She said:
I feel like every foreigner in Korea who hasn’t learned (or isn’t learning) the Korean language is missing out – especially the majority who are teaching English to Korean kids. Learning Asian languages with such difficult and seemingly complicated writing systems has always totally freaked me out. In fact, it was one of the reasons (along with being a stereotypical teenager and doing the exact opposite of my parents) that I didn’t take Japanese in high school when I could have. Ryan and I had always planned to learn Korean here, but as soon as we got here, it became apparent to us that we NEEDED to learn it. It’s really disconcerting and alienating to not be able to understand even the most basic things around you, to not be able to ask questions, or read things on a menu.
Although it seems like most of the foreigners we’ve met have learned only the very, very basics necessary for survival (even the people who have lived here for like, 8 years!!), we jumped right into it and signed up for a Saturday beginners Korean class at the Gwangju International Center. After a month of classes now, we’ve just finished learning all of Hangul, the Korean alphabet, which means we can now sound out just about anything, even if we have no clue what it means. While a month seems like a lot of time just to learn the alphabet, I feel like I’ve learned so much more!
As a native English speaker teaching Korean kids, there are a lot of things they say, or ways they pronounce things, that didn’t make sense to me, until I learned to say all the Hangul characters. For example, there’s no ‘f’ sounds in Korean, which is why most of my kids replace this with ‘p.’ Also, ‘p’ and ‘b’ are much more interchangeable in Korean, so my students commonly mix those sounds up. Along with the alphabet, we’ve learned some simple words, like the word for ‘our.’ In Korean, however, this same word is also used for ‘my,’ which explains why our students are confused when we insist that they say ‘my mother,’ etc. We already know the polite word for ‘yes’ is ‘ney,’ but our teacher taught us that the casual form is just like an ‘uh’ sound, which explains why our supervisor frequently says “uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh!” While vigorously nodding her head when we ask her a question – I thought she was just making random sounds before! Today we learned that the ending of the word teaching (‘nim’ in ‘son-sang-nim’) is a really high honorific used for teachers and a few others…if only our students actually respected us as much as this honorific implies… Seriously though, I feel like my mind is blown by some linguistic or cultural revelation at least once in ever meeting of our Korean class, and it’s fantastic!
We also found about a language exchange group that meets at a coffee shop downtown on Sunday evenings – Koreans and foreigners who practice language together! We went last weekend, and although there ended up being only one Korean person there that day, we ended up learning a lot! The group is organized by an Egyptian woman who has been here for four years with her ten year old daughter. Her daughter has been going to a regular Korean school, and seems to be pretty much fluent in Korean, along with speaking English and Arabic, and working on Chinese – I’m so in awe of this girl! She very effectively taught Ryan and I how to ask about prices, and to understand the numbers used for money, even quizzing us on numbers like 167; 2,743; etc. So impressive!
Learning Korean is by no means easy – I admit that more often than not, I still feel like I’m just drawing pictures more than writing anything intelligible, but it’s so eye opening to learn the little things. I already believed this before, but language and culture are so inextricably intertwined that the only way to really even try to understand another culture is to learn the language.
It feels really good to know that by the end of this year, I’ll be able to add ‘learning a language with a different alphabet’ to my list of language experience: speaking Japanese as a four year old there, and then forgetting it all; studying French for eight years, and totally immersing myself in it for a year; learning Wolof (Senegalese language) IN French. Now Ryan just needs to start teaching me German!
– Sarah
He Said She Said: Gwangju 