learning

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.

So, for the record, I am not an English teacher and, neither I nor my husband is in the military. (Read statement above.)

But it gets a bit irritating to have almost everyone you meet assume that you are one of those two things. Even after they ask you why you are here and you tell them.And, it’s not just Koreans. In fact, it’s rarely Koreans who make this assumption.

I went with my “counselor” from the relocation agency to get my Korean driver’s license last week. While there, we ran into another American, a professor at a university in Seoul, who has been living in country for 10 years. (He says . . .)
He turned around to me, and asked, ‘Do you speak English? Can you tell me which of these is the right window for getting an international license?’

I do, of course, speak English, but had no idea which window was the correct one. My counselor, C, however, also speaks fluent English and Korean. (Which is why she was hired to help me out, and why she was sitting and standing next to me, and talking every where we went.) She leans in and tells him, in English, which is the right window. This, he completely ignores, following the advice of the Korean guy sitting next to him who was clearly misunderstanding what he was saying.

Anyway, we go downstairs to take my eye test and physical exam (consisting of following instructions to do one deep knee bend). When we return, the Professor has obviously had a great deal of trouble with the clerk behind the desk. We can hear him complaining across the room. He’s had to wait in two different lines… he already bought a stamp, now they want another …. blah, blah. And, I should point out that I know what he was saying because all of this is in English. Mind you, he is also now standing at the correct window. The one that C told him to go to the first time, which he ignored.

Finally, finishing his business, he comes back over to me for a chat.

“Are you North American?”

“Yes. I’m from the United States.”

“Oh, you’re an English teacher.”

“No, actually, I am here with my husband.”

“Oh, military.”

“No, actually, his compa–”

He cuts me off and goes on to bitch about how difficult an adjustment we’re going to have, how Koreans will lie to your face because they don’t have the same code of honor for foreigners that they do for Koreans. For example, he was told to go to the wrong window, and had to then find the right window just now. How I’m going to have to learn. But, my students will teach me…yadda.

All of this is in front of my counselor. Who, as I’ve mentioned, is fluent in English, and has been sitting next to me the whole time. And who very nicely tried to tell his dumb ass him to go to the right window to begin with.

Also, as I think I’ve mentioned, I. am. not. an. English. teacher! I don’t have students. If this is how well he listens in English, I can only imagine what kind of time the Koreans have had.

He then condescendingly proceeds to show me he’s going to buy the clerk a soda as an apology for “frustrating” her, then wishes me well and leaves. Never says one word to C who has been politely and silently taking this all in.

I realize that it was a hot day. That waiting in line at the DMV is no picnic in any country. But, dude, you have been here 10 years and still can’t figure out the Korean words for “international driver’s license?” Or, how to ask which one it is in Korean? David can already do that and he’s been here five months.

I wonder if most Koreans think Americans are all loud, self-important bombastic jerks who refuse to learn basic Hangul.

Somewhere in the United States, a Korean professor and a newly arrived grad student are talking. The professor rolls his eyes, ‘Oh, God, you’re going to have such a hard time here! These Americans . ..”

There aren’t many things that would make me wish I were still in college, but this is one of them.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is offering to take a university student with him on a reporting trip to Africa.

We’ll visit schools, clinics and villages, perhaps chatting with presidents in their villas and Pygmies in the rain forest. The winner will write a Weblog for nytimes.com and prepare a video blog that will be shown on mtvU.

He’s doing this to make the point that students in the United States need a more international education. We grow up so ignorant about the world outside our borders. In an increasingly globalized economy, workers of the future need information about the customs, culture and attitudes of societies other than our own.

In many other countries, students take a “gap year” after graduating from high school to get this kind of unofficial education. It’s a year, I wish I’d taken when I had the time.

Traditionally, many young Britons, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders take a year to travel around the world on a shoestring, getting menial jobs when they run out of money. We should try to inculcate the custom of such a “gap year” in this country by offering university credit for such experiences. So here’s my proposal. Universities should grant a semester’s credit to any incoming freshman who has taken a gap year to travel around the world. In the longer term, universities should move to a three-year academic program, and require all students to live abroad for a fourth year. In that year, each student would ideally live for three months in each of four continents: Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe. A student might, for example, start off teaching English and studying Latin American history in Ecuador, then learn Chinese intensively in Chengdu, then work at an AIDS clinic in Botswana while reading African literature on the side, and finish up by studying Islamic history in Istanbul. In each place, the students would live with local families.

Since I was a teenager I have wanted to live abroad — to experience a culture and life radically different than the one I was familiar with. In college, I considered studying in Spain, but different circumstances intervened and I never took the opportunity. I also toyed with joining the Peace Corps, but compelled by the need to earn a living, different choices seemed to make more sense, to be “safer.”

As a fledgling reporter, I remember interviewing a university professor who regaled me with tales of bargaining with rug merchants in Ankara and buying beautiful saris in India. I remember thinking wistfully that I’d never have the opportunity to drink tea in Thailand, the way that she had.

As time went on, I consoled myself with the idea that one day, maybe after I retired, I could join the Peace Corps or take an extended trip to live abroad. I’m really grateful that fate has intervened and pulled me out of the path I thought I was on, sending me packing to Asia while I am young enough to appreciate it.

It’s not that I think there’s so much wrong with my own culture that I have to get away from it. I just think that you learn more about your own history and beliefs when you can look at them from the outside. I also expect to learn more about the world and about people, than what I can experience from my own small part of it.

Recently, Jodi over at The Asia Pages has written about her experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Krygyzstan and how it opened her eyes to how narrowly people view cultures other than their own.

Sometimes I’d find myself shocked at what the Kyrgyz didn’t know about the United States and the life I lived there.

What? You know who Mike Tyson is but not Michael Jordan? You’ve never heard of nachos, tacos or enchiladas? You’ve never seen an escalator before? You’ve never been in an airplane?

Eventually I learned. The world may seem to revolve around the United States yet at the same time, it does not. And things that were obvious to me were completely foreign and abstract to some. It came as a shock at first but over time, I got the message: There is a world beyond the US of A.

It’s a lesson that I think too few people ever learn.

*Title of the famous book by Maya Angelou.