All Kinds of Rambled Stuff

Hmmm… Where to start. How about a Korean Language update?

In late November, I signed up for a second Korean class, this one taught by the Korea Foundation Cultural center. It’s free and the teachers seem to be university students. I had to take an exam to get placed into a class for December. I tested into Beginner 1, almost got into Beginner 2. I found out after the test that Beginner 1 meets on Wednesdays at 4:00pm. Hmmm… With some annoyance, I informed the people who put on the classes that I happened to have a job, so wouldn’t be going to any classes. They told me that the Beginner 1 class always meets Wednesdays at 1:00pm, so when I re-tested in January, I would have to pull myself up to level 2. Hmm…

Fast forward to the end of December. I had been determined to cram for the last two days before the test. That determination had lasted up until the last two days before the test… Then other things just seemed to come along. So, I studied not at all, but I had been practicing in the intervening month; I’d studied a couple beginner Korean books and done some flash cards and bumbled around Kangwhado inquiring after missed buses. When I got to the testing center, the guy from the last month remembered me. “You must test into level 2,” he reminded me. No pressure. Should have crammed more (at all). Damn.

The test seemed to make more sense the second time around. Things I had guessed at before now made sense. Things that were completely foreign now contained enough clues that I could magic up a guess after piling inferential logic on top of inferential logic on top of my 10% comprehension. After I handed my test in, they asked me to fill out a new registration form (they couldn’t find my November one). I did so, then they looked it over and started talking about it. This is when I reminded them that they still hadn’t told me my score. Did I get into level 2, or what?

Nope. It’s level 3 for me! Oh, hell… I had gone on to answer the level-3 set of questions on the exam mainly so that I could gauge how much higher I’d need to score next month to move up. I didn’t actually want to be in the level 3 class… At this point, I requested that the test proctor kindly knock me back down to level 2. He refused (I think that level 1 & 2 fill up every month, and level 3 doesn’t). Damn. He did say that if I wasn’t learning, I could talk to the teacher about getting knocked back to level 2. Hmm… Okay… This was going to be rough.

I went to my first class on the fourth. I had memorized a few stock Korean phrases before the class, like: “Sorry, I don’t have a clue,” and “don’t ask me why; I guessed,” and “I’m only here because I’m good at taking tests.” I was prepared.

The class was all in Korean. Ruh roh. Fortunately, of the dozen people there, there were probably 4-5 who were worse at this than me. Phew. There were also at least 4 who put me so utterly to shame that I wonder if I’ll be where they are in… well… a long time. I comprehended all the stuff, though! My head hurt. I went to my second class last night, and damn, my head still hurts. For those of you who have learned another language like French, German, Spanish, Italian, I say nay: you haven’t learned another language. You’ve just learned a new set of words.

My Korean classes have given me new faith in my own job as an immersion teacher. It’s uncomfortable, but damn, does it ever make you learn. When I first started studying Korean, I used flash cards to memorize the most common 150ish words. This worked, but it was painfully slow, focusing on 10-ish words per day, plus cycling through the entire accumulated list for retention. It took weeks of practicing about 45 mins/day. After just 2 immersion class sessions, I’ve transcribed about 80 new words on flash cards, and about 70 of them I know well enough to recognize them immediately (though recalling them is harder). That’s just from the 2 class sessions, with almost no practice outside. Not bad at all.

Now, you have the privilege of hearing me espouse upon and complain about why I claim that learning another Germanic/Romance language is for sissies. The basic underlying structure of them is roughly the same. They have the same types of words (verbs, nouns, adverbs, articles, prepositions, etc). We’re not even going to go into how much easier sharing an alphabet makes things (not in this post, anyway). Move on over a few continents, and things change a bit.

Here, it’s all about messing with words. Prepositions are little magnetic bits that attach themselves to words, rather than being words on their own. I like to think about every sentence like a cell. There’s all the little organelles like nouns and adverbs and such, and they all shift a bit and get a little gooey if your sentence is getting complex. Then there’s the nucleus. The nucleus of the Korean cellular sentence is the verb-pile. The verb-pile is where all the important verbs, verb-bits and verb-altering bits twist around each other to produce the messenger RNA that tells the rest of the sentence what to do. The verb-pile, like all nuclei, is relatively dense. In fact, it’s usually one little phrase or even one word. Here’s an example of a sentence I’ve translated directly:

Subway(by) the supermarket(to) don’twanttogobut food buyneedto.

This cellular sentence is miotic; it has two verb-pile nuclei: don’twanttogobut, and buyneedto. One interesting problem which arises often (and which I point out to every single Korean who tells me that learning Korean is easy) is that “don’twanttogobut” is in fact not in the dictionary. Go figure. If it were, that would be a very very very large dictionary, since this word would be mashed between: “don’twanttogoand,” and “don’twanttogotoo,” and the “go” section of the “don’twantto” volume, would be between the “don’twanttogive” section and the “don’twanttogorge” section.

Of course, my kvetching about not being able to find verb-piles in the dictionary is just me being dramatic. Each verb-pile can of course be split down into its individual parts, and all of the parts can be looked up in the dictionary. Almost. You see, many (most) sets of words sound kinda awkward when you smash them all together, so the beginning & end of each word are massaged (unapologetically changed) so they will merge together better. In order to look up any word amputated from a verb-pile, you have to first massage it back into its original form, for which there are many arcane rules and many heretical exceptions. This, of course, assumes that you even know where to cut to properly separate all the various words in the first place. If you do know all of these things, chances are you already know what the damn word means. Korean dictionary makers have it easy.

when I briefly studied Latin, it was a great comfort to know that with a good enough dictionary and grammar book, I could translate most Latin stuff if given enough time. Now I take comfort in knowing that I can translate most Korean stuff if given enough Korean co-workers who I can convince to translate it for me.

There is progress, though. I can now take standardized-forms of verbs and mash them into present tense, continuous tense (am going), and can take stabs at past/future, though these stabs still often miss. I’m gettin there.

Next order of business: Snow!

It’s been cold in Seoul.  -17c (about 0 Fahrenheit) I think was the lowest so far. It snowed a bit on the 26th of December, but it melted away quickly. Not long before New Year’s it dumped more snow. This time it was snow in volume. One foot or so.

Seoul usually doesn’t get much snow, just cold. I’m told the Korean news agencies are reporting this as the most snow Seoul’s gotten at once in over a century. Wow. Seoul called in the army to shovel all the stuff off the streets and sidewalks. Shopping centers had employees out en masse sweeping off their entryways. Just in the last couple days, it’s started melting a little.

I had just taught my students logical discourse format and had them map out arguments. The day of the great snowing, one of my students presented me with a formatted argument for why we should cancel class to play in the snow. Well done, kid. I had them work quickly, and we called the class with 30 minutes remaining. There was much snow thrown, and even some knocking of people into snow drifts. A few of the kids got up the courage to throw snow at me (they would never consider doing this to their Korean teachers). In fact, one kid got yelled by another teacher for throwing snow at me. I gave better than I got, though, mostly through being devious. Oh, there was one rule to playing outside: no speaking Korean. Any kid who spoke Korean was banished back into the classroom to finish their work. This happened to one student. Poor guy. The janitor and several teachers were shoveling snow off the walkways and clearing the glass roof of the amphitheater (a mammoth task). My merry students were adept at undoing their work, especially when they threw each other into snowdrifts, where there would be much flailing and hurling of huge armfuls of painstakingly shoveled snow.

I solved this problem by getting two snow shovels and rotating them among the students and myself. While we still displaced a lot of snow, it was utterly dwarfed by the amount that the two shovelers would clear away. Teacher-relations were salvaged. It is common knowledge amongst all communal bodies that people who are being punished (ie: made to shovel snow) are traditionally fair game for ridicule. Thus, the snow-shovelers often had snowballs thrown at them. This struck me as a really really bad idea on the part of the snow-throwers. They soon discovered this after being on the receiving end of a few shovel-loads of snow.

I’m going to call this post here. What’s coming next requires some kind of satirical format, and I’m still mulling over how best to convey it. Stay tuned.

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