughing uncontrollably, and he starts wanting to kill his mother. "One more strange thing was that as soon as my mother's coughing stopped and I could regain some calm, I began to have doubts about what had just taken place. Did it really happen or was it only my imagination? Could it be that I had hallucinated?... Meanwhile the cawing and coughing went on and I usually succeeded in running out of the room before the thing I so dreaded could have any chance of happening... The turmoil in me, however, did not easily subside merely with running away... My body kept on trembling from this unbearable tension and extreme stress. The one consolation in suffering outside rather than inside was that I now did not have to worry about strangling her. Instead I unleashed my pent up fury on our dog, Blackie, whom I kicked and beat in a total frenzy." There may be all kinds of psychological or symbolic meaning here - but I find it hard to figure out. How did the tension and stress turn into fury? Who or what is he furious at? And Blackie?? Who kicks their own dog that they have named "Blackie" no matter how furious they are? Well, these musings are part of both the frustration and fun of reading Korean Lit.

Just for the record, here is a list of most of the books I read. Some books actually contain the title story and one or two other stories as well.

Yi Sang The Wings

Yi Mun-yol An appointment with my Brother

Twofold Song

Kim Dong-Ni The Cry of the Magpies

Ch'oe Yun The Last of Hanako

Lee Kyun-Young The Other Side of Dark Remembrance

Kim Yu Jeong The Camellias

Seo Giwon The Ma Rok Biographies

Kim Young-Ha I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Your Republic is Calling You

Lee Dong-ha Toy City

Yi Chong-jun The Snowy Road

Hwang Sok-Yong The Guest

Land of Exile - Contemporary Korean Fiction (An anthology)

Amazingly, 2 novels, Your Republic is Calling You and one I have not read yet, Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-Sook, are now being sold, even featured, at big US bookstores like Barnes and Noble. These books have themes a little more modern, a little more universal, a little more appealing to American audiences. I do believe Charles himself has had some influence in getting this literature selected and promoted and into the American market.

I wanted to find a Korean book that I could recommend to my book club, a book I thought the group would enjoy discussing. With the difficulties mentioned I haven't found quite the right book yet in the ones I've read, but who knows - maybe Please Look After Mom (my next read) will be the one. If not, it seems that more works with an appeal to western readers are being written and translated and promoted. I will keep reading!

Immersion - Final Reflections

2011-04-22T09:04:00.001-07:00

I was inspired by the idea of immersion years ago when I saw what was accomplished by a young Chinese student of mine. I was teaching an advanced composition course (ESL 91) and the student had been placed into a low intermediate class (ESL 332). He refused to accept his placement and by student insistence was allowed to enroll in my composition course.

He put into practice what Kato Lomb (see Aug 16 entry) suggested determined learners do: he signed up for a course far above his actual ability.

How did he do? He turned out to be the only student to receive an "A" in that course that semester.

Here's what he did:

He refused to speak Chinese during the day. He avoided his Chinese classmates. He stayed at school, studying in the library or participating in campus activities, away from his Chinese family, all day every day. He spent every day immersed in English.
He wrote an essay in English every single day.
He came to every single office hour I had to talk about his essays.
He walked around with an ever-present smile on his face, always seeming happy and friendly, endlessly seeking chances for interaction with native speakers.

This was self-imposed immersion. It worked extremely well for him.

Of course, he was unique (at our college at least) in that he didn't have to work or take care of a family, and as a newcomer he didn't have relationships with Chinese friends that he needed to maintain. He had the luxury to spend all day doing nothing but learn English.

I, too, would be in Korea with no work or family or relationship responsibilities, with the same luxury. What a chance for me to try out immersion.

In the end I was not as dedicated or as successful as my Chinese student, but I did do more than the minimum 10 hours a week of immersion activities I had imposed upon myself for the sabbatical, I did make progress, and I did come up with some conclusions about immersion:

The time spent in immersion activities - in studying and listening and reading and conversing and practicing in every way we can think of - is when the real language learning takes place - even more than in the classroom. Of course, if the class is conducted completely in the target language, as it was at the Yonsei Korean Language Institute, that is immersion too, but even that is not as good as practicing out in the real world or at home with one's own material at one's own pace. In the class the teacher is in control, and the student's whole attention is focused on pleasing the teacher and meeting her expectations. Outside of class, trying to apply what was learned, the learning feels more personal and memorable. As teachers, we should remember that the work we assign (or inspire!) students to do on their own outside of class is probably more important than anything we say or do in class. It is hard for teachers to release control; we think that as long as we are explaining or illustrating language, we ensure student learning in a way we can't when we release students to learn or practice on their own. We don't know what students are learning out on their own - but the students do, and that's what really counts.

Finding good immersion activities as a beginner in the language is not that easy! If only I could learn as a baby does, with someone beside me all the time to name the things that I see around me, and repeat those names with exaggerated pronunciation and intonation, and hug me every time I say something right, or cute or interesting. And everything I tried to say would be interesting to that loving person! Alas, such is not to be found. As a beginner, I found it is somewhat difficult to find and sustain immersion opportunities. Finding someone willing to converse is hard. Keeping a conversation going for a long period of time is hard. Effective listening and reading can only be done with simplified materials or extensive use of subtitles and dictionaries, which waters down the "immersion" aspect (not using the native language). Fatigue sets in more quickly as the need to concentrate is so intense at the beginning stages. I think I could not succeed in my immersion practice as well as the Chinese student in part because my Korean was so much more elementary than his English. With that in mind...

How valuable a language lab would have been for me!! How lucky the ESL students at San Jose City College are! Yonsei Korean Language Institute does not have a language lab. De Anza College does not have a Korean language lab. Adroit College does not have a language lab. There were audio CDs to go with our textbooks at all these schools, which certainly helped, but no aids beyond that. Few teacher office hours. No tutors. No workshops. No supplementary software. No video programs. No conversation groups. I have a new appreciation for what our ESL language lab at SJCC offers students, especially beginning students who have limited opportunities for immersion in the "real world." As I return to teaching at SJCC, I will certainly be emphasizing the extensive opportunities students have for practice in our ESL lab.

The best immersion activities are those chosen by the students themselves. I think this is something that we teachers in some ways have to resign ourselves to. We cannot control everything in our students' learning. Even though we know the value of immersion activities, we cannot "force" good immersion activities onto students. So much of the success of language learning comes from the students' own internal motivation and analysis of what they need and want to do with the language. A teacher might, for example, design an assignment where students call a movie theater to get information about movie show times. A real-life "immersion" activity. What a great assignment for a student who will really go and see a movie. But for the student with no interest in seeing movies, this activity will be much less memorable and useful. How about assigning students a choice of what business to call? Or a choice to either call or visit a business? Give students a chance to make the assignment as relevant as possible. This again shows the value of the SJCC language lab program, where students are free to choose their activities from among a suggested list. There is currently pressure at the college to require a specific curriculum for each lab course. Our language lab coordinator is resisting this, and I support her. It is fine to have a suggested curriculum, perhaps the best choice for the unmotivated and uninspired student, but once we make it required, and take away choice, we will be limiting the stronger language learners.

Being required to document immersion activities is not very productive. It is good to think consciously of one's learning activities and reflect on what is useful and not. It is even useful to put this in writing; that forces the thought process to take place. But being required to record every immersion activity, as I have required my students to do in the past and required myself to do for this sabbatical project, has proven to me to be unpleasant overkill. When I required immersion logs from my previous students, it was sometimes like pulling teeth, and now I know why. The effort to remember and record activities each day becomes repetitious and onerous and does not in itself seem to contribute to learning. Often I suspected my students wrote down immersion activities that they never did - or did immersion activities that they never wrote down, as I often did. Students who want to immerse will do it regardless of the log, and students who don't or can't won't (but can easily fabricate a log). In teaching I suspect that indirect suggestion rather than direct assignment is a better way to inspire immersion. Make suggestions, have students brainstorm and share experiences, give students time in the lab - and then, through writing or class discussion, have students assess for themselves what they got out of it - that is enough. I won't be assigning immersion logs any more.

The best immersion activity I had, both in Korea and in the US, was conversing with a Korean-speaking partner. Through connections I made at Ewha University, the neighboring school to Yonsei University in Seoul, I found 5 different Korean students who agreed to partner with me. Back at De Anza College, I joined Cross Cultural Partners, a program pairing up students who wanted to practice each others' native language, and was paired with 4 different Korean students At both schools, I met with a different student each day of the week. In our sessions we usually spent about 30 minutes using English and 30 minutes using Korean. Wow - 30 minutes using only Korean in a conversation. These conversations represented the main times I felt successful in using the language. My partners and I got used to each other; we took time to explain and reexplain and draw pictures and laugh and drink coffee together; we shared pictures and gave gifts to each other; we used the target language to actually communicate. At SJCC, we currently have no such partnership program. I wonder - could we? I wonder if we could find ways to get native English-speaking students to partner with our ESL students, especially the beginning ones who so desperately need this practice? I had not thought of pursuing such a project before I started the sabbatical, but now... I wonder!

In the end, I only got to stay in Korea for 4 months, so I missed out on the chance for extensive immersion experiences in Korea when my language skills got a little better. But I did pursue opportunities here in the San Jose area. That will be the subject of the next entry.

Learning and Age - Final Reflections

2011-04-22T08:07:00.000-07:00

I started my study at Yonsei University at age 61. Out of hundreds of students, there were only a handful of us older students. There were precisely 3 older American students, and of course I was drawn to them and got to know their stories.

One, a man about my age, was an English teacher who had been in Korea for many years and had tried to learn Korean at the Yonsei Korean Language Institute before but had given up. He was repeating level 1 again - and failing miserably. He said that during the listening midterm, he could only catch 1 word! He simply could not grasp spoken Korean. He quit again before the end of the term.

The other, Susan, maybe 45 or 50, was doing well in level 2. But imagine - she had been married to a Korean for many years. She and her husband actually lived in Japan, and she said she and her family spoke Japanese there. Now that her kids were grown, she decided to come to Korea to finally learn her husband's language and show her children how much she valued that part of their heritage. She was succeeding at level 2 and would be advancing to level 3.

Susan's relative success may be due to her relatively younger brain or previous exposure to Korean through her husband, but how much greater was the difference in her attitude. Susan clearly loved Korean people and Korean culture, and she knew her learning Korean would mean something precious to her family. The man showed no such love: he judged Koreans by American standards and often found them wanting. He blamed the Korean language, Korean teachers, Korean culture, for his failure to learn. (How could anyone learn such a crazy language in this crazy environment!)

I do think older learners tend to have a harder time, but based on my personal experience and observation, I would break down the reasons something like this:

slower brain (!) - 10%

attitude and circumstances - 90%

Here are a few things I think interfere with older learners' language learning:

Less ability to accept a new culture

We older learners tend to be pretty set in our values. We are no longer experimenting with possibilities of how to live our lives, and are less interested in trying things out. We are more choosey about what we will and won't accept in the new culture. For me, it was very different from when I was younger, and wanted to try out EVERYTHING in the new culture, without judgment. Culture and language go together: food and the way we talk about food, rules of social interaction and how we talk socially, how we express emotion and how we talk about emotions, and so on, so resisting something in the culture can affect our receptivity to the language in some ways.

In Korea, one obvious difficulty I had was with what is called "honorific" language and forms of address. Most of the students at Yonsei are in their teens and twenties, and we were taught mainly the style of language used to speak to someone older. Outside of class, I was often reluctant to start a conversation with a Korean because I didn't have experience in addressing someone younger - or even my own age (and I rarely talked to anyone older!). In addressing me, sometimes Koreans called me the equivalent of "ma'am," and sometimes they called me "grandmother." Grandmother! That was supposed to be honorific? In my younger years I would have been fascinated with these different ways of addressing people and so excited about trying out the different forms of address with different people. But as an older learner I struggled with this aspect of Korean culture and language and its threat to my sense of self and deeply-held values about how people should relate. It affected my comfort and willingness to speak.

Less urgency to learn the new language

For most older learners, learning a new language does not represent the opportunities it does to young people. Older learners will not likely be starting new careers or establishing new significant lifetime relationships. They can already predict the circumstances in which they will, or will not, be using the new language. Knowing a new language may enhance their later years, but it is not as likely to deeply change them. There is not the same sense of excitement and hope in what the new language will bring. Thus the motivation required for deep and intensive study may not be as present for older learners.

Fewer opportunities for significant encounters with Koreans

In my Dec. 7 entry, I wrote about this difference. Young people all over the world over want to meet each other. They organize parties, mixers, events. Young men and women find each other, spend hours talking and getting to know each other, as I remember doing as a young single student and teacher living abroad. That's how I used to practice so much. Now I remember! That's how I got introduced into families. That's how I always had someone from the target culture to venture out with. That's how I came to feel so at ease. In Korea I did get to know a number of Koreans, and did things with them, but sporadically. I had no Korean friend that I saw on a regular basis, someone that I could call up any time, someone that I shared my daily life with, and my language skills remained so poor that I never got to feeling at ease with anyone. I'm sure that with more time I might have deepened some of those relationships - I was only there 4 months! - but the time and effort involved would certainly be greater for the older me than for the younger me!

But - how great for older folks to learn a new language!

Most of us fear various changes as we get older: becoming rigid and inflexible, losing our brain power, becoming bored and unexcited about life's opportunities, becoming disconnected to mainstream modern life, losing touch with the affairs of the broader world, to name a few.

Studying a new language can be an great antidote for all of that!

Though we are not as flexible as when we were young, we're probably a lot more flexible than we would be without facing the challenges of learning a new language. As we teachers receive older learners in our classes, as we perhaps lose patience with them when their learning seems slow, or when they apologize for their inability to "remember anything anymore," or when we feel they are taking the place of a younger student who could benefit more, or when we wonder why they don't just stay home and relax... I hope we can also celebrate their determination to keep learning and respect their special courage to study a new language at an older age. I personally have lots more respect!

Travel - Final Reflections

2011-01-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

My first goal was to establish a daily life in one place, Seoul. Travel was an "extra," meant to contrast that experience, and give a different look at the culture and add some background to the main experience of living in Seoul.

Fortunately, with my brother and sister-in-law, I was able to take a short trip around the country, most of which has already been described. Some final reflections about the trip follow.

First - the negative.

The smog.

During the weeks of June that we traveled, the entire country was shrouded in gray haze and smog. Of course, it was worse in the cities, really heavy in Busan, but even in the middle of the country, the smoggy haze was always there. As we traveled through areas of fabled beauty, I pitied the loss of beauty in the air, one of the evident prices of rapid industrialization of the past quarter century.

My Korean

Even after all my study, I found I really could not negotiate even the basics of booking rooms and asking directions with any facility at all. There are pat phrases to use, of course, but it was so easy to forget them (!) - and besides, the proprietors did not know which pat phrases were in Korean Book 1 - and would use different phrases! I could have been more prepared, I should have studied and memorized more... the remorse of the language learner. I shoulda, I coulda...

Greater Feeling of Separateness

That feeling of being new, of not fitting in - that feeling was stronger for me throughout the trip. Of course, we did many activities - hiking, taking boat rides, swimming in the ocean, etc. - but we did these as tourists do, for our American enjoyment. It was great fun - but not always with a sense of deepening participation in Korean life.

The Positive

Feeling of Appreciation for the "one-day excursion"

When we did travel with Koreans, we often observed groups of Koreans out traveling together. These folks were clearly out for a good time; they would chatter and laugh and bring out snacks and just really seem to enjoy themselves. With packs but not suitcases, they usually seemed to be on day excursions. In Korean dramas, the good wholesome families would often take day excursions - in fact, it was a virtue to skip out on whatever daily responsibilities people had to do that day and take a day to go off somewhere and have fun - go fishing, go hiking, have a picnic, go off to an island... not for a long trip, but for a day.

Feeling for Korean "roots."

Pre-Seoul, non-Seoul Korea... older, ancient-seeming sometimes, another world I was barely able to glimpse, but a world that is most likely still in the hearts of many Seoulites. Not so glossy - a world of earthiness, a world that did not so easily slough off the pain of the 20th century, a world where ancestors are still honored and traditions still observed and old ways remembered, a world Seoulites return to on special occasions. This I enjoyed imagining as I observed village after village.

Feeling for Places in Literature

Much of the Korean literature I have read is set in places other than Seoul. There are stories of farmers and villagers; there are stories of wanderers; there are many stories of characters uprooted from one place and landing, and often struggling, in another. So travel helps to make the idea of some of those places and stories more vivid, more real - sometimes more wrenching.

Feeling for Terrain and Its Effect on Korean History and Sense of Identity

Koreans are known for being proud of their culture and heritage; they are proud that, despite the powerful dominance of China and later Japan, they have maintained their separate language and culture. As I travel around Korea, I am struck with how really small it is, how quickly one passes over mountains and through valleys and over to oceans. It really is amazing that that little peninsula has retained its separateness and uniqueness over the centuries. How precious each bit of land, each native inhabitant, each word of the language, each historical site must be. Sometimes foreigners feel excluded from "real" Korean society; they feel that Koreans will never really accept them, never really consider them their equal. Maybe travel helps build sympathy and understanding for the view that some Koreans have of their specialness.

Well, those are a couple of reflections. A week of travel was certainly not long enough.

Sense of History in Gyeongju

2010-08-29T18:35:00.000-07:00

Pre-20th century Korean history, at least as I've seen it represented in Korean dramas and museums, seems to represent for many Koreans a time of glory, a time when Korea was unconquered and bold and at a cultural high. In the dramas I have seen depicted over and over in highly positive ways values of reverence for nature, service to country, fierce loyalty to a superior, deep ties to family ancestry and descendents, lifelong friendships, love of art and architecture and the spiritual and physical properties of food and drink, clearly defined social roles, physical prowess for men and soft poise for women, carefully enacted rituals, the nobility of sacrifice, and so on. Even in Seoul, and all around, the preserved and restored palaces and temples and traditional villages and houses and historical reenactments in traditional costume seem revered and loved.

So I wanted to visit Gyeongju. This historic city is known as the "museum without walls," and many Koreans told me I should visit it. It seems most Koreans I talked to had been there, even if it was long ago on a school field trip. In Gyeongju there are numerous temples, tombs, monuments and the like dating from the time Gyeongju was the capital of the Shilla Kingdom, which for a time during the 7th-9th centuries AD ruled much of southern Korea.

And so we went and saw lots of things like these large numbers of ancient royal tombs:

And this particularly famous and revered Buddhist temple, Bulguksa (now on the UNESCO World Heritage List):

I now see why most of the pictures of Bulguksa you see in the tourist brochures are taken from the left side. Anyway, if you would like to see some really nice pictures of Bulguksa without a dominating sign that says "TOILET," just google it!

And these turn out to be the only pictures I took in Gyeongju. But maybe that's appropriate. Of course, not being Korean, I don't know what it really feels like, but there must be a sense of enormous separation between that history and life today. Unlike American history, where today's government is still a continuation of that formed at the beginning of its national history, this seems, in practice if not in feeling, a broken and abandoned history, remembered nostalgically, imagined, mourned perhaps, but left behind, with little that seems applicable to today's world.

But I'm a foreigner looking in. I appreciate the professionals who restore the buildings and take the beautiful pictures and perform the traditional arts and wear the traditional costumes and create these historical scenes and provide a glimpse of what life was like back then. And I'll continue to watch the dramas and enjoy spending some time imagining life in this ancient Korean world.

For a really nice article on the sights of Gyeongju, see SJCC's own Charles Montgomery's article, printed in 10 Magazine - an English-language magazine published in Korea. You'll notice that Charles took his picture of Bulguksa from the left.

My Korean Classes are Done!

2010-08-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

Wow! I have completed all the study required for my sabbatical.

This picture was taken at Adroit College on Saturday night, Aug. 21. I have just given my final presentation, in which I showed a few pages from my blog (visible on the screen in the back.) In this picture I am receiving my certificate for having completed the Intermediate Course.

It's been fun. Really really fun!

"Hometown," Ideas of Travel and Lake Chungju

2010-08-18T04:55:00.000-07:00

In 1945, at the close of WWII, Seoul's population was less than 1 million. It's now over 10 million. So many Koreans during the past half-century have left their "hometown" and moved to Seoul.

I was in Seoul during "Chuseok," a 3-day Korean holiday in October something like our Thanksgiving. Many many Seoulites return to their "hometown" during that time. I stayed in Seoul, and it became noticeably less crowded that weekend.

The Korean word for "hometown" was one of the first words we learned in our Korean class. In dialogues, people were always asking each other about their "hometown." Americans sometimes had trouble with the question. We usually picked the town where we happened to live in the US, but for most of us, that was not the place where we "originated," where our ancestors are buried. But that seems to be what it is for Koreans. And when they visit their hometown, they do indeed, it seems, even today, visit the ancestors' graves and perform some acts of respect and remembrance.

And it's easy for Koreans to get to their hometown because the country is small. There are no sleeping cars on regular Korean trains. There is no need for any. It just takes a few hours to cross the whole country by train.

And Koreans do have places they seem to love to visit besides their hometowns. Especially mountains! And beaches. And Jeju Island, the most famous tourist island, known as the "Hawaii" of Korea (I unfortunately did not make it there.) I think every Korean I had talked to had been to Jeju Island. It seems even school kids take school trips to Jeju Island.

But most of them I talked to had never visited, and didn't seem to know much about, Lake Chungju. It's true that it's but a man-made lake, but on a map it appears to be the largest lake in all of Korea, smack dab in the center of the country. As American travelers, we tend to read things like the Lonely Planet guide to Korea, which says: "The two-hour, 52 km boat ride along the large articicial lake from Danyang to Chungju is a highlight, with constantly changing scenery that on misty days looks like a sequence of Joseon-era landscape paintings" and calls it "Korea's most scenic waterway trip." So we took the trip.

But I didn't meet a single Korean, other than on the boat itself, who had taken the trip. When I mentioned it in Seoul, or to Korean friends here, most didn't know what I was was talking about. (Of course it could've been my pronunciation. Korea has Chungju and Cheongju, Gongju and Gyeongju and Gwangju - who knows where they thought I was talking about!) On the boat there were lively groups of older Koreans (affectionately called "halmoni" and "halabuji" - grandma and grandpa - although, having been so addressed a couple of times myself, I feel a little ambivalent about the term) - anyway, groups of older Koreans talking and drinking and laughing and sharing their food with us and seeming to have a great time! They were evidently local people, not visitors from out of the area, well familiar with the routines and sights and places to go.

It's hard to understand the feelings modern Koreans have for their "homeland." With the long history, the small size, the homogeneity of race and language and culture, the strong ties to the extended family and ancestors, the closeness to mountains and islands and sea, the particular attraction to one's particular point of belonging (the "hometown") - maybe these determine a person's desire to "tour the country" in a different way than it does for Americans.

But tour we did, in the American way. Here are a few scenes from the trip.

DMZ and North Korea

2010-08-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

This spot marks the demilitarized zone - the DMZ.

It looks a bit like going into Disneyland, doesn't it? These days it's a tourist destination.

Still....

Because of the current tensions between North and South Korea, all tours actually going into North Korea have been canceled, but we took the tour that got us as far as we could go.

The picture above marks the spot where a tunnel built under the DMZ by North Koreans was discovered. You actually take a tram car ride underground and see parts of the tunnel.

At another spot, we were allowed to look over into North Korea (but not take pictures past the yellow line!)

Another part of the tour took us to the beautifully built but empty train station at the end of the South Korean line. A rail link between North and South Korea has been completed but currently no trains run. There are signs (literally!) of hope:

And here we are in Panmunjom (or the Joint Security Area) on the south side of the DMZ but looking over at the big gray building on the north side. It was here that the armistice ending the Korean War was signed in 1953.

Here I'm standing next to a South Korean UN soldier in that central blue building where talks, when there are any, still occur between the two sides.

South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak has just proposed that a reunification tax be levied on South Koreans in anticipation of reuniting the country one day. It is predicted that reunification will cost the more economically-robust South Koreans billions, maybe a trillion or more dollars. I spoke to South Koreans who are ambivalent about reunification, fearful of its economic impact.

Meanwhile, this tragi-comic place endures, off limits to Koreans themselves, but open to gawking tourists.

Travelogue: Incheon

2010-08-10T09:08:00.000-07:00

Three different times during the past year I flew into the International Airport at Incheon, and twice I left from there. It's a fabulous airport - spacious, with many friendly helpful people around to guide you and answer questions, directions clearly marked (and of course in English), wonderful restaurants and shops, a spa, a culture center where you can make Korean handicrafts, a museum, lounges, a hotel... but, that's not what I want to write about.

Away from the airport, completely out of sight and earshot of the airplanes, is the town of Incheon. Twice I spent a day there with my friend Cheng Min - once in the fall, and again with my brother and sister-in law during our trip in June. It just takes an hour to get there by subway. It's where MacArthur landed with the Marines in 1950 (there is a statue of MacArthur there.) It's now a relatively quiet spot away from the hustle and bustle of Seoul.

Some highlights:

The Sudoguksan Museum of Housing and Living is a recreated village, totally encased inside the relatively small museum, depicting the life of the poor people of Incheon in the years following the Korean War. It is interactive; you can walk through all the rooms and try out various tools and furniture and clothing (and, of course, go to the gift shop):

There is a Chinatown in Incheon, supposedly the largest (and some say the only) Chinatown in Korea. If you sound out the Korean spelling of the word on the wall behind the big plate of food in the picture below, it says Cha - i - na - ta - un, or "Chinatown."

Actually, after WWII, and especially after anti-Chinese repressions by Korean dictators in the 70's, most of the Chinese from this area either left or were living in poverty. Then the Korean government saw tourist possibilities here and put in money to revitalize the area. Apparently most of the merchants now are Chinese who bought in from the mainland - or Koreans! Anyway, it's colorful. The big plate of food in the picture is jajangmyeon, noodles covered with a black bean sauce, which Koreans call a Chinese dish but is actually a Korean - and very popular - version of a Chinese dish. (In fact, the dish is so popular and well-known we had to memorize the name of this dish in our Korean class at Yonsei.) Apparently the dish originated here in Incheon. Cheng Min and I had a great meal of it on my first visit.

Wolmido is a seafront area of Incheon, very "vacation-y" with a promenade, nature park, amusement park, ferry docks, and many seafood restaurants. We had a HUGE seafood lunch at a restaurant with a window seat overlooking the harbor:

So we took a couple of ferry rides, and ended up at Jagyak Island (or Jagyakdo). There are no cars on this island. No roads, no houses, no hotels or restaurants - just an island you can walk around, or walk over, and lots of shoreline where you can fall asleep, or play games, or set up a barbecue and have a good time as a number of Korean groups were doing. We mostly walked around and over the island:

Visiting these sights in Incheon, I feel a stronger sense of some particular aspects of Korea - its long and ambivalent relationship with China, the effects of the war tragedies engulfing Korea in the past century, and the strong influence of sea coast and island life on the culture of Korea in particular. I really enjoyed all I saw and learned there, and really thank Cheng Min for her help in getting us around, finding interesting spots to visit, and sharing her Korean insight with us.

Travel Reflections: Houses

2010-08-05T08:03:00.000-07:00

We have our suburban little boxes all in a row, and Koreans have their urban big boxes all in a row. In Seoul and all the big and, as I discovered, all the medium-sized cities as well, these nearly identical-looking huge apartment blocks are everywhere.

I was invited inside two of these apartments while in Seoul, one somewhat small and modest, the other larger and more lavish, but both furnished western-style - although in one, when snacks were served on the coffee table, we got off the sofa and sat on the floor to eat them. Clearly the high-rise is space efficient, and the Koreans I met seem quite happy to be living in them.

My vision of what a Korean house would be like was somewhat different, originating in - you guessed it - Korean dramas. The historical dramas showed the very traditional Korean house (like this one at the Korean folk village in Suwon):

But even in the dramas showing modern life, many families - especially the good families, the ones who are honest, and generous, and loyal, and who love Korea - are depicted as living in traditional Korean-style houses. These houses, like the old ones, generally have a gated entrance leading into a court yard or reception area with a series of rooms built around it, all opening into the central area, something like this:

In these houses the inhabitants still conduct most of their living (visiting, watching TV, eating, etc.) sitting on the floor; mats are rolled out at night for sleeping on the floor as well. There is always a low table in the reception area, and eating and visiting with guests is conducted there.

The bad guys in the dramas - the power-hungry, the deceivers, the connivers, the ones careless of Korean virtues - they tend to be richer, and live in western-style houses and apartments. They don't usually sit on the floor, unless they are conniving to hoodwink the good innocent Koreans.

In my travels around the country, I wanted to see if people outside the big cities still built, and lived in, traditional-style houses.

In my very limited time, my only means of seeing this was from a train window.

And in every town, yes, I saw groups of traditional-style housing from my window, usually surrounded by fields of crops. I tried taking pictures as the train whizzed by:

This particular township actually looks more prosperous than many I saw. Many of these areas with traditional houses seemed seedy and run-down. Here seem to live farmers, people who have, by choice or necessity, not partaken so much of the financial benefits of Korea's economic boom. Everywhere near these townships, on flat patches of ground and up hillsides and along riverbeds and surrounding the houses there are fields, big, medium-sized and small, with an amazing variety of crops. There are large, mechanized farms to be sure, but also many of these small farms where family farmers still appear to be working the land and eking out a living.

My mind was absorbed with speculating on the lives of the people living in these places. From the dramas, it would seem there is enormous camaraderie, lots of visiting back and forth, lots of gossip (!) lots of hard work, lots of strict roles between men and women, old and young, bosses and workers, lots of intergenerational living. Home life is lived half indoors and half out - sinks for washing and teethbrushing are often outside in the courtyard, a lot of food is prepared outside, etc.

A translator of Korean into English commented on the cultural difficulties of translating. For example, to write "He entered the house" may conjure up a very different image in the mind of a westerner and the mind of a Korean. The Korean may think of the courtyard or reception area, and open air, and almost public visiting space, and not the private interior of a home, with the door closing behind, as a westerner is likely to imagine.

And so, with no time or sufficient language skills and perhaps without the courage to actually go to small villages and seek to interact with the people, I speculate on the different houses and how they affect our relationships and activities and values and lives. And I watch out the window as the train whizzes by:

Time Now for Reflection

2010-08-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

The Korean adventure is drawing to a close. In the end, I spent more time in California than in Korea, so it turned out quite differently than I expected. Still, I pursued the goal of learning some Korean, and I did have some grand times and met some wonderful people.

In the coming month, to fulfill the requirements of the sabbatical as well as my own desire, I must comment on the following:

Experiencing language learning as an older learner
Comparing the different approaches and methodologies used in second language instruction from the student's perspective
Finding ways to have immersion practice when not living in the country where the language is spoken
Developing relationships with Korean individuals
Finding ways to maintain connections to life in Korea and the acquaintances I have made there
Observing Korean culture through travel
Reflecting on Korean literature through translation

I will try to make these comments here on the blog during the month of August. Stay tuned.

Back to Korea One More Time

2010-06-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

On June 9 I'll be returning to Seoul to meet my brother and sister-in-law, who are now on a 5-week trip traveling around Japan and Korea. We plan to spend a few days together in Seoul and then travel to Gyeongju, Busan and Jeju Island. I am looking forward to being back one more time and having a chance to see more of the country. - and in warm weather again!! It'll be short; I'll be back in the States June 19 - just in time to take my final exam in my Korean class at De Anza. But the real final test, for me, will be to see how well I can communicate in Korea. Should be fun!

What Teaching Method is the Best?

2010-05-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

"The superior teacher has regularly gotten superior results regardless of method."

In my year's journey as a student I have experienced these sets of teachers:

teachers at Yonsei Korean Language Institute who were thoroughly trained in one particular method and had to rigidly adhere to it;
teachers at De Anza Community College who had complete freedom to choose and execute a method (though still required to use a particular text);
teachers at Adroit College who were loosely trained in one method and had freedom to adapt and apply it, using the required text as much or as little as they saw fit.

Through these experiences I have learned that:

sometimes a method that seems bad can bring out good learning;
it's very difficult for a teacher to change her method for the better (though somewhat easier to change it for the worse!);
a teacher's commitment to her chosen method and attitude towards her students matters a great deal.

I will illustrate with some examples.

Teacher A. This was my favorite teacher at Yonsei. Committed to the Yonsei method (described in detail earlier in this blog, with its plusses and minuses) she executed it with liveliness and enthusiasm, sweeping us along, giving us no time to question it, making us committed too, inspiring us to work hard. She paid attention to the individual student, helping or challenging each of us at our particular level. It was good, and I learned a lot!

But there was a mystery toward the end with this teacher. I still think about it - the student who crumpled. It was another American student, the only one who was having more trouble than I was. For some reason, she stopped helping him out. When he had to perform a dialogue he couldn't remember or answer a question he didn't understand, she started letting him squirm in front of everyone. Sometimes she laughed at his struggles. The student started to be absent, started to do worse and worse. Another method might have worked better for him, and he did begin to complain about the Yonsei method, determined to go to another institute for the following term. But I don't believe that's the reason his learning stalled. How could he possibly do better, with any method, when he worried about being humiliated every day?

I wonder why the teacher changed with this student. Was there pressure on her to have all her students meet the standards of the class and pass on to the next level, and she felt frustrated at her own failure? Did she just feel he wasn't studying enough and lose patience? Why would she take what she did best and chuck it at the end?

Teacher B. This teacher, also from Yonsei, was the only one I felt I didn't learn much from. Why was she a teacher? Maybe she just hated the Yonsei method and was in despair because she couldn't develop her own teaching style and method. Who knows? She was so lifeless, so robotic, so unseeing of the individual students, so unable to match what she was teaching to what we were understanding, that I would mentally go to sleep during much of her class. She didn't dwell on us too much if we couldn't answer her questions, so we didn't worry too much about feeling humiliated, but she was unable to inspire us because she didn't show interest in our learning. She showed no desire to get student feedback on her teaching, seemed anxious to leave the classroom as soon as possible at the end of class, called in sick when she obviously wasn't - I believe the possibility of improvement was too far away for this teacher, and she knew it and wasn't interested in it. She used the same method as Teacher A but with a radically different attitude, so learning was stalled.

Teacher C. This teacher at De Anza spoke in English for 99% of each class. The only times we heard Korean were when she read a dialogue and had us repeat lines after her or when she said sentences in Korean to exemplify a grammar point she had just explained in English. She simply talked about Korean - in English. She focused primarily on grammar. She often repeated and repeated her explanations. She almost never had us speak and rarely had us do anything except occasionally write on the board. No pair or group work. No in-class practice. Mostly we just listened to her English.

Anyone would say this is poor language teaching.

And yet... I found the audio files that go with the book on the internet and so was able to supplement class instruction with listening. And she did make the grammar explanations very clear.

And she was very clear about what would be on the exams and exactly what we needed to know. And that required us to...study! The study we did at home was intensive and focused and productive and rewarding. And through that study, we learned.

Did the teacher know her in-class method was not the best? I believe so. She often apologized for being "very boring" and "talking on and on." At the beginning of the first semester I had her, she tried to have us do pair work and activities that were suggested in the text, but she soon gave it up. I don't think she could see the learning we were getting from our struggles. She was a lecturer. That's what she was comfortable doing. Her greatest teaching value seemed to be unambiguous clarity, and the learning outcome she valued most was correct grammar use. She knew we wouldn't understand grammar explanations clearly if she used Korean, so she used English. She saw the students falling asleep, typing on their IPhones, passing notes.... but she didn't change.

She did have a secret weapon. She showed the students, every day and in many ways, that she cared about them. She cared that we learned. She cajoled us, nudged us, praised us, gave us pep talks. She came to the class every day 30 minutes early so she could meet with any student who had questions. She was the only teacher who expressed such a passion for learning.

So even though the in-class methodology was disappointing, I learned a great deal from the work I was inspired to do for this teacher and this class.

Teacher D. This teacher at Adroit College used Korean in the class all the time, so we really got to hear it, and that was great. Classes at Adroit are quite small (3-6 students) so we had some opportunity to speak ourselves, and we talked about our lives and what was going on in the world and many things of interest to us besides what was in the text.

But unlike the teaching at Yonsei or De Anza, there was little structure in what was being taught. The teacher seemed to feel that just using Korean, any Korean, constituted teaching and learning. So - she gave us lists of vocabulary words to memorize, and even tested us on the words, but we rarely saw these words in context, rarely used the words in class. She gave us exercises to do in a workbook, but only spent about 15 minutes in a 2-hour class going over the workbook and introducing the next week's exercises. We rarely practiced with the material in the textbook or did anything except give the answers. And for 90% of the class, even though the class was so small, the teacher talked.

The students weren't too happy about some of this and twice gave the teacher suggestions to change. One student suggested we try to use the vocabulary words we studied during the class. The teacher gave a long defense on why she does the vocabulary the way she does, saying, in part, that she has to do it that way because students are lazy and won't learn any other way.

Another day another student suggested the students would like to have more time during class for "conversation." The teacher gave a long defense of why she doesn't have students speak more, saying, in part, that she has to do the talking because we students don't know Korean well enough to say anything well.

It was only when the teacher's teaching method was challenged that she showed any negative feelings towards the students. Normally she was very supportive and encouraging, always came to class early and stayed late, talked to us during the breaks, etc. Perhaps she was just frustrated with our inability to learn faster and thought that throwing a lot of language at us was the best way to help us, and the best she could offer.

Did we learn anyway? I wasn't so inspired to do a lot of outside study and preparation for this class, and I agreed with the students she could have made our learning more efficient and rewarding. Yet, because of the small class size and opportunity to use (or at least hear) Korean for actual communication about things we cared about, I was always mentally active and engaged during the class. The teacher was skillful at keeping her language to a level we could more or less understand, and I certainly improved my listening ability, which I desperately needed. And amazingly, I did learn - and still remember - a lot of vocabulary from memorizing those lists. So yeah, we learned.

We teachers pick what our particular study and experience has shown us to be the best method(s), or what helped us most when we were learning another language, or what best fits our own personalities and values, or what seems the easiest or most fun, or... there are many reasons why we choose to teach as we do.

For me, the greatest lesson is:

Whatever method we choose, if we teach it with passion and caring, most students will choose to learn.

What's in a Name?

2010-04-30T08:46:00.001-07:00

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" says the enamored Romeo.

Samuel Coleridge Taylor expressed a similar sentiment:

Ah! replied my gentle fair,

Beloved, what are names but air?

Choose thou, whatever suits the line:

Call me Sappho, cal me Chloris,

Call me Lalage, or Doris,

Only, only call me thine.

But these were supremely confident lovers, secure in what they had. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, her character expresses something quite different. When Beloved comes to lie down with Paul D, she cries, "And you have to call me my name....Call my name...Please call it."

If you are alone, or unrecognized, or searching for an identity in a foreign environment, the assurance of having a name, your own name, can be important.

At Adroit College, we are required to use Korean names. If we're not Korean, the teacher makes up a name for us.

The Korean name I was given at Adroit College is 민백영, pronounced something like Min Baek Yeong. I have been called by that name for the past 2 years that I have been taking classes there.

In Korea, though, the name I went by was 마가넷, or Ma Ga Let. No one suggested I should go by any other name. That was fine with me.

Perhaps I'm lucky that I have a name that exists - and/or sounds good (to me at least) - in other languages. Living in France and Zaire I went by Marguerite or Maguy, and Margarita in Guatemala. When I hear one of these versions of Margaret, including the Korean MaGaLet, it still sounds like my name, like me. When I hear Min Baek Young, it sounds like someone else.

I understand the teacher's thinking - if we have a Korean name, we will feel more "Korean," we will immerse into the culture more, we will get used to Korean names, and so on. But I don't think it works. I think it backfires. It adds an additional tension, an additional insecurity, to a situation that is already difficult and tense.

I think now about the names of our students, and how some of them have taken the step to adopt an American name, and what it might have cost them to do so. I think of others who have no wish at all to adopt an American name, and I sympathize with them.

I also recognize something new. Sometimes, when I, as a teacher, would ask students their name, they would pronounce it in the "American" way, using English sounds. This would confuse me, or irritate me, because I wanted to try to pronounce their name "correctly." But now I see that maybe the pronunciation of their name using English sounds IS their American name, the name they want to use here - an American twist on what still remains their own name, a comfortable way to bridge the gap between the two cultures and languages.

Back in the US - the project continues

2010-04-27T18:20:00.000-07:00

I've been taking time adjusting to life back in the States. But it's time to get serious with Korean again. I have an alternate plan to finish my sabbatical project here in the US:

Continue studying Korean for 200 more hours, including:

Elementary Korean 3 at De Anza College for 60 hours

3 20-hour evening courses at Adroit college

80 hours of self-study using any combination of:

-Rosetta Stone

-Yonsei Level 2 materials, which I brought back from Korea

-textbooks and audio materials I have at home

-private tutoring

-online courses and study material

Document 100 more hours of immersion activities, including:

doing homework for courses

watching Korean TV, dramas and movies

learning Korean song lyrics

conversing with shopkeepers at local Korean establishments

engaging in activities with local Koreans I may meet

exchanging emails with newly-made Korean friends in Korea

reading Korean newspapers, children's books, readers, etc.

Continue writing in the blog (so I better do it!), focusing on:
experiencing language learning as an older learner

finding opportunities for immersion activities outside of Korea

developing relationships with local Koreans

reflecting on Korean literature in translation

comparing different learning approaches and methodologies

maintaining connections to life in Korea and acquaintances there

Prepare an annotated bibliography of narrative literature written by immigrants from Korea to the the US - a project suggested by Cynthia Solem, who will be compiling an extensive bibliography of immigration literature from many countries (but not Korea!) for her upcoming sabbatical.

Take one more short trip to Korea (hoped for - but not required)

I obviously miss being in Korea, but it's good to be home, too, and these projects should keep me busy!

Final Entry from Korea

2010-03-31T07:13:00.001-07:00

One more day in Korea, and then I'll be heading home. These last two weeks have been packed.

A sampling of some activities:

A culinary tour with friends Charles and Yvonne and others where we sampled a lot of traditional Korean foods at one restaurant and sampled a bunch of Korean drinks - and ate more food - at another with an intervening visit to a museum devoted to art featuring... chickens!

Saying good-bye to local vendors I have come to know, such as this one where I would often buy coffee and practice my sparse Korean:

A trip to the town of Cheon-An, an hour's bus ride out of Seoul, to visit a Korean friend's hometown and visit Independence Hall, a museum dedicated to independence movements during the Japanese occupation of Korea and all that happened during those years:

A hike on Bukhansan Mountain, just on the outskirts of Seoul...

with friend Yvonne...

and a large percentage of the Seoul populace!

Quite a few lunches and dinners with Korean, Japanese (former classmates from Yonsei) and American friends I got to know:

This is just a sampling! Many days have been full of activities, but I've also had time to sit in my quiet 15th floor apartment, look out over the wide expanse of Seoul that I can see, and contemplate these last months here. They've been good months, hard at times but always interesting, and I definitely will miss this place.

Listening/speaking vs Reading/writing.

2010-03-25T01:01:00.000-07:00

Some learners are better with the oral language, and some with the written.

In Korean, I am definitely NOT better with the oral language.

When I was in California I picked up this book from the library:

Lo and behold - even though it's called an INTERMEDIATE (!) Reader - I found I could actually understand much of it:

Not bad, huh?

But yet ... here I am after 4 moths of living here and 10 weeks of intensive study - and I still can't carry on even a minimal conversation with most people I meet casually in shops, in my apartment building, etc.

I CAN kind of converse with Korean friends on a familiar topic; we sit down together and when we speak slowly and with the vocabulary that's familiar to me I can carry on a minimal conversation.

But not in casual encounters. I just can't catch what people say to me, and even if I do, I get so tongue-tied I usually can't get any words out. It just all happens so fast!

How frustrating.

I ran into a classmate the other day - an American who completed Level 2 (a whole level more than me) at Yonsei. She said she couldn't speak much either. We both agreed this was a problem with the Yonsei method. (Ah, it's not entirely OUR fault!!) Because everything was so controlled, we almost never had spontaneous conversation. We were taught to speak methodically, and always correctly, but not freely. We did a lot of classroom listening, and I listened to a lot of tapes - but I never heard anything like I hear in the casual encounters I have "on the street."

So now what? I'm leaving Korea in a week.

Well, I'll just have to find Korean folks back home and keep working to remedy this situation.

All of us ESL teachers have had students whose reading and writing skills far surpass their listening and speaking. Sometimes I get a student in an advanced class who writes beautifully - but can still hardly carry on a simple conversation. I now have great sympathy for such students. Maybe through my own struggles I will learn something new that I can pass on. Now that will be an accomplishment!

A Stab at Korean Literature

2010-03-20T18:52:00.000-07:00

Luckily for me, Charles Montgomery introduced me to the Portable Library of Korean Literature - a collection of short translated works by modern Korean authors. He even loaned me a bunch of books. These, together with a few I bought, are all short, so I started reading - well, skimming - them all.

The books were often interesting reads, but they often were a bit mystifying too. So many stories seemed symbolic - but of what? I felt I lacked the background to even guess what the writer was trying to communicate. I also felt a "sameness" about so many of the works; the themes, the plots, the characters, the style, the use of language all seemed repetitive. Being unable to discriminate, I was clearly missing a great deal!

So I'm going back and reading some of them more carefully. Acknowledging I lack the background to actually understand these books, I'm going to comment simply on how the books affected me.

First work: The Wings (or Wings) by Yi Sang.

I'm already troubled by problems of translation. Should the title be Wings, or should it be The Wings? (It's variously translated as either.) It makes a difference in English.

Soon the story reveals itself as a whole lot of often surrealistically-unrelated sentences - basically, a puzzle to try to figure out. But to figure out a puzzle, the clues (ie the words) have to be really clear. On page 1 we get this:

"I again plan a life with a woman. I am a spiritual straggler who has been, so to speak, after a momentary peep at crystalized intellectualism, alienated from the strategies of love."

(Hey, does that sentence make anybody want to read the book??)

But I find elsewhere a different translation:

"Again, with a woman, I draw up a plan of life, a scheme of one whose spirit has gone mad after a glimpse of the ultimate reason, a man whose lovemaking technique has grown awkward."

(At least now we know "strategies of love" refers (apparently) to sex - so maybe we do want to read it after all!)

Just contemplating the the different possible meanings in these two translations could take a year !

OK, translation is always a problem. So let's forget it, and assume every word is as Yi Sang intended.

Actually, there are 3 stories in the book. All have a similar narrator - an alienated, maladjusted, confused, powerless, sickly - but imaginative (!) - protagonist who tries to make sense of the incomprehensible world around him. In each story he has a young "wife" whose main quality seems to be that she has sexual relationships with other men, usually for money, and all the "action" of the stories centers around dealing with this situation. Repeated themes or images that struck me in all the stories are the elusive passage of time and memories, the contrast of day and night, deception, hunger and fatigue, not understanding the world before one's eyes - even having/shaving facial hair! (Examining the references to facial hair in the different stories could make a nice student essay). In all, the narrator seems Hamlet-like, trying to figure out what he should or shouldn't do to deal with the deception around him, but ultimately ineffective, powerless. His imminent death - whether through disease or self-destruction - seems to lurk nearby in all the stories.

SPOILER warning.

All the endings of the stories touched me.

The Wings ends with a seemingly simple poem, simple cry for freedom:

"I stopped my pace and wanted to shout.

Wings, spread out again!

Fly! Fly! Fly! Let me fly once more.

Let me fly just once more."

When did he "fly" before? Not clear. But in the penultimate paragraph he describes his "wings" as "the deleted phantasms of hope and ambition" that "flashed in my mind like the flipping pages of a pocket dictionary." That image - all those words tossed out of the dictionary and thrown on the "sheet of white paper" that "opens in my head" on the first page of the story - maybe he just wants the white sheet again, the creative possibilities where, even though "the body sways from fatigue" (and so he may soon die), "the soul sparkle(s) like a new, shiny coin" (ah, the money symbol, with all its hope and promise).

The end of the second story specifically refers to the grand theme of deception:

"It is but a dream to deceive,

But so too is being deceived,

Twisting, turning, wandering life,

Set fire to your shadowy heart-"

For me, a searing, haunting final line.

At the end of the last story, he is presented with a knife and choices (ah, Hamlet):

He can kill someone in revenge (presumably to repay deception)

He can kill himself and get out of it all.

Or...

He can use the knife to peel an ordinary round, lukewarm tangerine, and just go on. As he anticipates the taste of the tangerine, "tears like the vaporous steam forming on a cooling glass well up in my eyes." Wow - hot tears on cold eyes. Fire on a shadowy heart. Night and day. Passion and alienation. Truth and deception. Unbearable. Irreconcilable. Such is our existence.

Yi Sang lived and died (at the age of 27) during the Japanese occupation of Korea, during which he was imprisoned and presumably mistreated for "thought crimes." Supposedly much of the content of the stories is autobiographical, including the descriptions of poverty and ill health and a woman in his life similar to the one(s) in the stories. A sad, short life - but filled with creative passion and a gift of reading for later generations.

I may have totally misunderstood this book, whether because of the translation or my ignorance of the context in which it was written, but I had a good time searching for its meaning for me.

Back in Seoul

2010-03-19T14:26:00.001-07:00

When I first got home in January, I really missed Seoul.

But then, after a few weeks in San Jose, I started to get comfortable. Everything at home is so...EASY! And CALM!

Here's my street in San Jose:

And here's my street in Seoul:

Here's my supermarket on a typical weekday in San Jose:

And here's my Seoul supermarket on a typical weekday:

And so on. As I got ready to come back here, I wondered if I really wanted to face the crowds, the struggle with language, and all the other challenges of life here.

But once I got here, I remembered what a great city this is. One day I looked out my window and counted 27 buses that I could see on the streets at one time! It's strawberry season, and strawberry dishes are showing up everywhere. I arrived in a snow storm, but the snow melted by the next day, and the palpable change of season is once again in the air. People I got to know in local shops and my apartment greet me as a long lost friend returned. And so on. So many attractive things in life here.

And I still have 2 weeks! When time is short, each day becomes more precious. I will relish these last days in Seoul.

Ever Wonder Who Coined the Term "1.5 Generation"?

2010-03-15T12:40:00.000-07:00

"I coined the term 1.5 Generation...."

So claims T. S Chung in the video Arirang, produced by the Centennial Committee of Korean Immigration to the United States and available at the Santa Clara Public Library.

The quote continues: "...to refer to people like myself, people who were born in Korea but who have immigrated to the US, usually as a teenager, or who is (sic) bicultural and bilingual."

An article about T.S.Chung entitled "Coalescing the Korean-American Community," published in the LA Times in May, 1992, introduces him by saying: "He calls himself a 'one-and-a-half generation' Korean-American."

Was this the first use of the term? So it seems...

Learning from Non-Native Speakers

2010-03-09T20:46:00.000-08:00

Before I went to Korea, I bought this book - with accompanying CDs - to do some pre-studying. There was nothing to indicate that the voices on the CDs would be...NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS. But so they are. They speak Korean with obvious native-English speaker accents. At the time I was disappointed with the voices, so I didn't do much with these materials.

In Korea, I had all native Koreans as my teachers. Obviously, you may think - but here in the US there are many professional ESL teachers who are not native speakers. In Korea I did not experience much diversity in the teaching pool. All my teachers were women. All were young - or young middle-aged. And as previously described, all used the same method.

Would I have been pleased with a little diversity? Well, yes - but only as long as the teachers were Korean. A man would have been nice! Or someone older. (I did have an older Korean teacher at De Anza College and really appreciated that!) But a non-native? An American?? I would have been disappointed.

But since I've been back, I've been using the Korean materials pictured above, and I have begun to realize how useful they are. When the Americans speak Korean, I can catch what they're doing to approximate the Korean sounds. Their sounds, their intonation seem halfway between a beginning Korean speaker's speech and a native Korean's, and they serve as a really useful learning bridge.

And then, coincidentally, as I've been watching a Korean drama called Jejoongwon, about the establishment of the first Western medicine hospital in Korea, one of the main characters in the drama is...American! See him back there in the black hat?

Easy on the eyes (!) - and how fun it is to watch him chattering away with the Koreans in his unmistakable American accent. When he speaks, I understand about double what I understand of the Koreans. That makes it exciting to watch. And actually, there are other American characters (more missionary doctors!), including a woman, all of whom speak fluent Korean with English accents.

So - I am feeling proud of my compatriots who seem to be able to speak Korean so well. When I hear them, I feel motivated to achieve what they have. When I listen to native Koreans, I get discouraged because native Korean speech seems so distant and unattainable. But - to be able to speak like these Americans - that would be enough. More than enough! And they make it seem attainable.

So I am learning to appreciate the non-native teacher.

Now - would I appreciate, say, a Korean teacher that was a native French speaker? or Arabic speaker? Right now, my prejudice says... no. How would hearing someone with a different accent altogether help me learn? But... I am also learning to be more open to the possibility. If I should get the chance to have such a teacher, I will welcome it. Much has been published in the US in recent years about the value the non-native English teacher brings to the ESL classroom. Maybe there is more that I could learn from such a teacher than I can even imagine now.

March 16 - Back to Seoul

2010-03-01T09:01:00.001-08:00

Seoul weather reports look good - even lows are above freezing most nights. Safe to go back, I think!

I am looking forward to this arrival. What a difference it will be from 6 months ago, when I arrived with 4 big bags and utter ignorance. Now I have my one small suitcase, knowledge of how to get around, a slightly improved ability to communicate, a pocketful of Korean money, and my own little pad waiting for me.

It will be a bittersweet arrival; because of unexpected family circumstances, I may not be able to stay long this time. But I will try to make the most of the time I have there.

Americans vs. Koreans

2010-02-21T12:31:00.000-08:00

Ah, the Olympics.

Someone asked me, "Who do you root for?"

I have to admit, I get a surge of pleasure when Koreans win.

Korea is so small compared to the US. Yet somehow they pull out these winners, and it is exciting to watch.

Probably, if I were in Korea now, I would be feeling the tug of home and rooting for the Americans. But I am here, and feeling instead the tug of Korea. I wish them well in these games.

Rosetta Stone

2010-02-11T23:10:00.000-08:00

Ever tried learning a language with Rosetta Stone?

Here's how it works: You see 4 pictures at a time. You hear - or read - a sentence. You click on the picture that matches the sentence. If you're wrong you get a big X and have to try again. If you're right, you get a check and go to the next set of 4 pictures. You do this over and over. There are variations as you go but that's the basic gist of it.

This is called "dynamic immersion" - an approach that supposedly mimics first language learning. There is no translation, no grammar instruction, no explanation of any type. The pictures try to make the meaning clear, and you try to figure out the grammar as you go.

I like the idea of this. This is - sort of - the way I wanted to try to learn Korean. I wanted to see if an adult could learn this way.

But I wasn't successful with it before I went to Korea. It was too hard, and too tedious. The chunks of language being used in the sentences were just too big.

And I didn't use it at all when I was in Korea.

But now - I use it every day. And NOW - it makes sense to me as an adult learner. What a great SUPPLEMENT to the textbooks and class instruction and real world practice. Now that I know a lot of grammar and vocabulary, the new chunks being introduced are not so overwhelming, and I get to hear sentences and patterns repeated and recycled over and over until the sounds and the meaning do seem to start to sink in - in a way they don't with any other method.

I'm hooked. I believe this is helping my learning.

But for anyone tempted to try this:

Don't expect to learn anything practical, or anything that you could actually use as a beginner. You will learn things like "This clown is putting on his pants/This clown already put on his pants" or "This rocking horse is not a live animal/This pig is a live animal" or "There are many cowboy hats but no cowboys" long before you will learn anything like "Hi, my name is..." or "Where is the bathroom?" Strange content at times - definitely not a program for the casual learner who just wants to learn a few phrases.

What I'm Missing in Seoul

2010-01-27T09:32:00.000-08:00

I've been in the States almost 2 weeks now, and here are a few things I've been missing:

Vibrant bustling streets everywhere. Sidewalks filled with pedestrians. Street vendors of all types - cooked food, fish, fruits and vegetables, clothes, accessories, magazines, phones,...

Subway stations everywhere, with subway lines going everywhere. Streets filled with buses going everywhere: green buses that go around the local sector, blue buses that go to other sectors in the city, red buses that go out of the city, abundant taxis everywhere.

No tipping - none! No sales tax. The price you see is the price you pay.

Ondol floor heating. Hot water goes through those pipes under the floor, and the floor gets toasty warm. It takes a long time to warm up a room this way, but once it's does, ooh, it's delightful to walk (or lie!) on the floor on a cold winter day.

No keys! My apartment door has a touch pad. There are no locks on our mailboxes. No need for car keys. Nothing else to lock up.

Take-a-number waiting system is all over - in banks, movie theaters, the post office, immigration office - instead of standing in line, you take a number from a machine and sit (!) in one of the seats provided while you wait for your number to be called.

Personal customer service; friendly people willing to help. Wow. Calm, polite, patient people everywhere, willing to talk, answer questions, take time. I don't use the phone much myself but have sometimes had Koreans make business calls for me - they always get a human on the line, never an automated menu with endless buttons to press; I have yet to see anyone put on hold.

Korea's unemployment rate is, I believe, 3.something % - compared to the US 10% rate. There are undoubtedly complicated economic and social factors, but I can't help but notice the huge number of people working at jobs that don't exist in the States. Every large store has workers posted throughout the store, at every display case, just standing there waiting to help customers. There are people riding little delivery motor scooters everywhere - almost anything can be delivered to your home with a phone call (you can order McDonald's delivered any time day or night!). With market vendors in stall after endless stall at the big markets, the huge number of very small businesses (tiny little restaurants by the score, small clothing shops, bedding shops, camera shops, etc.) on every street, street vendors, bus and taxi drivers, people actually answering phones, etc. - all these visible jobs surely add something to the economy and people's livelihood.

I will say, though, that these armies of customer service workers spend a lot of time seemingly doing nothing as they wait for customers. Are these folks getting paid much? Are they making it?

Anyway, I miss them!

Preview of July

2010-01-17T22:25:00.000-08:00

I am now in California - had a great reunion with local family today. Leaving Seoul definitely gave me a tug, giving me a preview of what it's going to feel like in July, when I leave Korea for good. I feel very lucky that I get to go back in a few weeks, but for now I'm glad to be home; I will have a chance to take care of some things and contemplate how things have gone so far. Any momentous conclusions will be shared here. Thank you for sharing the first part of this journey with me. See some of you soon.

Sudden Change in Plans - Winter in California

2010-01-13T01:57:00.001-08:00

Surprise! A number of circumstances converged this past weekend, resulting in... a decision to transfer my course registration to the spring term, and come home for the next month or two. Yes, this Saturday I'll be back in California. I plan to stay in California until mid-March, and then come back to Korea to take the spring semester and complete the sabbatical.

I did not expect to come home in the middle of this, but now I am, and I'm looking forward to it! I hope to see many of you soon. I will keep the blog going from home. For those in Korea, I will miss you for the next couple of months, but I will see you again soon.

Second Quarter Begins

2010-01-08T00:37:00.000-08:00

I am now comfortably in a Level 2 class which began 2 days ago. I opted for the slower paced one (the sequence where students take 8 quarters to complete the whole program instead of 6) - which means I am back in the exact same place I started last September. But now it's easier and my sweat is staying in my body (although that may be due to it being about 70 degrees F colder now!). The best part is that there are currently only 6 students in this class. The other 5 are young - 2 white Americans, a Korean-American, a German-Korean, and another Asian (not sure where from).

The negative part: this teacher exhibits the boredom the others must feel. She seems miles away, barely able to bring herself to listen to our stumbling efforts, impatient with our mistakes - I don't think she likes doing this much. But - she takes us through all the required steps and gives us that invaluable listening practice, so I think I can learn in this class. 2 days down, 48 to go.

Seoul Winter - the Good, the Bad, the Good...

2010-01-06T02:10:00.000-08:00

Thanks, Charles, for welcoming me back to Seoul winter!

When I looked up average precipitation and temperature in Seoul, December didn't look that different from January. Things were a little cold when I left for Japan toward the end of December, to be sure -but it was dry, and I thought, "I can handle this winter!" I came back to a bit of snow on the ground. Fine! Pretty to look at, and the cold still tolerable.

Then last Sunday it snowed throughout the day. So pretty to watch from my 15th floor apartment.

The next day, Monday, I went out with my friend Mi Kyeong to lunch and a movie. We sloshed through the snow and it was fun.

Then came - the slip! Still only early January, and I already took a spill. 2 days later, when I had had enough and sought out a doctor, I ended up like this:

Xrays did not show a break but I'm to wear this for the next 4-6 weeks. We'll see how that goes. For now it actually feels great having this thing encasing and protecting my sore arm - I think I shall sleep tonight.

While having lunch with Mi Kyeong, before "the spill," she taught me an expression: "pul heng chung ta heng" (불행중 다행): something like "out of misfortune comes fortune."

And so it proved true. I found a great "international clinic" at the hospital associated with Yonsei University -right on my walk to school. (The hospital has a great reputation but an unfortunate name, it seems to me - Severence Hospital!) Everyone speaks English, was friendly and helpful, took care of me right away... and the best part was that I met a fellow sojourner - an American woman, exactly my age, experiencing exactly what I had been experiencing - the isolation of not having women friends our own age. She finished her appointments, then stayed with me through my exam and xrays, went with me for coffee - it was great! Yeah, she's American, and I'm here to meet Koreans, (and actually one of the great things about Kyong Mee is that she is close to my age -her kids are grown too - but my Korean is still so elementary that our ability to talk about things is still very limited) - but oh, I did enjoy being with Mary Lorna today.

And now - the sidewalks are slick with unmelted ice and school starts tomorrow and I have what used to be a half-hour walk (I'm giving it an hour now so I can go s-l-o-w-l-y) each way - I just hope the good fortune remains!

Christmas in Japan

2010-01-02T02:53:00.000-08:00

A week away from Korea, a week with my beloved family, a week of non-stop English, a week of constant companionship - it was a great time for me. Unfortunately Harold wasn't able to make the trip, but Katherine and her partner Chris flew over and we met Patty and husband Corey in Tokyo. In Tokyo we ate lots of good Japanese food, walked around lots of places, visited historic gardens, viewed the city from the Seoul Tower - and a highlight was our visit to the Imperial Palace on Dec. 23 which, unbeknownst to us, happened to be Emperor Akihito's birthday. So we got to join some enthusiastic Japansese throngs who came out to hear the emperor give his 3-minute birthday greeting to the crowd.

We took the bullet train north to Patty and Corey's lovely home in Misawa.

Misawa is in northern Honshu and houses the Misawa Air Base where Corey is stationed. In Misawa we enjoyed traditional Christmas festivities, ate some wonderful meals at their home and around Misawa, and spent a day exploring Misawa and the Air Base. Here are a few of the family activities:

This week was really a wonderful interlude. I feel more charged up now, ready to tackle ... Level 2, and Seoul winter.

Street Vendors and Restaurants

2009-12-20T05:22:00.001-08:00

I cannot count the eating establishments in my immediate neighborhood. From street vendors to fancy restaurants there must be hundreds of places within a mile in any direction. Hundreds - I exaggerate not!

And yet - I don't frequent them that often. Usually I am by myself to eat. I feel conspicuous going into a restaurant alone, so I usually don't, especially if it's a Korean place (I do occasionally go to Western places.) But when I have company I love going to these restaurants. If any of you come to visit, we'll go!

It's easy to order because there are usually pictures of the food posted in front. And many of these places are cheap! One thousand won (the Korean currency) is worth about 85 cents, so a 4,500 won meal is just a

little under $4.00. Many delicious and ample meals can be had for 5,000-10,000 won. Lots of side dishes usually go with the main dish - many times at the end of a meal uneaten food goes back to the kitchen.

So here is a sampling of just a few of the places along a main thoroughfare in my immediate neighborhood. (On the little back streets restaurants are even more crowded together and more numerous.)

Language Learning Behavior That Drives Teachers Crazy

2009-12-20T00:50:00.000-08:00

All those language learning behaviors that drive teachers crazy? I do them all!

For example:

I nod and smile when someone is talking to me in Korean - even when in actuality I don't understand a word they're saying. How many times have I done that! I'll meet someone in the apartment elevator, say; we'll greet, and the person will start talking to me. I smile, nod, say "ne, ne" (that's "yes, yes") and at the end say goodbye. I wonder what I'm saying "ne" to?? Sometimes this is easier - it gives the illusion that we've just had a nice conversation in Korean, which is better than the sometimes endless and hopeless exchange of "What?" "I don't understand" "Please repeat" etc.

I don't yet have a Korean "um" or "yeah" or other filler phrase I can comfortably use between thoughts when I speak. So what do I do? At home, Spanish speakers will sometimes repeat the word "pero" in between thoughts, even when their English level is high enough not to need any other Spanish; some students seem to preface every sentence with the word "because" - even when there is no cause relationship; it too seems to function as a filler, annoying as it sounds to the listener. I find myself saying "and so" in between sentences. How annoying that must sound - sticking "and so" between each Korean phrase. But even when I notice it, I can hardly stop doing it - it just slips out. The mind - or the tongue - really seems to need to put something there. (I also sometimes fill with "y" - the Spanish word for "and" - a typical phenomenon where you start filling in gaps with words from a different foreign language you've studied. It's gotten me in trouble since "y" is also the pronunciation of the name "Lee" in Korean and happened to be my Korean teacher's name. Someone asked me why I was talking about my teacher.)

And I incessantly translate. There was an older Russian woman at SJCC who used to come into the ESL lab for help. She absolutely had to analyze every sentence she read or wrote and translate it into Russian. It's the only way she could understand. I wanted to shake her, to tell her to tolerate some ambiguity and try to get her mind functioning in English. Relax, and let the English sounds and structures penetrate. And here I am, finding that I cannot tolerate ambiguity either, and I can't just relax and let the Korean penetrate - it doesn't go in! I hear the sounds, I know I've heard them before, but often they don't mean anything until I think through the translation.* And my Korean texts are filled with the English translations of words I've written above the Korean words. I tell my students not to do that - to gloss the words at the bottom or on a separate page - but they want the translations there and so do I.**

I have little patience with proofreading. I've mentioned this in the posting on error correction. Proofreading in Korean is nothing like proofreading in English. When I look at a page of Korean text that I've written, it still just looks pretty much like squiggles to me. I'm still at the stage where I have to sound out most words - like a first grader learning to read (Can't you hear the parents? "Just sound it out!"). As with translation, I have to think through the spelling of every word.*** I understand the effect of misspelled words, but going through a text word by word is so tedious and does not seem very rewarding in terms of learning. So sometimes - I skip that part!****

*In our classes at Yonsei we have a test on about 100 new vocabulary words every week. and I've always done well on those tests, but I use mnemonic tricks, associations, mental pictures etc. to remember the words. Of course, we use the words in conversations and exercises, but that's not how I remember them. So I do well in reading comprehension and writing and vocabulary tests because I have to time to think and translate and remember my tricks, but very poorly in listening and speaking because it goes too fast and I haven't really internalized the learning yet. (Learning vs. Acquisition! Oh, so true!)

**Does this slow down learning? I think it does. But in class I have to be ready to answer a question about a text at a moment's notice. What if I forget a word and can't answer the question? I will be embarrassed in front of all my classmates! I will be on the spot, sweating and squirming, trying desperately to come up with some kind of answer. So - I use translation and any other trick, like predicting what exercises we might be asked to perform orally and copying the answers into my textbook ahead of time. I've been known to read a previously copied answer without knowing what it meant!

***An example: compare these two words: "지하절" and "지하철." The first is an incorrect spelling of the word for "subway" and the second is the correct spelling. I have to force myself to remember which "ㅈ" has the little line above it and which doesn't. "ㅈ" and "ㅊ" do represent different sounds, but I can't yet distinguish them in rapid speech, so pronunciation doesn't help. To a Korean, spelling "subway" the first way immediately sets off their mental red pencil - just as someone spelling "friend" as "freind" sets off mine.

****So I love keeping my learning log, which I write in Korean but just for myself - so I write as I would speak, without worrying about correctness, and it's very enjoyable. I wonder - which way is the more efficient for learning?

PS I think I've got some good language learning behavior too! Stay tuned.

Food at Home Part 1

2009-12-19T18:59:00.001-08:00

I do eat. For most of my meals, I cook and eat at home. Today I will take you on a short excursion to my local grocery store, kitchen and dining table.

The store

I actually have many places where I can shop for groceries. There are little convenience stores everywhere; this one is actually on the ground floor of my apartment building:

But my main store is located on the bottom 2 floors of a department store half a block up my street. I walk up, go into the back entrance, and down the escalator:

Down on the bottom floor there are the vegetables, meats, fish, and other "fresh" food: here's a sampling:

The upstairs has canned and boxed foods, breads and snacks, drinks, dairy products, cleaning products, etc - not as exotic as downstairs.

Each time I go shopping I just buy one bagful of groceries - as much as I can carry home comfortably. So I shop every couple of days. Here is a typical single bag's worth of groceries brought home from the downstairs section:

Food at Home Part 2

2009-12-19T18:16:00.000-08:00

The Kitchen

And here is where I cook. This is it - 2 burners. No oven. No microwave. (That's a washing machine, not an oven, underneath the stove!)

So every meal is pretty much a variation of the same thing. Some kind of base (rice, noodles, potatoes, spaghetti, beans, Korean dumplings etc) and some kind of stir-fried or boiled topping made with vegetables, meats and whatever ingredients I feel like throwing in. Accompanied by something - fruit, a salad, a store-bought side, crackers, bread and peanut butter, etc.

The Dining Table

Actually, I usually just eat at my desk (!), but here is a typical home-cooked meal (not quite like the rather large restaurant meal shown in previous post) laid out on the dining table:

Looks pretty much like what I'd eat at home!

A long-handled spoon and long, thin metal chopsticks are the standard Korean utensil set. Adult forks are nowhere to be found. Another blog, another day, will have to be devoted to... Korean chopsticks!

Also coming (I hope) ... local restaurants and street vendors.

Language Study and Age

2009-12-07T12:29:00.001-08:00

In my sabbatical proposal, I said I would explore the experience of the older language learner - so I thought I'd better put something in here about that.

It is different being an older learner. The biggest difference: it's harder to meet peers my age. For young people, there are parties and gatherings and lots of chances to meet Koreans and people from other countries, but I don't fit into that now. So for language practice I mostly rely on my weekly encounters with young Korean students and my conversations with shopkeepers, people who work at the apartment building etc. It's not as much fun, and not nearly as constant as having that daily interaction and practice with social peers.

In my sabbatical proposal I anticipated some other differences:

I have spoken to many older learners and observed them in class. I have learned that these students may have accomplished a great deal in their lives but they may feel that due to age, they cannot remember as well or make the same progress as their younger classmates; they may tend to stay in the background so as not to expose their weakness to the younger students; they may feel lost because they cannot make the emotional adjustment to the new culture and language as younger students can; they may feel they have lost the honor and prestige that should come with age; they may feel that they have been left behind. I expect to have similar feelings and experiences..."

I have had some similar feelings, to be sure. As far as memory - it's hard to tell. It's definitely harder to memorize vocabulary now than it was when I learned French and Spanish in my teens and twenties, but then it's one thing to learn that, say, the French word for "to begin" is "commencer" and something quite different to learn that the Korean word is something like "shi jaek ha da." Every new word is just sounds that have to be memorized. And I clearly can't memorize as well as my younger Japanese and Chinese classmates, but lots of Korean words have Chinese or Japanese roots, which helps them out. Yes, I struggle with memory, but is it due to age???

As far as staying in the background, feeling bad about lost prestige, etc. in the classroom - I'm glad to say not so much. In the classroom I feel pretty much like any other student, I think. None of us can maintain the positions we have in our own environments, and we all feel self-conscious about our fledgling efforts. Equally!

And I AM learning and making progress, even if it's slow. Conclusion: we older learners should not give up! (Duh - of course, I had already made that conclusion before I started this project - just wanted to prove it, for myself and my students back home.) And I'm sure the mental activities I'm doing - memorizing, practicing new language patterns, opening my ears to new sounds, etc. are really good for my aging brain. How did Kato Lomb learn a new language at age 86? Probably because she had kept her brain nimble through years of learning new languages - always striving to learn something new.

It was fun to read this passage in Shakespeare's Richard II, in the scene where Thomas Mowbray is banished from England for life. Does he lament the loss of family and friends, his lands, his wealth, his position, English food, English music, customs, activities.... no! He only complains of missing - his native English language:

"The language I have learnt these forty years,

My native English, now I must forgo,

And now my tongue's use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

Or like a cunning instrument cased up,

Or being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony.

Within my mouth you have enjailed my tongue,

Doubly portcullised with my teeth and lips,

And dull unfeeling barren ignorance

Is made my jailer to attend on me.

And then this aged 40-year old (!) dismisses his chance to remedy the loss:

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now;

What is thy sentence then but speechless death

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

Well, it IS hard to be a pupil at an older age - to have to "obey" a young teacher, to perform at her command, to make my mouth move in uncomfortable ways whenever she decides it's time to do so... the loss of command, of control, of competence, of confidence.... being reduced to self-conscious giggles and apologies and fretful nervousness. Many times I long to be back in the teacher's role and forget this uncomfortable learning. But... it's better than "speechless death!"

The First Term is Done!

2009-12-04T01:19:00.000-08:00

I survived the first 10 weeks of Korean study - and passed the final exam! So did almost all my classmates (a good rate, as the average fail rate, I learned, is 30% - sounds like SJCC! I guess the method worked on us - at least as far as it satisfied Yonsei's requirements.)

Here we are celebrating:

We're actually in the outdoor area of the restaurant, now wrapped tightly with plastic walls for the winter - nice and cozy, but very smokey!

Now I have a couple weeks to rest up, try to catch up with this blog (!), hang out around Seoul, travel a little around Korea, and get ready to meet my family in Japan for Christmas.

Thanksgiving at Ewha Womans University

2009-11-28T23:56:00.001-08:00

Within a mile or so in each direction from where I live there is a university - 4 in all. I attend Yonsei, and the next one over is Ewha Womans University. (Yes, it is spelled "Womans" - no plural, no apostrophe.) Every day after I finish class at Yonsei, I now head over to Ewha and go into this underground building:

Here I meet a different student each week for conversation practice (Korean and English). I met these students through Myong Hee, a health education teacher here whom I had met earlier through Clara Song. I hope to write more about this conversation experience later. But now I just want to report that through Myong Hee and her students, I was invited to this real American-style Thanksgiving dinner:

The precooked turkey, sweet potatoes with marshmallow topping and cranberry sauce apparently came from the US army base here in Seoul; the rest was made from ingredients found at Korean markets. Forks didn't make it, though. Here I am with Myong Hee:

And these are two of my conversation partners who were at the dinner, Ji Min and Shi Yun:

It was fun to be with a group of Koreans and for once understand everything that was going on! It was an interesting mix of Korean and American - a good evening.

Final Exam - and Error Correction

2009-11-21T23:10:00.000-08:00

Next Friday and the following Monday are final exams. Wow - can the first term be almost over already??

My blogging has fallen way behind! It's not for lack of thinking of folks back home, nor of things to post - just feeling busy, I guess. I will try to catch up with things soon.

For today, rather than whine about the final exam (at least for now!) - I shall post some thoughts on...

Error Correction!

There is one and only one error correction method used at Yonsei:

Yes, errors are corrected for us in bright red ink. That's it. There's no highlighting, no hints about how to correct our own errors, no writing center where we can discuss our errors - we can study the errors or not as we will.

And I often find the will is lacking. The value of studying the errors is nowhere near as valuable as doing the writing itself. That's where the real learning takes place. The teacher will never know how many times I look up words in the dictionary, how many times I check over my writing before I hand it in, how long I think about what content to put in my sentences - the pride I feel each time I finish a writing assignment.

If the teacher could be beside me while I am writing, and help me see the errors as I put them on the page, that would be helpful. That's the time the brain would be receptive to the feedback. But getting the feedback the next day, after the brain has gone on to other things, is really too late.

By far the majority of errors are "careless" - that is, I know how to spell the word or apply the grammar, but when I am thinking of so many things at once, I still make a mistake with it. Several times, I have made an error, and the teacher has taken the trouble to write out the rule I broke. Each time I felt sorry for the teacher, because I already knew the rule. It was wasted time for the teacher and actually felt insulting to me, presuming ignorance I didn't have.

I understand the teacher's goal for me is to write without errors, just as it's my goal as a teacher with my students at SJCC. The student can't feel the irritation errors cause the native reader, so the teacher must do something about that. But I wonder if focusing on the student's errors is really the way to help students avoid them.

When I write, my goal as a student is different. I want to communicate. I want to function. I feel real satisfaction when I do those things. How much sympathy I now have for some of our students at SJCC who are new to the Roman alphabet and have tremendous spelling problems. On different days they may write the word "friend" as "fiend" or "frind" or freind" or... yet they actually have learned how to spell the word. It's just that ... to them, the word looks just fine any of those ways. They know how to use the word. They just want to tell the reader something about their friend and are willing to work hard at that - but not to look up and double check minutely every single word.

Would spelling lists help? Would charts of frequent grammar errors help? I 'm not convinced. Making charts of my stupidity doesn't really seem to be that inspiring! I'd rather use the time to read some more and listen some more and study some more. That, it seems to me, would be more fruitful, and lead to better writing in the long run.

I am feeling more enthusiastic about things like journal writing - writing activities where content, rather than correctness, is emphasized. It would not bother me at all to turn in some writing and have just my content - and not my errors - commented on by the teacher. It would be refreshing! And fun!

And that will be a topic for another time - can language learning be... fun???

Food

2009-11-13T02:26:00.000-08:00

I've had some queries about what I eat. There is much to write about food here, and I hope to post more soon. For now, just thought I'd post this picture of me sitting down to dinner.

(I hope no one was expecting a movie (maybe watch me eat the whole thing?) This was just supposed to be a photo but somehow the movie button got turned on...)

A Robot - or a Teacher?

2009-11-06T02:30:00.000-08:00

Yes, all the teachers follow a script and use the same process, but I'm glad to report that one of our new ones has what is to me the spark of a "teacher." The other teachers basically present - and then test. They may be nice, or funny, or clear; they may write beautifully on the blackboard; they may have great diction and the ability to keep their oral speech more or less within our vocabulary level - but when they start the "go around the room" Q/A check, it is the same for everyone. Teacher asks; student either answers or squirms. Student gets nervous as his/her turn approaches; student breathes a sigh of relief (and probably stops listening) after his/her turn has passed. If student can't answer, teacher repeats question; eventually, if this goes on long enough, teacher gives the answer and student repeats. Student may not understand the answer, but his/her turn is blessedly over.

But this new teacher....actually teaches during Q/A. She listens to the student's effort. If the student has trouble she breaks down the question into parts. She writes a word or two on the board, giving the student a visual hint and time to collect his/her thoughts. If needed, more words go on the board. More hints are given. The student is not left floundering; instead, the student is patiently lead to the answer. The teacher uses the Q/A to figure out what the student doesn't doesn't understand and targets that. Wow! This is what it means to teach the student, not just the material. Not only do we get that moment of individual help, but the stress of the Q/A is much reduced. So simple....

This was the same teacher who broke us into groups of 3 and gave us conversation time with students from another class, and today set us up with a little team competition to practice some vocabulary - such welcome variety!

We did something...different!! today

2009-11-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

This week starts the second half of the first term. At this point they change teachers around, so we have two new teachers. But that's not what's different. These new teachers follow the same script as the old ones, so they know exactly what we've studied, and they use the same procedure to go through each lesson. Oh, there are differences - one teacher always starts with the first student on the right when we take turns around the room; another teacher starts in the middle. One teacher has us read long passages out loud and spends a short time explaining the passages while another teacher has us read short passages out loud and spends a longer time explaining the passages. But basically, the teacher could be a robot.

No - here's what was different. In the fourth period of class today, the teacher put us in 3 groups and sent two of the groups to different classrooms. Meanwhile 2 groups of students from different classes came into our room - thus mixing up the students from 3 classes. Then we paired up with a new student we didn't know from a different class, were given some conversation questions to use as starters, and were instructed to have a conversation with our partner.

Wow! We actually got to practice talking with a partner. No particular questions we had to ask. Nothing we had to report to the whole class afterwards.. No - we just got a chance to practice - stress-free - for about 30 minutes. The teacher was there to help us with whatever we wanted to ask. It was wonderful! How lively everyone became.

Was this in the script? I don't know, but I suspect so. I suspect it's Yonsei's attempt to be a little more modern. I think every Level 1 student did this today. Ah, lucky us. To just be able to practice, and to use our new skills to get acquainted with someone new, to actually communicate, without the pressure of having to perform in front of the class - I must remember how good this felt.

Itaewon, Insadong, and Ehwa Womans University

2009-11-02T01:02:00.000-08:00

I don't have pictures, but here are 3 more meaningful places I have visited:

Itaewon

This is an area not far from where Charles Montgomery lives, and I spent an evening with him and Yvonne here. There are lots of foreigners in this area. The famed "What the Book" English-language bookstore is here. The American Army base is next to here. There are restaurants from all over the world here. Really great for a little diversity! We browsed the book store, wandered the streets and went to a delightful rooftop cafe for drinks and food. I'll be returning to this area!

Insadong

Clara Song was here in Seoul last month, and one evening she invited me to join her and a friend to visit this special "cultural" area. Lots of artisans have shops here, there are old-style homes here, tea houses, narrow cobbled streets, galleries and so on. The friend was Mi Kyong, the one I later went to Seoul Forest with. We walked around, visited various shops, and ended up at this small specialty restaurant Mi Kyong knew about. Amazingly, we walked in, and there at the next table was a famous Korean actress Clara and Mi Kyong recognized - in her 70s now, but apparently well-know in her youth. (Her name for any Korean readers: Eom Aeng Ran or 암앵란). There was a fair bit of conversation between our two tables and I was even introduced and greeted. So what a great evening - Insadong, great dinner, meeting an actress, being with Clara, and making a new Korean friend.

Ewha Womans University

Yes - it's spelled without the apostrophe. This university is very near Yonsei, and one evening Clara Song (yes, Clara, once again, who has introduced me to so many people!) invited me to this area for dinner with another friend of hers, Myeong-hee, who teaches health education at the university. At dinner we got acquainted, and since then I have met with Myeong-hee several times and gotten to know Ewha a bit. Myeong-hee even invited me to go an excursion with her and a colleague to the DMZ, and I really wanted to go with them - but alas, they were going on the day of the midterm!! Amazingly, 4 of her students have volunteered to meet with me once a week to practice speaking Korean. Wow! I have already met with one student a couple of times, and will meet another one tomorrow.

So - my days have been full. It's a good thing I'm not teaching!!

Excursions

2009-11-01T00:14:00.001-07:00

I realize that the last time I wrote about any excursions was a month ago. I have actually had some kind of outing every weekend since then. Rather than have people think all I do is study for midterms, here is the run-down:

Oct 10: Evening at Namsan and N'Seoul Tower followed by rainbow lightshow on the Han River. Namsan is a small "mountain" in the middle of Seoul with a tower built on top. I took this excursion with a classmate and Yvonne Dominguez, Charles Montgomery's fiancee. We rode a cable car up to the top of the mountain - where there is a teddy bear museum! At the top of the tower - I look wistfully across Seoul - to home.

Oct. 17: A lovely day spent at the Korean Traditional Village in Suwon, about 40 miles south of Seoul, with a classmate. Gorgeous fall weather, wonderful day spent wandering around this multi-acre recreated traditional village - many many houses and shops and paths and shows and interactive activities and people in native dress pretending to go about business the old way - no crowds - really a nice day.

Oct. 23: A visit to "Seoul Forest" with a Korean friend, Mi Kyong, whom I met through Clara Song. On that day I disappointedly forgot my camera again (picture is from the internet) - not that I wanted to capture Seoul Forest, but I wanted to capture my friend. Oh well - next time. Seoul Forest is not quite a forest - trees have been planted to try to make a park out of this old race track area, and as you can see the trees haven't grown too much yet. But we had a great time walking around. Mi Kyong speaks a little English but mostly we talked Korean for about 3 hours! Most of our talk went like this:

Me: What is that?

Mi Kyong: That's a tree.

Me: A tree. And what is that?

Mi Kyong: That's a bird.

Me: A bird. Oh, and what's that?.....

And so on. I don't know how Mi Kyong held up for 3 hours but it was great practice for me.

Oct 31: Another excursion with classmates. In the town of Icheon, about 40 miles south of Seoul, is a hot springs spa attached to that big hotel - you can see a water slide jutting out. We spent a couple hours in the coed sauna section, and then a couple hours in the women's only hot springs pool room. You walk around and go in all the pools ... naked! Those are a couple of my classmates in the picture. Hazy gray skies.

Believe it or not, we spoke mostly Korean the whole day on this trip. There were 3 Japanese women, 2 of whom speak little English, and 3 English speakers (one from Hong Kong, one from Singapore, and me) who speak no Japanese, so Korean was our language. Very elementary conversation, but fun and useful to practice with each other.

Actually, I've been having a very good time.

Celebration Time!

2009-10-31T22:04:00.001-07:00

I passed the midterm!

And I forgot to bring my camera to the celebration party at a local restaurant Friday night.

So this picture is from the internet - but our food and drink looked pretty much like this. There were 11 of us students from the class and 2 instructors.

Here's what you do at this kind of gathering: you grill the meat at the table and attempt to pick it up with chopsticks (more on that in another post!) and put it in a lettuce leaf and pick up more stuff that's all over the table (kim chi and all kinds of sauces and side dishes) and put bits of things on the meat and roll it up and eat. Then you pick up more stuff from the table with chopsticks and pop it directly in your mouth - there's no individual plate at your place. Then you pour beer and soju (the ubiquitous Korean cheap alcoholic drink) rounds continuously and talk and laugh really loudly and just have a good time.

And you try to do it all in Korean.

Ah, the midterm is over. Don't have to start studying for the final exam for 3 more weeks!

The MIDTERM

2009-10-28T03:49:00.001-07:00

Wow - the first half of the first 10-week term is almost over already. We had 2 tests today (speaking and reading comprehension), will have 2 more tomorrow (listening and reading comprehension), and 1 more on Friday (reading aloud).

And I am not pleased.

No. If I had reservations about high-stakes tests before, I have them even more now. How nerve-wracking. How undignified. Previously friendly teachers suddenly have this monstrous power. They know. We don't. They're out to get us, to find our weak spots, now to judge us rather than teach us -even though they already know all that because they are with us for 20 hours every week.

I'm pondering ways for a more humane kind of evaluation, where students have more say, more chances...

Of course, if I pass, I'll feel better. Tomorrow is my worst one - listening!!

KOTESOL

2009-10-24T04:47:00.000-07:00

KOTESOL - Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - is having its annual conference in Seoul this weekend (Oct 24-25), so I went to check it out.

In scope and size it is similar to a CATESOL conference. I was surprised to see that ALL the featured speakers - all 13 of them - were white - not a Korean among them. Some of the names were vaguely familiar to me (David Nunan, Scott Thornbury, maybe some others) - the one I noted particularly was John Fanselow, so I went to his presentation, entitled, interestingly enough for a student at Yonsei:

"Huh? Oh. Aha! - Difference between Learning Language through Rote Memorization and Predicting"

Well. Here's a teacher the exact opposite of teachers at Yonsei. His message is something like this (his words copied from a website):

I have rededicated myself to supporting change; breaking rules; having contrasting conversations, and trying the opposite. Supporting change and supporting different perspectives is the only way to move forward.

To illustrate, here's from another website:

The ways he suggested we break rules were simple:

􏰀 If you normally ask students to underline words they don’t know, reverse the procedure and ask

them to blank out such words and ignore them. Notice your normal practice and do the opposite.

􏰀 Notice the difference between the way people do an activity in a classroom and outside in

ordinary life. In classrooms people sit at desks to read – there is silence. At home people

sometimes lounge on cushions and listen to music while reading. Have reading happen this way

in class.

􏰀 Take a traditional practice like reading aloud in class and change some detail about the way it is

done. Ask the student to read silently, to look up from the page and then to say what she has read

to somebody in the room. The change in detail radically changes the whole.

Fanselow’s message in that lecture was “For goodness sake do something different next Monday

morning”.

In the session, he gave us a lot more of these "change the way we do things" examples - all of which were basically puzzles (ie students presented with incomplete or incorrect information and asked to figure out or predict the complete message). As a teacher, these things make (made?) great sense to me. I too would have thought such ideas, such efforts to "shake up" the learning process and engage the mind more actively, would be productive. They would have excited me.

But as a student - I just felt irritated. Why do I have to waste time figuring out puzzles in a language class? Why do I have to indulge this teacher in his idiosyncratic approach to teaching - an approach that I know will not be repeated in the next class? Will I really learn more than by just plugging away at the words and structures I need to know (ie repeat, memorize, practice etc.)? How can the teacher convince me, the student, that this puzzle-solving effort will pay off? If the teacher doesn't do that, then motivation, trust, confidence etc - all those really important things - are lost.

The best part - I met a Korean English teacher at the bus stop; we rode the bus to the conference together, talked a while, exchanged contact info, etc. Once that was done I felt my day was made. I met a Korean. He offered to help me with my Korean. Wow.

I don't think I'll go to the conference tomorrow. I think I'll stay home and keep "memorizing" what I need to know for the midterm next week.

More on classes at Yonsei - the bad!

2009-10-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

So what's negative?

The classes are stressful!! I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. There is no relaxing. The teachers speak very fast and the brain spends 4 hours desperately trying to understand everything and keep up. Am I learning more than if they slowed down a bit and made it easier? Does the tension get in the way of learning or stimulate it?

The high-stakes exams! The teachers are with us 4 hours a day 5 days a week and know our level very well- but they are not allowed to evaluate us. No. The TEST will decide that. Next week we have our midterm - 2 days of separate tests for listening, speaking, reading comprehension, reading aloud, and writing. At the end of the course we go through the same thing with the finals. Those scores determine 80% of our grade and whether or not we pass. What if I get a mental block from nervousness, or there's some freaky vocabulary that makes me misunderstand a whole reading or listening passage, or ... I feel the same way our writing students at SJCC feel when facing board-graded exams - IT'S NOT FAIR!

For a teacher, this has got to be deadly boring. (On the other hand, teachers are relieved of the stress of having to grade the students, and they have almost no preparation to do other than correct the daily homework.)

Of course, there are other little negatives. We had to memorize long lists of Korean food dishes - more than we really needed to learn how to order food in a restaurant. We never have group work or much chance to practice together in class (though we do try to practice when we're together after class). But these things are minor. The material seems to be well-sequenced, and there's no doubt we are learning a lot. Actually, all the negatives have a plus side. The relentlessness of the class sessions and the midterm exams make us study even more. We are forced to do the work of learning. Our brains feel like they will explode. At the end of every class is the same refrain - my head hurts! Yesterday one student asked: "Can we review this material next week?" The teacher just said, "Sorry, no time!" The schedule is set; we have to finish a chapter a day. We even have a new lesson to learn the day before the midterms start.

But - I guess this is how they get students ready for Korean university in a year and a half - for those students who can survive!

I do wonder - as I wondered and hoped when I started this - if there isn't a less painful way to acquire a second language at an older age. Is all this needed to force the older brain to accept new sounds and structures and learn new words?

It does help tremendously that I am in Korea and can practice on real people! More on that later.

Thank goodness I didn't stay in Level 2.

More on classes at Yonsei - the good!

2009-10-18T00:15:00.000-07:00

So - the program is traditional, teacher-centered, and highly standardized. And - it's fast! The claim is that if a student takes all six levels one right after the other, which they can do in 6 quarters or 18 months, they can go from being a total beginner to being ready for Korean university courses. 18 months!! Does it work?

These things I have found quite positive:

No time is wasted! Class starts on time and breaks are never longer than the alloted time. Each hour is packed! No time is spent trying to get the Internet to work or looking for sites, no time spent passing out handouts, getting students into groups, giving complicated directions, etc. It's just language, language, language.
There is a great deal of recycling of material and varied practice with the same vocabulary and structures. The 3 books really support each other. We listen, repeat, memorize, copy, pronounce, and use as speaking or writing models the same or similar material over and over.
Homework and study is efficient because we know exactly what we will need to know for the next class, exactly what will be on any tests or quizzes, and exactly how to do the exercises, since they're always done the same way. It isn't boring because we're always using new language, and that's enough novelty.
The constant focus on individual daily performance (written homework, listening dictations, Q/A etc.) assures that all the students stay attentive and keep up.
We use every page of every text. The texts were developed here at Yonsei, and there is clearly an enormous pride and confidence in the value of these books and in the methods used here. This helps us to accept the books and methods, to trust that if we do all we're asked, we'll learn!

There are certainly drawbacks, which I will try to list later. But actually, I am so deep into studying and trying to keep up right now that it's hard to sit back and make a detached judgment. It's too early to tell what the results are going to be. But I have lessened my resistance to a program like this. I'm sure I will take some of these advantages and try to work them more into my own teaching when I get back.

Classes at Yonsei

2009-10-16T00:38:00.000-07:00

Sue Wilson asked some specific questions about what classes are like at Yonsei, and I did want to write about that. So here goes. About homework - yeah, we have a lot, so much that I haven't been posting as many blog entries lately. But now I'll describe - in detail (!) what the classes are like. Later I'll try to share more of my personal experience and reaction being a student in these classes.

Period 1: 9:00-9:50: Room 534 (see picture previous entry), first teacher

The fourteen students sit in a semi-circle around the room with the teacher in front. There is a chalkboard and large TV monitor that plays CDS and videos - no other AV or Internet.
The teacher begins by asking a few questions about the previous lesson and usually goes around the room asking each student in turn to answer a question.
The new dialogue is introduced, always in the same way: teacher reads the dialog while students listen; teacher reads the dialogue line by line while students repeat; teacher goes around the room after each line and has each student speak the line; teacher speaks a line, students in unison speak the next line, etc; then roles are reversed; we repeat the dialogue with books closed; we go around the room as pairs perform the dialogue - student 1 and student 2 recite the dialogue, then student 2 and student 3 recite the dialogue with student 2 taking the second part, etc.
The new vocabulary is explained (yes, after, not before, we memorize the dialogue).
We go through various Q/A and book exercises practicing the new vocabulary.
The teacher begins explaining the grammar, always in the same way: She writes the pattern of the new structure on the board with blank lines for the nouns and verbs, then gives lots of examples of different nouns and verbs that can fill in the blanks and use the new structure. We often have to take turns (going around the class one by one again) making sentences, answering questions, etc.
We have to keep 2 homework notebooks; at the end of this period we hand in the notebook with the homework we've done for this day, and she returns the notebook we had turned in the day before with the homework corrected and maybe a short comment; otherwise she doesn't talk about the homework at all.

Period 2: 10:00-10:50 - same teacher, same room, same semi-circle, same seats

It's pretty much a continuation of the first hour - more grammar, more practice questions, more workbook pages to do in class. The teacher has some printed material (vocabulary, prompts) that she shows the whole class - there are no handouts for individual students and the printed material is exactly the same for all the teachers of Level 1. She also has some pages with prepared questions and prompts to refer to for oral practice - again, exactly the same pages all the teachers have.

Period 3: 11:10-12:00 - same room, same semi-circle, same seats - different teacher

This is supposed to be our pronunciation/reading class, and we use a different companion book to the main text.
First the teacher gives us back our corrected homework from the previous class and the corrected dictation we took in the previous class; then she gives us a new dictation, taken from the reading we studied the previous day. Then she collects the dictation and home work we had been assigned.
A new short reading (short paragraph) from the text is introduced, always in the same way: teacher reads while students listen; we go around the room, each student in turn reading out loud all or part of the reading; new vocabulary is introduced (this teacher does not use any other prepared materials); we go around orally reading and answering questions from the textbook about the reading.
Then we have a short pronunciation lesson, not so much to pronounce sounds correctly as to be able to read Korean orally. There are certain letters in Korean whose sounds change depending on what letter the following word begins with, so each day we learn a new rule about how to pronounce such words together. These words are in the book; we just listen and repeat.
The teacher has "conversations" with us using vocabulary we've been learning - and a lot of new vocabulary as it comes up - just to help us practice oral conversation (and probably to keep herself from being bored silly).
She assigns the homework which is always the same: copy the new reading twice; write all the sentences from the previous day's dictation in which we made errors, and study the new reading for the next day's dictation.

Period 4: same room, same semi-circle, same seats, back to the first teacher again.

Pretty much a continuation of the first and second classes. We have a third book that accompanies the other two - a workbook - and if we have finished all the grammar and practice from the first book we do workbook pages - sometimes on the spot, and sometimes she gives us time to read and write the answers first, and then answer one by one.
She assigns the homework, which is always the same: copy the dialogue we learned in the first period twice, write the dialogue a third time substituting different verbs and nouns, write sentences using the new grammar structures but our own nouns and verbs 3X each, and then either more workbook pages or a short paragraph to write - or both.

After every four lessons we have a vocabulary test - we are given the words in our language and have to write the Korean word. The same test is given to every Level 1 student.

We will have a 2-day midterm exam in two weeks; I believe there are separate listening, writing, reading and speaking parts. It will be the same test for all Level 1 students.

Both our teachers know English, as well as most of the students in the class (and there are students to translate for those who don't), and they occasionally give a meaning in English, but 99% of the class is conducted in Korean: directions, grammar explanations, side comments and jokes, announcements, whatever.

There is no lab. There are CDs that come with our books with the dialogues we have to learn and other listening exercises; they are not assigned, and those with good listening skills probably never listen to them at home (but I spend a great deal of time with them!)

There are 14 Level 1 classes, and students were placed in their Level 1 class according to their placement test. Our class is Class 14, which is a "high" Level 1 class. Everyone in the class had taken at least some Korean before, and several are quite good (ethnic Koreans who have heard Korean all their lives, etc.). I think this is why we get the extra conversation practice, side comments etc. - and why our teachers speak extremely fast!! I cannot even imagine how the students who have not had any Korean before could keep up; most of us in this class, even the good ones (not me!), are mentally exhausted by the end of the four hours.

And that's how I spend my morning, 5 days a week.

My classmates

2009-10-11T06:39:00.000-07:00

There are 14 of us in the class - 4 Americans, 7 Japanese, 1 from Singapore, 1 from Hong Kong and 1 from Indonesia. About half are young college-age "kids," about half are young (late 20's to mid-30's) career professionals - and then there's me. A couple shots in class and out:

So far ---- it's been great! Every single classmate is friendly. I've had lunch with classmates, gone sightseeing with classmates, and been included in various activities with them. I had been fearful that my age might make it hard for me to develop relationships with classmates, but such seems not to be the case. We all have different reasons for studying Korean, but at this stage we're all in the same boat, struggling with basic communication and taking our baby steps into Korean life; age seems not to make much difference...

3-week Observations

2009-10-04T05:51:00.000-07:00

Good friend Sue Wilson asked how things were going now that 3 weeks have passed. A few observations:

The first week was pretty hard. There were so many decisions to make with so little knowledge. Many times I felt lonely and anxious. I questioned whether I would be able to do this Korean adventure. How could I approach people, and present myself, and get what I needed? Each foray out was was filled with anxiety. Each time I felt that way, I thought about the newcomers in San Jose and how they must feel when they first get here and don't know how to do things and can't speak the language. Each smile, each word of encouragement, meant so much to me. I will always be grateful to Young Kim-Park and Mrs. Park, the contacts provided by John Song and his wife Clara, who I was able to visit with during those first few days, to Kyoung-min You, the real estate agent who showed me how to set up everything, and to Charles Montgomery and Yvonne Dominguez, who provided real company and friendship at the end of that long week. Without their help, I don't know what I would have done. How much power each of us has to make or break a newcomer's day. Even the smallest bit of help or encouragement means so much.

Each of the last two weeks has been better (and certainly easier) than the first one. Settling in the apartment was huge; getting started in class, and finding the right class, was a big boost too. Now a routine is starting to settle in. I know where to shop for food. I'm slowly getting pans and plates and making most meals at home. I've found where to get scotch tape and a dictionary and contact solution and an iron and all the little things. I'm getting to know the city better each week. I have friends for an occasional outing or meal. I have something important to do (ie homework!) every day when I come home. And the weather has been great!

However, I am not immersing into Korean as much as I had anticipated. Actually, the need for company is too great. I really don't know how to make Korean friends right now, so I have been spending most of my human-contact time with the English-speaking folks I have come to know. It is so comforting! How sympathetic I feel towards our ESL students back home who continue to hang around with each other, even when they know that it is at the expense of their learning English. I hope I will find a way for more Korean contact as time progresses, but for now I am grateful for the English-speaking company.

About learning Korean: Actually, it is coming along, certainly at a much faster pace than at home. This Yonsei Level 1 class seems perfect for me. Most of the material is at least familiar, but only now do I feel that I am really absorbing and using it - at least in class. We spend the whole 4 hours hearing and using Korean - at my level. This was the pitfall of the 2 places where I studied Korean at home. At De Anza, the classes were conducted primarily in English, so I had little practice with speaking and listening. At Adroit College, the teachers used Korean in class, but it was usually at too high a level for me, and so I couldn't learn efficiently from it. I think Krashen is right (sorry, Kato Lomb!) - the value of just-right slightly challenging input (as opposed to overly challenging input) is enormous - so it seems to me now. The words and meanings just stick in my brain in ways they didn't before. And I feel so proud to be able to sit through 4 hours of class almost totally in Korean. And even though I'm not speaking a lot of Korean, I am surrounded by conversations I overhear, signs and notices I try to sound out, TV shows I watch - the whole environment certainly helps reinforce whatever learning is taking place in class.

The best part of all: the endless surprises. Three weeks ago I could not possibly have imagined all that has fallen my way. Each discovery, each success, each kindness, each "aha" moment - each one brings a thrill of excitement. Wow!!! Like just this minute!!!! Clara Song just called this minute - she's in Korea, and has invited me to meet her and a Korean friend for dinner tonight!!!......................... I just got back from the dinner. Wow! One of the best surprises of all just happened as I was writing!!! We had a great dinner and great conversation; I met a wonderful Korean (!!) friend of Clara's and we have plans to go to a concert together on Thursday night. I will end this entry as I bask in the wonder of this evening.

A Professor in Korea

2009-10-04T05:21:00.000-07:00

This is what it's like to be an English professor at a university here in Korea. This single office is about the size of 3 or 4 double faculty offices at SJCC (here you only see the back end of it.) There's a sink in there. The professor's nameplate is on a plaque by the door. Those from SJCC would recognize the name- yes, it's Charles Montgomery! He's teaching English and writing literature reviews for Korean English-language magazines and doing all kinds of amazing things. I've already written about the first time I got together with Charles and his fiancee Yvonne here in Seoul - since then we've gotten together two more times. Through them, I've gotten introduced to...bookstores!! with books in English!! Why am I so excited about that? Didn't I come here to learn Korean?? But it feels really nice to hobnob with folks from home. And they have been so helpful with advice about living here, and things to read, and food to eat, and..... it all fits in, and I am very grateful for their friendship here.

Being a Tourist

2009-10-04T04:44:00.000-07:00

I've had two fun outings going around to some of the tourist spots with recent friends I've made in my classes at Yonsei. It's great to have some friends (of course!) and people to go around with. They are from France, Hong Kong and Japan - and all speak English perfectly! So did we practice Korean??? Well... a little! Not exactly immersion, but a good time. We walked around, saw palaces and traditionally-garbed Koreans and learned a lot of history and saw and heard some traditional music and dance performances - and best of all, I had someone to go to restaurants with (a real treat!) As I look at these pictures, I realize that in both these and earlier pictures, I have on the same shirt! I think I'd better go clothes shopping!

LARGER apartment view pics - per request

2009-09-30T04:35:00.000-07:00

Here's a shot facing up toward the school (up the tree-lined street just left of center):

And one facing south toward the Han River (just follow the curve of the road between the buildings; a couple poles of a bridge and a bit of water are just visible):

That's the best I can do for now. Trying to select and position pictures and add text on this blog seems to get harder all the time! Is it Korea?? Anyway, come and visit and see the views for yourself!!

And now...With Furniture!

2009-09-28T23:08:00.000-07:00

A trip to the Recycle Center and $400 later (a bargain, I thought), the apartment looks like this:

I'm in a corner room on the 15th floor, so there are views! I'm on the west side of Seoul, and the windows face west and south, so I don't get to look toward the city center, but if I look to the northwest, I can see Yonsei University (though not the building where I study); if I look to the south, I can see a corner of a bridge that crosses the Han River. If I look down, I see a huge, ever changing world of shops and streets and people and rooftop living; at night there are bright lights everywhere. Some views going around, starting by looking toward the northwest and ending by looking toward the smoggy southeast:

My Apartment

2009-09-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

I am finally getting fairly settled into an apartment, but it took some doing! I had to choose between some much more basic, much less private, albeit cheaper, student-type rooms - or this! Finally decided on this. I like it quite well - it's perfect for one person and well-located. For now, here are some pictures of the apartment on moving day, pre-furniture:

Looking through the front door:

The kitchen/laundry on the right:

The bathroom on the left:

The living room:

The very narrow stairway:

The 4-foot high sleeping loft:

Looking down into the living room from the loft:

Home sweet home, for now.

Placement Test Result and First Days of Class

2009-09-26T23:22:00.000-07:00

The test results were posted on a big board; hordes of students crowded around, pushing and shoving to find their test result and class assignment. I finally found my name, my test result and class assignment - Level 2!! This was what I had hoped for - Level 2. All smiles, full of pride, I went to my first class.

Two days, 8 hours of class and buckets of sweat later, the teacher and I had a conversation (in Korean!) It went something like this (minus all the "what?" "please repeat" etc.)

Teacher: What is harder for you, vocabulary or grammar?

Me: Vocabulary

Teacher: I think both. Do you want to stay in this class, or do you want to move to Level 1?

Me: Should I move to Level 1?

Teacher: It's your choice.

Me: Let me think about it.

So I thought about it. Kato Lomb said - go for the challenge. I'm willing to work fairly hard at this. The Level 2 material is possibly within my reach - if I have enough time and will to study.

But - I did decide to move to Level 1. Kato Lomb sought challenge, but she also approached her language learning with joy and optimism. The Level 2 class was really stressful. We had the same teacher and same method (teacher-ask, student-respond) for 4 hours straight. We had to answer questions and perform in the class over and over again. My brain - (is it age? laziness? fatigue? insufficient motivation and confidence?) just couldn't concentrate that hard and that long, and I disliked the feeling of being put on the spot to perform each time the teacher demanded it. Perhaps my preparation really isn't up to par.

So tomorrow morning I will begin my Level 1 class - hopefully with joy and optimism. I think that there will be plenty of new material for me to learn, and I will try to supplement that with reading of my choice, real-life excursions, self-study, etc.

The Placement Test

2009-09-21T11:58:00.000-07:00

There must have been about 500 of us, seated in a big auditorium, waiting for the testing process to begin. Mostly quiet, people looking around nervously. I was glad to see a few older folks like me among the sea of young kids! We were sent to various rooms to take the test. There would be 2 parts: a written test and an oral interview.

The paper test was about 10 pages long. I was pleased when I could answer the first question! And the second! Things went pretty well for the rest of that page and a few questions on the next. After that I pretty much had to quit. But I felt ok - I could demonstrate the little bit of knowledge I had.

My interviewer smiled a lot and seemed interested in me. She adjusted her speaking level to meet mine so that I could show what I knew. Just as in the written test, I could answer a few basic questions and then I had reached my limit. Test was over.

A couple of observations:

The test was administered by the directors and teachers of the school. Almost certainly it was a local test written by the school professionals. Since answers were hand-written directly on the test paper, it was clear each test would be read and scored by a teacher. Then there was the oral interview with a teacher. Thus teachers were completely and personally involved in evaluating student ability and getting students placed in the right class. The benefit of this teacher involvement seems logical and obvious, and inspires confidence.
The interview did so much more than allow the teacher to evaluate speaking ability. It gave me a chance to meet a teacher, to ask questions. It made me feel the instructor's interest in me personally and her desire to ensure I was in the right class. It certainly showed much more about my ability than the written test alone would do, and again inspired confidence.

So - no fancy computer test, no pre-recorded listening test, no essay. I don't know if there are concerns with validation, unbiased questions, and all the things we struggle with at SJCC. My feeling, as a student, is that those things don't matter much. What mattered to me was how I was greeted and treated as as I went through the placement process and how confident I felt that the process could accurately assess my language ability. Not really complicated.

Charles, Yvonne... and Wilson!

2009-09-20T04:38:00.000-07:00

So... I had done quite a bit by Friday. I took some time on Friday and Saturday to tour the city on the Seoul City Tour bus:

visit some palaces:

and do other touristy stuff.

Then Saturday night I met former SJCC colleague Charles Montgomery and fiancee Yvonne, who have been living here and teaching English for the past year:

We had a great time visiting a bookstore, having refreshments at a sidewalk restaurant on the banks of the lovely Chonggyecheon Stream, walking around, taking in the street performers and lazer shows and all the lively sounds and colors of Saturday night in a beautiful section of downtown historic Seoul. How great it was for me to be guided around, get the inside scoop on how to do things, exchange experiences and thoughts on living in Korea, reminisce about SJCC, and share the wonderful balmy September evening in downtown Seoul with them.

And then, in the midst of jostling crowds as we walked along the Chonggyecheon, what do I hear but..."Oh hi, how are you?" I turn around... and it's Wilson, a student who had been in one of my Korean classes at De Anza College. There I am, in the middle of Seoul ... and I run into someone from home:

It was a great Saturday night!

Finding a Home

2009-09-19T22:26:00.000-07:00

I decided my best bet for finding a home was to go out with Mr. You, an English-speaking real estate agent. Eventually we found this place - the top floor of the "SKY" building. It's a corner room with 2 big picture windows on two sides, high above the hustle and bustle below. I will post more pictures once I move in - but until all the paper work gets done, I'm staying in a little hotel across the street. I'm very pleased with the location. It's about a 30-minute walk from the school. The building is flanked by two streets. The street on one side looks like this:

The street on the other side looks like this:

I took these pictures yesterday (Saturday) morning when few people were out, but actually the streets rarely look like this. Normally they are filled (really filled!) with cars and pedestrians. I like feeling in the middle of two worlds, two Seouls, in this spot. If I go out to the smaller street, and then turn left, I go into street after street of little shops, restaurants, sidewalk stands, etc. If I head straight up the big street, I come to a big traffic circle with 8 different entrances to the subway, and if I get across the circle, I come to a smaller street that leads up to the school. Actually, I have to go through the subway tunnel just to get to the street leading to the school. I have everything I need near here - big department stores, Starbucks and all that stuff, supermarkets, and little store after little store. So ... this will be my home for a while.

A Hard Day

2009-09-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was a hard day. I hadn't showered and felt grubby. I had hours to kill before I could check back into my hotel where my luggage was. I walked and walked. I breathed in the smoggy air and battled cars and pedestrians at every road crossing. I rode a big loop on the subway, trying out different lines. I sat in a little park where other idle solitary Koreans sat. Finally in my room, I got on the computer and tried to figure out how to find a place to live. Eventually I made an appointment to meet Mr. You, an English-speaking real estate agent, the next afternoon. I watched a Korean drama to take my mind off my anxieties (it really helps!) , and called it a day.

My Day with Mrs. Park

2009-09-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday I left my luggage here at the hotel where I stayed for the first 3 nights, and took off in a taxi with my overnight bag for Mrs. Park's apartment. This visit had been arranged by, once again, my most generous colleague John Song and his family. Mrs. Park is a very close family relative of theirs, and she had so kindly offered to let me stay there until I found a place of my own. She received me warmly and had a room all cleared for me. After settling in, we sat down to visit. I am glad to say her English is better than my Korean - but actually not much better. So it took us a while to exchange information about our families, why I'm here (always a hard one to explain - even in English - even to myself sometimes!) etc. Talking about the future and how we might arrange things between us proved too much, however. In the evening we ate Japanese sushi in her apartment together and watched some TV; in the morning I came back to the hotel, leaving things indefinite as to whether I would return or not.

I am so grateful for the day I spent in a real Korean high-rise apartment with a lovely, kind and gracious Korean hostess. Even though it looks like I will not be staying there (more in the next blog), I am glad to have met her and hope to have more chances to visit in the coming year....when my Korean gets better.....!!

"Ne" and "Aniyo"

2009-09-16T14:41:00.000-07:00

"Ne" means "yes" and "aniyo" means "no." These are the magic words. Hear a "Ne" - and the all the world becomes bright. Something is working, a step toward settlement is being made, there is someone who can help. Hear an "aniyo" - and a world of troubles descends. That idea won't work - now what?? How do I figure out an alternative? Amazing how much power those 2 words have to a newcomer. This is the hard part - setting up living, bank accounts, phone accounts etc. - trying to finish all before school starts next week. Stay tuned for news about how all this works out. Wish me luck!! Ne!!

A Terrific Morning

2009-09-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

Right up that tree-lined street is Yonsei Korean Language Institute, where I will be studying. And right next to me is Young Kim-Parker, a family friend of SJCC colleague John Song. Young is American but spent the last year here in Korea studying at the same institute. She is going back to the States this week but graciously spent one of her last mornings here with me, showing me how to cash money, ride the subway, get to Yonsei, order food, etc. We had a terrific morning, and I learned a lot! Thank you, Young!!

In Seoul

2009-09-12T22:29:00.000-07:00

I made it this far! This is the view from my hotel room - there is Namsan (or "South Mountain" - the hill behind the buildings) and the Seoul tower right there in the hazy background. Somehow I managed to get my tons of luggage and myself to this hotel last night, had a good sleep, and spent this morning walking around. Now this afternoon I'm sitting in my cool hotel room and contemplating next steps.

Some early observations:

Traveling alone: not easy! Things that seem easy with a partner seem daunting when doing them alone. Fortunately, the need for food, and money - and coffee! - and the need to learn - force me out the door.

Speaking Korean: Day 1: Total failure! Every time I tried to say something to someone in Korean, they either just looked at me and said "huh?" - or acted as though I hadn't spoken at all. In the end, it was just easier to use English - almost everyone I spoke to had at least a smattering of English, and I became too intimidated to try any more Korean. Day 2 (today): partial success! I could not figure out how to set the air conditioning in my room - so with a combination of English, Korean and sign language I asked a maid about it. Turned out I had been monkeying with the floor heating settings instead of the air conditioner - when she saw what I had done she looked aghast, punched a bunch of buttons, said "hot, hot!' and "No touch, no touch." The air conditioner control turned out to be a remote control device I had overlooked. In all this I did keep saying things in Korean like "It's too hot" and "I don't know how." Whether she understood my Korean words or just the gestures I don't know, but at least she didn't say "Huh?"

Seoul: Wild and crazy! Traffic like Guadalajara (ie it doesn't move; lanes are narrow with no shoulders; taxis, buses, motorcycles, cars all vie with each other over any possible space that opens up to move forward). Layout of the city seems complicated with hills and tunnels and twisting roadways seeming to separate and intertwine sections. Lots of standard, block-style high-rises, and a few spectacularly dramatic modern buildings, art work, arenas, bridges, etc. Lots of pedestrians. In my hotel area, there is a mixture of main thoroughfares and big buildings and places like Starbucks and KFC and Dunkin Donuts and signs in English, and little alleys with little shops and sidewalk venders and mysterious stairways and nothing in English. So far I have only ventured into establishments on the main thoroughfares, but time and growing (hopefully!) confidence may lead me down some of those alleys...

Night comes early here in Seoul; it's now almost 4 o'clock and daylight will end soon, so I'll be off for one more foray.

I'm Off

2009-09-10T15:59:00.000-07:00

I'll be catching the plane in a few hours and arrive in Seoul tomorrow evening. This week has been busy with all the packing and gathering of documents and advice and saying good-bye and whatnot. Someone asked me how I was feeling. Excited? Yes. Nervous? Yes. But mostly amazed - that all the preparation and anticipation is over and the actual journey about to begin. I am also feeling that I will miss dear friends and family and home... but onward to Seoul I go.

Packing

2009-09-07T21:20:00.001-07:00

Somehow all of this:

Has to fit into this:

Hmmm...

How to Learn Korean

2009-08-16T15:47:00.000-07:00

How to learn Korean? I wish I knew. I teach students how to learn English as a second language, but I am not at all sure I can apply what I teach to learning Korean myself. So for now I turn to a different expert .

Kato Lomb supposedly was proficient in 17 different languages. She began learning languages as an adult and took up her last language, Hebrew, at age 86. Wow - she even impressed Stephen Krashen, who was inspired by her to take up a new language at age 54. How did SHE do it? The main thing - she taught herself! The drive, the methodology, the persistence, came from her own invention. So that's the main thing I picked up:

It's not really HOW, it's the inner drive to learn, to question, to figure out, to try, to communicate that makes language learning successful.

I also picked up this:

Lomb is supremely confident. She KNOWS she can learn. She isn't daunted by the difficulties. So CONFIDENCE really helps.
Lomb suggests jumping into hard stuff right off the bat. Start reading a book even if you can't understand much of it. If you take a class, try to get into a class more advanced than the one you placed into. Start with a full, thick (even monolingual!) dictionary. Then actively try to figure out what is going on; make your own discoveries about how the language works.

For most of us, this goes against the grain. We want to start at the beginning, go step by step. We want "comprehensible input." We are overwhelmed and frustrated when the material is too hard. But perhaps for the student with enough MOTIVATION and CONFIDENCE, this is a shortcut to faster learning. It worked for Lomb. (Should we give our ESL students who want to take a higher class than they placed into a chance to do this too?)

For me, I do not yet seem to have sufficient motivation and confidence to make this work in learning Korean. But perhaps when I get there...

Colleague Scott Alkire is the one who managed to get this book translated and published in the US, and he wrote a wonderful preface to the book comparing Lomb's experiences to modern Second Language Acquisition theory. The book is available online at TESL-EJ.

What a Sendoff!!!

2009-07-30T22:36:00.000-07:00

July 25 - Friends from San Jose City College provided an amazing send-off with banners, balloons, BBQ ribs, chicken, wine, beer, cakes, pies, brownies, candles, flowers, Paul Anka, Stardust, Irish jigs, Korean books, presents, hugs, laughs, talk, comraderie, good will, deep friendship...and more and more! My heart is full and I can only feel deep gratitude and love for such a level of generosity. I loved the party!! I can't wait for Korea - and I can't wait to come back! Thank you!!

A link to pictures will hopefully be added soon.

Takeoff

2009-07-09T09:02:00.000-07:00

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Asiana Airlines 12hr 10min | 5639 miles

So there it is - scheduled takeoff and arrival in Korea.

The Korean Consulate

2009-07-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

Well, I managed to get... a 3-month student visa. So I will have to get it renewed in Korea. But that's fine - it will give me an activity to do! Here's the Korean Consulate in San Francisco - a lovely spot atop a hill on Clay Street overlooking the bay. They were not encouraging, though, about my plan to study AND teach. If I study - no, no, I cannot teach. If I get a teaching contract, I can get a teaching visa - but then, no, no, I cannot study. So, I will begin by being a temporary student, and see what happens after that.

Korean Language Institute at Yonsei University

2009-06-24T23:39:00.000-07:00

My Korean course will be at Yonsei University. Here are some pictures of the university campus - pretty, huh?

This building, I believe, houses the Korean Language Institute where I will be studying:

Here's a winter view!

The Korean Language Institute is located right next to the one circled on the campus map, at the far back end of the large Yonsei campus.

Hard to imagine this is located in downtown Seoul - but so it would seem to be. Click here, then click on Yonsei University and zoom in to see where in Seoul this place is. The satellite view is particularly fun.

This last picture, called "Yonsei University Street," apparently depicts the area around the campus. There are actually 4 or 5 universities all in this general area, so there are supposed to be lots of restaurants and bars and dance clubs and norebangs (Korean karaoke) etc. - should be interesting!

So that's the place.

Learning with Korean Dramas

2009-06-16T16:30:00.000-07:00

When I lived in Guatemala, I used to watch the Spanish -language soap operas. They were great and really helped my Spanish. So now I watch Korean "dramas" as they are called. This was my first drama - The Emperor of the Sea - a 51-episode drama about a famous merchant whose influence supposedly brought prosperity and justice to the Shilla Kingdom in Southern Korea around 800 AD. Only about 6 things ever happen in this drama (characters peer out to sea on a boat, or they sneak around with swords and slaughter all their enemies in a sword fight, or they sit around a table and talk, or they hide and then peer around to look at the person they love with longing eyes, or they hide and eavesdrop on their enemies, or they ride around on horses.) Still, the scenes and costumes and manners and sound of the language seemed beautiful to me, and the cultural messages gave me pause. Here for example are two:

In these dramas, when characters (at least the "good" ones) review their life, they tend to ask, "Did I serve enough? Did I help my friend (family, country etc.) enough? Was my life used well enough to protect what I value?" Americans, it seems to me, tend rather to look back and ask,"Did I live life fully enough? Did I dance, love, risk, etc. enough?" Our focus tends to be more self-centered, more on whether we grabbed enough for ourselves. (Am I right on that?)

When things go wrong, the "good" characters generally accept the blame. If a friend betrays them, it is because they did not care enough, did not inspire enough, , did not help enough. If a battle is lost, it is because they did not lead enough or plan well enough. It is never someone else's fault. They do not resort to lawyers to investigate all the defensive people who claim it was someone else's fault. The "good" characters look to see how they (not someone else) could and should have done better to avert a bad outcome.

I like my own culture, and I like the emphasis on individual opportunity, but these dramas prod me a little. Of course, there are all kinds of other things such as the emphasis on the role of fate and on hierarchy and on obedience and on national pride and.. lots of food for thought.

And - what a great way to hear spoken Korean. My teachers say my pronunciation isn't that bad; it that's true, I owe it to the hours I have spent watching dramas and getting a feel for the sound of the language (even if I can't catch much of the meaning of the words.)

For anyone interested in a taste of Korean (or Japanese, or Taiwanese, or Chinese dramas) these websites can entertain you for hours: Mysoju and Dramacrazy All are with English subtitles.

Studying Korean

2009-06-15T06:13:00.000-07:00

I am nervous about whether or not, at this later stage of life, I can actually learn a language like Korean. I started out just listening to subtitled dramas on TV and studying what I could on the Internet; then I found Adroit College. This is a private language school in Milpitas; classes are small (about 5-8 students per class) and run for 3 hours one night each week for each 10-week quarter. So far I've taken these classes:

Beginning Korean 1: I didn't actually take this class, but got private tutoring at the school to learn this material so I could join the next class the following term.
Beginning Korean 2: I took this class once. (If you look real close at the Winter 2008 graduation picture pictured above you can see me sitting in the front row, third from right, with my Beginning Korean 2 graduation certificate in hand.)
Beginning Korean 3: I took this class 3 times! This was the first class where the teacher spoke primarily Korean in the class. Wow.
Advanced Beginning Korean 1: I've taken this class 2 times - just finished my second try at it.

As you can see, it's not going really fast. In addition to these classes, I took two quarters of Korean at De Anza College: Beginning Korean 1 and 2. Korean is hard!

This week I will start the Advanced Beginning 2 class. While taking this summer session I hope to get more serious about analyzing learning methods and strategies and making progress and what works best and so on.

2009-05-17T19:01:00.001-07:00

Greetings!

In about 3 months, I'll be heading to Korea to study Korean and find out what living in Korea is like. I plan to post news, pictures etc. on this blog. To anyone interested in a look now and then, I invite you to join me here.

The hangul (Korean alphabet) posters on the bedroom closet door were given to me over a year ago by Harold (my husband), and the book was given to me recently by my good friends Leslie and Kathy. They, and all my family and friends at San Jose City College and elsewhere have been very supportive in encouraging me to do this. Thank you all.