Learning Korean

One of the big reasons I wanted to come over here was because I wanted to improve my Korean skills.  I had heard that one of the problems with coming over here as an English teacher is that it's extremely easy to just skate by with English plus whatever survival Korean you pick up.  I didn't understand that - it's a total immersion environment.  How can you not learn?

Now that I've been here a little while, I understand why so many people leave here knowing basically no Korean.

On a daily basis, I speak little to no Korean.  At school, I'm not allowed to use Korean at all.  It's not a super strict rule, but my students aren't even supposed to know that I speak even a little Korean.  It's really hard to lie to the younger ones sometimes because they really want me to know Korean, but if they know I can use it then they won't use English in the classroom all the time.  Some of my older students know because I compared English to Korean in order to explain a pronunciation pattern or because they kept arguing that they weren't using Korean.  (Dude, I know that wasn't the Koreanized pronunciation of an English word because I understood what you said. Nice try.)

Outside of work, the only native Korean that I talk to on any kind of regular basis is my conversation partner, and we meet once every week or two.  I'm a shy person, so I'm very slow to make friends.  On top of that, I don't really know how to meet people here.  It's gonna take me quite a while to build up a group of people I can use Korean with.

If I want to learn Korean, I have to be really motivated.  Out of all the foreign teachers at my school, one or two would like to learn more but have no time, three (not including me) are actively trying to study but have varying degrees of dedication, and the rest just don't care if they learn Korean or not.  Classes don't really work with our work schedule, so anything we do has to be self-study.  I'm extremely lucky in that I have enough of a foundation that self-study should be totally fine, but one of my coworkers is starting from scratch.  I'm helping her as much as I can, but she could be progressing a lot faster if she were able to take classes.

I have two TOPIK study books and plan to get an advanced grammar book within the next few weeks.  I also have a few books on hanja, or the Chinese characters used in some Korean writing.  They're fading out of use, but they're super helpful for word roots and finding connected words.  Also, if I want to read older texts, I'll need to know them for that.

My main method of studying is actually reading. I should be reading the news, but I can't motivate myself to look up articles, translate all the vocab I don't know, and then study those words.  They're boring words.  Instead, I've picked up a couple of novels - one is a translated book by a Swedish author, and the other was originally written in Korean - and have been working on reading those.  I've tried this before with World War Z, but it was a massive struggle to get through that with all of the military terminology involved.  Right now, I'm reading The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared (by Jonas Jonasson) and it's much easier to understand.  I still don't know a lot of words, but I'm able to pick up some of them from context and I can still get the gist of what's going on even before I look up vocabulary.

I'm also trying to use lang-8.com a lot more.  Lang-8 is a website where you can post journal entries in your target language and native speakers will correct them, while you correct journal entries in your native language.  The writing level can be super basic self-introduction stuff or more difficult things like political issues or summaries of news articles.  I'm hoping to get myself to the point where I post blog entries here in both English and Korean.

Changdeokgung cultural event

This weekend I went to another cultural event through my school.  The director hears about a lot of these opportunities and promotes them to the foreign teachers.  I really wasn't feeling going to something that started at 9am on a Sunday, but my director caught me while I was developing a video-based course and I was caught off guard so I wasn't able to come up with a reason why I couldn't go.  A few of other teachers got roped into going too, so I wasn't the only one she managed to catch off-guard.

So, at 9am on a Sunday, I was at Changdeokgung Palace (창덕궁).

The event was three musical performances at different locations in the "secret garden" of the palace.  The palace itself was absolutely beautiful, but the secret garden was even better.  Admission to it costs extra, but I highly recommend it. (I got in for free because of the program, though~)

The first performance was near Buyongji Pond (부용지).  We listened to pansori (판소리), which I absolutely love. (If you're interested in listening to a short selection, here's a good one on youtube.)  The piece we listened to was an excerpt from the story of Chunhyang.  There's actually a movie made from the pansori piece, which you can watch with subtitles on youtube.  It includes parts of the song in the movie, which is really cool.

This is Buyongji pond. It's probably a lot prettier in summer when there are plants growing in it, but it was still really beautiful.
 

The pansori performance:

After that, there was a daegeum (대금) performance.  I tried to upload the video that I took, but it's too large for this blog. Here's a youtube video of the same piece by a different performer instead.

I've heard traditional music before, but the only instrument I knew by name was gayageum (가야금). I'd never heard a daegeum solo performance before, and it was really interesting.  I was expecting the clear sound you get out of a metal flute, but there were actually some harsher, buzzier tones as well. 
Once I got over my initial surprise at the change in tone quality, it was actually very beautiful to hear how each different kind of sound was used in the song.

The last performance was a court dance with a musical ensemble.

Surprisingly, the smallest flute was the loudest. Go figure.

After the performances and the tour were over, my coworkers, school director, and the woman from Korea Tourism Organization (the same one who ran the Namhansanseong trip) all went out to lunch in Insadong.  Definitely found a great restaurant to take people to when they come visit!

Overall, even though I had to get up really early in order to do this today and didn't really want to sign up in the first place, I had a great time.  I'm a bit sad that I'm not going to the next event, which is a walk-a-thon in November, but that's right around the time of the TOPIK exam and I'll probably want to do some extra studying.  There will be plenty of other events though~

New page!

Check out the helpful tidbits page for exactly what it says - helpful tidbits!  Things that I might not fully explain in a post or things that will make reading the blog in general a bit easier, some cultural and lifestyle differences that don't need a long explanation but are worth mentioning, things like that~

September --> October

My first full month has drawn to a close, and I'm really happy to be drawing closer to my first paycheck.

The hardest part about living here so far has definitely been that I got here in mid-August but won't get paid until mid-October.  I was warned that it would be a month before I got paid, but I thought that meant mid-September.

I've been living out of my savings so far, and that's been super stressful.  Trying to set up a living space from money that I set aside for other things (like student loans and emergency plane tickets home) is difficult, so I've been doing the minimum.   I don't have enough storage containers for all my things, so I don't have a place for everything yet.  A bunch of stuff is just kind of eternally being shuffled around on my table.  I don't like that I've never seen my apartment with all my stuff fully settled in it.

My first paycheck will be larger than normal because it will include training as well, but I'm still going to be on a slightly tighter budget than I hoped for the first few months to make up for everything I've had to spend so far.  Grump grump grump.  At least it's almost over - I get paid in a week and a half.

But the nice thing about living in a big city is that there's plenty to see and do for cheap or free, so it's not like I'll be unable to enjoy myself.

As for teaching, some things have gotten easier while some things have gotten harder.  I have some unruly students and a couple classes where I'm hard-pressed to keep my students from speaking Korean all the time.  However, I have figured out what certain classes of students do and do not respond well to, so I've been able to tailor lessons to their needs a bit better as time has gone on.

The weather is definitely getting chillier here, but I haven't seen leaves changing color yet.  I'm sure that will come soon enough~  I'll post pictures when it happens.  I'll also post pictures of my apartment when I eventually get everything settled, but that's still a bit away.