Home base

There's not a whole lot to update on at the moment. I've mostly just been in my work routine and haven't been doing anything super exciting lately. But here's a general update anyway!

The last month has been full of ups and downs as far as adapting to my new home goes.  I've had a rough few weeks as far as my language skills go - people have been talking really quickly and I've been unable to spit out the words that I need - and the weather is getting colder, which is really bad for my social life. I can't handle cold very well, so in winter I tend to shut down and not leave my room except for necessary things. I fulfill my obligations, like school or work, but for most of the rest of winter I just hole up in my room and don't go out to do things with people. If I had gotten here a month or two earlier, I would have been able to do a lot more out in the city because I would have been happy with the weather and willing to go out by myself. Now I need the push of an obligation to someone else in order to force me to leave my room.

On the other hand, I've been randomly struck by a desire to go back to London.  My first reaction was that I shouldn't be wanting to leave so soon after getting here, so something must be wrong.  But I've been forcing myself out into the city more despite the cold, and every time I'm reminded of how much I love it here. I thought about it, and I've realized that I want to leave because I've established that Seoul is my home base now.  I have a routine, I have my regular bars/clubs/restaurants/stores, and I'm familiar enough with things that I feel completely comfortable most of the time.  The language barrier keeps me on my toes, but it still feels like I've actually settled in.  And once I feel comfortable, I feel the need to do something that throws me out of my comfort zone a bit.  I don't want to go to London and then go back to the States. I want to go to London and then come back here.  I'm going to say that wanting to travel now is a good thing, because it means that I feel like I have home base set up here.


The minor news:

• Be on the lookout for a post about the Seoul Lantern Festival, which is going on for the next couple of weeks.  I'm not sure when I'm going to head out to see it, though.
• I have almost all of my usual tea-making supplies again (why can I not find a good teapot???) and have been very happy ever since my tea order got here because tea is important.
• I've pretty much completely transitioned to PC gaming, but I'll always miss my xbox to some degree.
• I'm pretty sure I have an addiction to notebooks - I can't resist buying one or two every time I go out to a stationery store. They're just so cute! (and useful)
• The TOPIK is coming up in 2 weeks and I'm nowhere near ready for my brain to be that fried.

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.

TOPIK

My paperwork has arrived in Korea and now I just wait for it to be processed.  I'm guessing it'll take a week or so, so no more updates on that front for a bit.

Meanwhile, I've been looking into prep for the TOPIK. (Click the link to read about it on Wikipedia~)
For those of you who didn't click the link, the TOPIK is basically a Korean proficiency test with levels from 1 (you know basic survival Korean) to 6 (you're practically fluent, congrats).

In order to study at a Korean university (as a full student - language programs and exchange programs can be different), most schools require a TOPIK score of 3 or higher.  Pretty much any job other than native English teacher will ask for your TOPIK score on your resume.  There's even a separate business TOPIK, but I'm just taking the standard exam.

The first exam after I get to Korea will be in October and there's another toward the end of November, so the first thing I'll have to do is decide which one I want to take.  Registration for the October exam is in August (right around when I arrive, actually), and registration for November isn't until October.  I'm thinking I want to take the October exam so I can get a measure of my abilities as close to arrival as possible.  Why am I not waiting until I've learned a bit more and gotten more practice so I get a better score?  Because this test doesn't actually affect anything.  I don't need to take the TOPIK until closer to the point where I apply for grad school, but I want to be able to see just how much I've improved over time.  TOPIK scores are valid for 2 years, but I'm considering taking the test every year so I can measure improvement better.

One of the first things I'm going to have to get for myself once I get to Seoul is another TOPIK study book.  (I say that like I'm only going to get one. Ha.)  I recently bought one online for $30 because it looked helpful and was all digital, and so far it's looking like money well spent.  It has tons of helpful things in it, including a 47-page pdf of idiomatic expressions, grammar separated into beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels, and a pdf of the 6000 most common Korean words.  On top of all that, there are video files (that I haven't looked at yet) with analysis of each section and what constitutes a "good" answer in non-multiple-choice sections, and practice tests.

I'm trying to study now, but I just can't motivate myself to do much of anything yet.  Everything seems too far off.  Hopefully my friend Ashley, who's going through the EPIK program instead of a private school recruiter like I am, will be placed in Seoul as well so we can study together once we're both in Korea.