42 Language Learning
Learning Korean: The Adventure Continues
www.gwangjunewsgic.com
January 2022
TEACHING & LEARNING
By William Urbanski
W
ell, well, well. It is once again that unfortunate time of year to reflect on my Korean language progress. All those years ago when I first started learning Korea, I had no illusion that Korean would be an easy language to learn, but given my background in foreign languages, I figured it would take no more than three or four years to become fluent. Fast track a bunch of years and while I have not thrown in the towel by any means, certain realizations about Korea, language learning, and some other stuff in general have made me come to terms with the fact that native-level fluency, maybe, is not such a great goal after all. HURDLES OF ALL SHAPES AND SIZES As anyone who has looked into the matter surely knows, there are a couple of objective factors that make Korean a bit of a tough nut to crack, and in no particular order, here are a couple of the big ones. First of all, Korean is obviously in a different language family than English and works differently than Indo-European languages. While there are a large number of loanwords, it can be tricky to use them in a meaningful way. Then, there is the whole hornet’s nest issue of honorifics, which is kind of neat I suppose, but takes up a lot of bandwidth to not horribly offend people every time you try to say hello. Another interesting characteristic worth mentioning is that while anyone who speaks English grows up with a great deal of exposure to people speaking English with different accents, Koreans are much more homogenous in this regard, meaning that unless your pronunciation is pretty bang on, it may be difficult to make yourself understood. Things like different grammar and pronunciation are surmountable hurdles but require a disciplined and deliberate approach. Besides the scientifically verifiable and objective features of the language itself, there are a host of other issues I would dub “situational factors” that add a layer of difficulty and complexity to learning Korean. Now, I cannot take credit for noticing all of these, but some of the major ones are outlined here. The first is the fact that so many people come
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over here as teachers: a position that, well, requires us to be speaking English most of the time. Every school that employs an expat teacher is slightly different, but I have experienced quite a wide range of, shall we say, “tolerance” towards speaking Korean during work hours. Most of my schools have been very welcoming of my interest in learning Korean, but some places have basically said to not use Korean at all (a silly rule that accomplishes nothing and one that I also flouted at every available opportunity). Another social factor that I would highly doubt I am alone in observing is the tendency for Koreans to reply in English, or start talking in English when you speak to them in Korean. There are myriad reasons for this, such as the fact that most Koreans are very eager to try out a skill they have spent years honing at school and the fact that it could be regarded as a polite thing to do. The reasons for this are not particularly important to understand here, but this is in stark contrast to, say, France, where the rule of thumb could be summed up as, “You are in France, speak French.” The sum of these and many, many other social factors means that on top of the typological considerations, the average expat/foreigner actually has surprisingly few opportunities per day to practice Korean in a meaningful way. So yes, as you can see, it is not hard to dream up a laundry list of reasons why it is hard to get good at speaking Korean, but doing so actually obscures an important fact: Many people from all walks of life accomplish that very goal each and every year. Focusing on the reasons (real or imaginary) why Korean is so tough is actually somewhat counterproductive, as they are quite general and unspecified when effective language learning is a task that should be extremely personalized and very specific. To borrow a bit of parlance from Jordan Peterson, we could say that when it comes to language learning, focusing on social factors is “low-resolution” thinking and the path forward should be “high-resolution” and extremely specific. Identifying difficulties and learning through mistakes should not be an end in itself but rather a tool to change learning strategies and forge ahead in a better way.
2022-01-06 �� 9:28:18
