Korean

Korean language question:
According to Flickr this is how you say ‘hello’ in Korean.

‘Bangawoyo? Since when?

Help me out here.

(Full size page view linked here: Flickr screen shot )

Why is it that in almost every Korean language class I’ve taken there is always one guy who’s taken already taken the class once, twice, three or maybe 10 times already and still will not move on? It’s like their sad little attempt to try to be the big man on the continuing-ed campus.

The guy who hangs around, taking the level 1 class again, trying to kiss up to the teacher by demonstrating all the Korean grammar he/she already knows, by shouting out the answers when the other beginner students hesitate when called on.

Who tries to proselytize during class breaks—loudly trying to convince the confirmed atheist sitting next to you that she simply must accept Jesus as her Lord and Savior. (OK, so maybe that’s just this latest guy . . .)

But I’ve taken other classes—though this is the first one that involved a rather significant financial investment—and I’ve seen it before.

I know it would probably seriously cut into the bottom line for a lot of language institutes to get rid of guys like this, so there’s really nothing else to do but suck it up and deal. But I think there should be a limit—you can retake level 1 twice…maybe three times. But at that point you have to either move up or move on. It’s not fair to the rest of the people who’ve paid the tuition to listen to this guy incorrectly correct their Korean grammar and suck up all the class time trying to ask the teacher esoteric questions about the other words he’s learned that mean the same thing as the one she’s trying to teach us.

If you don’t know it after the second nine-week run through, you’re not gonna.

Or, the fastest way to waste the equivalent of $950 you’ll ever see. We’ll know in about eight weeks.

Today, I took my placement test for the Korean Language Program at Lingua Express, the language institute at Sookmyung Women’s University. On Monday, I start daily three-hour Korean classes, Monday through Friday, continuing until mid-March.

I can sum up today’s results by saying that if they’d just paid attention to the line on the application where I said I thought I should be in Beginner 1, it would have saved everyone a lot of time. Even though I took two months of free weekly classes at the Korea Foundation Cultural Center, and have been studying on my own using both the Rosetta Stone Online (Level 1 Korean), and Declan’s Korean Hakgyo software, this test kicked my butt.

It turns out that despite being able to count to 100 in both pure Korean and Sino-Korean numbers, order a bazillion things in a restaurant, shop at Dongdaemun, tell the vendors their price is too high, count change, give taxi driver’s directions to home and office, ask for directions to get somewhere, ask someone what they’re eating, where they’re going, and if it’s OK, Korean two-year-olds still have it all over me when it comes to communicating.

On the rare occasion I understood what the proctor was asking me, I completely lacked the vocabulary to respond. (They don’t really like it when you switch to English, but when asked what I was doing in Korea, I didn’t know the Korean for, “Husband got transferred here and I didn’t want a divorce.”) As for the written part, I could read the questions OK. I just had no idea what 90 percent of the words meant. (”This question asks something about the Korean language and something about attendance, everything else, not sure …The next question wants me to fill in words in a sequqence, but this isn’t days of week, months of the year, or numbers…I’m lost.”)

So, there I’ll be next week, back learning the Korean alphabet and how to introduce myself. Which, as I said before, is where I thought I should be. We’ll see if I’m any better by the spring.