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.