Interlinear books are bilingual translations where the original has a translation right below each word or expression. Try them out on Interlinear Books.
For multilingual verb conjugation, try CoolJugator - a tool that can currently conjugate in dozens of different languages. It also recognizes forms and provides examples for each verb.
I haven't installed this app to try it out but it looks like just my type:
Korean doesn't but also does use hanja, and a knowledge of maybe 100 of them plus the way they work in the language is probably essential for true fluency. A lot of Koreans themselves misunderstand them: I heard one the other day explaining the 문 in 백문불여일견 as 文 instead of 聞 (which still does make sense but is technically incorrect unless you're using 文 on purpose), but they have the benefit of Korean being their mother tongue to make up for it. For an outsider, knowledge of hanja is actually a way to speed up the process of learning and understanding vocabulary, a way to create a sort of internal dictionary of root words that you can access at any time. Learning them is very highly recommended.
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It's been 15 years since I first learned Korean, and 13-14 since I've known it to fluency, and since then I haven't spent a day without spending at least a few hours using it. When learning a language you not only learn a language but also create your own way of speaking it, in the same way you do with any other language including your first one, and I thought it would be interesting to jot down a few points on what characteristics my Korean has. They are in no particular order, and I think I'll update the post from time to time as others come to mind.
가르치다 vs. 가리키다 - always make sure to properly use 가르치다. Same for 다르다 vs. 틀리다. It bugs me a little when I hear it used wrongly, but it's so prevalent that I won't ever mention it.
너무 vs. 아주. 너무 when technically used wrongly in positive sentences (너무 더워) doesn't bug me. I think trying to correct people on this is a battle that has long since been lost.
ㅇ is cute. Words that have a lot of ㅇ in them have always and still do sound cute. 엉덩이, 비행기, 꽹과리, ~쟁이, even 약쟁이 and 술주정뱅이.
That might be why I don't mind seeing and writing 뱅기 for 비행기 even though I'm a purist otherwise when it comes to spelling.
On that note, I strongly dislike seeing words like 저나 (전화) and 시러 (싫어) and all the rest of these lazy spellings.
Of course spellings like 쬐끔 for 조금 and so on are completely fine as they change the meaning. You can almost see the person making the two-finger gesture when saying 쬐끔.
가지고 - for some reason I still dislike using 가지고 where you connect it to a verb/adjective like 더워가지고 or 돈이 없어가지고. Feels whiny or unfocused, I always hear people using it when grousing on the phone with a friend or girlfriend in a low voice at a PC bang or somewhere and it doesn't make me want to do the same.
I like when phrases like 단언컨대 that are usually more literary than colloquial suddenly get popular and get used a lot for a while.
I'm not sure if I care that 부셔버리다 is incorrect while 부숴버리다 is not. Maybe I should.
Korean is a lot of fun when you get to the end of a sentence and your brain kind of wants to say two things at once and you end up with a mix of the two. I do this a lot when my mind is elsewhere. For example I saw my cat on the stairs the other day when I thought she was sleeping and wanted to say to her 오, 여기 있었어? But I also wanted to say 오, 여기 있었구나! So what came out sounded something like 여깄었크써? as my brain decided it would be a good idea to just mash them together in lieu of choosing one.
I never do any code switching (e.g. unnecessarily adding a bunch of English words into my Korean) unless I'm with a Korean who also speaks Japanese. Then it's code switching galore. It's so easy to switch between one and the other and sometimes the exact thing I want to say is in one language, not the other. Things like そう言われたくない! or 文句ある? or 平気 and so on just tend to slip out.
I still don't have a Korean name for myself. Just 데이빛 with that exact spelling. I've played around with the idea of 데이(day)빛(light) becoming 일광(日光) but that's an awkward-sounding name.
If I had to choose a surname for myself it might be 남궁. I have a tiny stuffed bear I got in 2004 that I've named 남궁덕전. He still travels with me in my pocket sometimes.
Apparently 이 is now preferred to 이빨 but I still stick with 이빨 most of the time because it's not a homonym for anything else.
I don't much care for the double 지 in phrases like 공부를 해야지 합격하지. I stick to 공부를 해야 합격하지.
Sometimes a phrase gets put on hold for usage in my head because I've only heard it used by a girl. Once I hear it used by a man as well then it's good to go. Phrases like 안봐도 비디오야, which feels a bit girlish but maybe that's just me. Outright 애교 of course is obviously girlish, but the possibly girlish phrases are the ones that get a question mark.
I use a certain amount of 막, but not too much.
Korean is the only language I talk to animals in. English just feels awkward now.
Psy released his first good song since Gangnam Style today, along with another one called Daddy which was also fine but this one is better:
The title is 나팔바지. 나팔 (喇叭) is a trumpet, 바지 means pants, and putting them together means trumpet pants...well, bell bottoms. Just in case you watched the video and weren't sure why they were pretending to play wind instruments throughout.
A few days after this post we're seeing the results of 무한도전's show this and last week. Top downloaded songs on Naver right now are dominated by the singers that made an appearance:
I don't watch a great deal of 무한도전, but their last episode of the year turned out to be a particularly revealing one.
Just to explain what the program is about before I begin, it's a group of comedians that go around doing...things every week based on a single theme. One week they will play a game where they play a kind of city-wide tag (something like The Fugitive), another one they will be dressed up as Marvel super heroes (I forget why for that episode), etc. A little bit like those 5- or 10-minute parts of late night shows like Conan O'Brien where he'll do something like deliver Chinese food, except it's a full hour and a bit in length, and a lot more people.
And it's also a really popular show.
So now that the introduction is over with, here's what this week's episode was about: an event where they recreate one of the music programs from the late 1990s, programs like these:
with the singers themselves who are now somewhat older and long since retired (most of them). The idea was to have them each perform a few of their songs, dress up in the exact same clothes as before, film it in the same way (like with the sudden 180 degree camera rolls), basically recreate the whole thing in as close to a time machine feel as one can get. They rented out a hall for that, the same size that one sees used at all the other weekly music programs, so something for about 600 people, then told viewers to submit their names if they wanted to get a ticket to the event.
Surprisingly (to them), some 75000 people applied to get tickets, so only one in twelve got to see it in person. Yu Jaeseok (유재석) said they had underestimated the interest and after doing it were sorry to all the others that wanted to come that couldn't.
After that the program aired, Infinity Challenge got the highest viewership they've seen this year:
and next week's episode where the second half of the concert takes place will certainly have a larger viewership, as there is a lot of excitement about what they did after the first half aired.
What makes this interesting: careers in the Korean music industry are generally quick, fiery, short-lived things. Lots of training goes into groups which are then carefully put together by record companies, they release a few albums, and then a few years later are gone. They disappear because 1) the record company sees sales and interest start to decline, and 2) they get 'old'. Old as in mid-20s or so. So the record companies focus their energies on new and up-and-coming groups, and the rest are tossed to the wayside. For the most part, in any case.
This is where the sudden interest in this program has come from, since cutting the lives short of these groups just five or so years into their debut means there is still a lot of fan support for them. This support / interest isn't obvious at first glance because when a major record label drops its support for a group they will more or less disappear from view, even if they attempt to maintain a career afterwards, and fan interest alone can't keep a group alive. It's why a lot of former starts will be seen playing at nightclubs since they will pay fairly good money for an 'old' singer.
And by old, well...this guy is 38:
(don't forget they're using the same style as before, so they don't dress like this in 2014)
And these girls are around 34.
And here's one of their members in 2011 without the 90s garb (apparently couldn't make it this week due to pregnancy):
So old here is like figure skater or gymnastic champion old. Not actually old.
(Come to think of it, I wonder if Tsunku and his never-ending group Morning Musume are to blame for a lot of this singer recycling in Asia or if he was just following and expanding on an existing trend.)
When I started learning Korean in 2001 a lot of these singers were still popular but in the latter half of their short careers, so about half of the singers in this episode were really familiar to me. 김건모 was in one of the first Korean textbooks I ever bought, SES was still popular in 2002 during the World Cup when I lived in Korea long-term for the first time, and I had an 이정현 album or two in 2001 to listen to in the car when driving from school to school in rural Kyushu.
So what will this do? I don't believe it'll change much in the industry, but I think for the next few months we're going to see a lot more of these events both within and outside of Infinity Challenge and similar shows. Maybe a large event over a day or two or three in a few months at a much larger venue attended by people in the tens of thousands (remember 75,000 wanted to see them this concert they broadcast this week), and perhaps a new album or two by groups that have been out of the limelight for a long time but whose members really want to release another album again.
Even though this has never been my favourite kind of music (see the link two paragraphs above for what it is), if a sudden surge of interest in these groups causes a bit of a rethink in how long careers in the industry last and what old truly means, then I'll be happy with that. We'll see soon enough whether next week's culmination of this project and whatever folllows results in the tremor, however minor, in the Korean music industry I'm hoping to see.
Also, here's the show itself - no idea how long the video will last but it's still up as of today, at least.
It's not very often that one finds a Gallup poll on a subject such as this: what Koreans think of hanja. That pdf is all in Korean. Here are some of the results:
How inconvenienced do you think you would be not knowing any hanja?
2002: 70% inconvenienced 30% not inconvenienced
2014: 54% inconvenienced 46% not inconvenienced
Do you see hanja as Korean, or foreign?
2014: 47% Korean, 48% foreign
(2002 pretty much the same)
Do you think hanja should be mixed in with hangul?
2002: 55% should be mixed 33% should only use hangul 12% don't know
2014: 57% should be mixed 41% should only use hangul 2% don't know
Starting in 2018 textbooks for 3rd graders and above will use hanja along with hangul. What do you think?
67% in favour 29% opposed 3% don't know
That's the very basic summary of it. The actual pdf gets into how in favour and how opposed respondents are, opinion by region, etc. etc.
If you're learning Korean and somewhere around the intermediate level this episode of 나는 남자다 may be of interest, as it features guy after guy for a full hour with names that Koreans find funny. The whole thing is subtitled and their names are written out, so there should be a lot of new vocabulary there for just about anyone at that level. The reason why the one guy is named Napoleon and not Napoleong is interesting too - not too many know about the suffix 옹 (翁 in hanja). So he got to be the non-nasal Napoleon.
For the first time in 6 years, the number of credit cards in Korea has fallen below 100 million. According to numbers from last month, the number of cards from major credit card companies (Kookmin, Shinhan, etc.) was 99 million. This is the first time since 2008 that it has been below 100 million - back then there were 96 million cards.
In addition, the number of credit cards per 'economically active' person is now 3.9, the first time since 2007 that it has gone below four. In 2007 the average person had 3.7 credit cards.
With the World Cup less than a year away, it's time for TV stations to start using their Portuguese interpreters, not the most sought out language until recently. I think I've already found my favourite one:
Ronaldo is introduced as 축구공 호나우도 (Ronaldo the soccer ball instead of Ronaldo the soccer player), and she then follows up with a 플레코안녕~ (kind of like saying "ssup Fuleco") that the announcers found most entertaining, with a "우리 통역사가 참 귀엽죠?" (Our interpreter's so cute)
In related news, Portuguese is now one of the ten "languages for the future" as considered by the British Council. The other nine are: Spanish, Arabic, French, Mandarin, German, Italian, Russian, Turkish, and Japanese.
This is pretty cool. I found it through a quick search for 한글 띄어쓰기 앱 on Google, and lo and behold, there is a way to automatically space your Korean. Let's write something completely random:
매일아침일찍일어나야하는회사원들이참불쌍하다고생각한다.
then put it into the input box, hit 실행, and we're done.
A few days ago I referenced a poll of Korean smokers about whether they would quit if cigarette prices were raised to 10,000 won, but since the current price of about 2500 won is nowhere near that and no plans exist to raise it to four times its current price, this poll is probably more meaningful. It asks smokers what they intend to do if prices are raised by 2000 won, which is exactly what a bill in parliament intends to do.
When smokers were asked what they would do if tobacco prices were raised from 2500 to 4500 won, 39% said they would quit, 47% said they would continue to smoke, and 14% reserved judgment.
(In comparison, for 10,000 won 54% said they would quit and 33% said they would still smoke).
Among those that smoked under 10 cigarettes a day 44% said they would quit, while 41% of those who smoked 11-20 a day said they would quit. For those who smoked over 21 a day, only 19% said they would.
"What would you do if tobacco prices were raised to 10,000 won a pack?"
54% - I would quit
33% - I would still smoke
14% - Not sure / refused to answer
Other data from the survey: 52% of those surveyed (now not just smokers) approved of raising prices by 2000 won, 39% were opposed. 88% were in favour of banning smoking in large bars and restaurants, 10% were opposed.
43% of Korean males smoked, 4% of females, for 23% in total. Smokers smoked on average 18 cigarettes a day.
Gwangju English Broadcasting (FM 98.7MHz) is set to launch the country's first Chinese radio broadcasts. Thanks to the Korea Communications Commission's multilingual broadcast resolution it adopted, it is set to begin in October a 2-hour daily Chinese-language program. The program will have information on daily life, the region, national news, news on China, among others.
There are 22,000 Chinese citizens living in the Gwangju / Jeonnam region.
Gwangju English Broadcasting began in April 2009 with all English broadcasting, but of the 63,000 foreign nationals living in the region a full 35% of them are Chinese.
Listeners will be able to hear the Chinese broadcasts through radio stations in Gwangju, Seoul, and Busan.
Gwangju is one of Korea's larger cities, the sixth-largest (fifth if you count Seoul, Incheon and the rest as a single megalopolis) and located in the southwest corner.
Here's what it sounds like - not too bad, yet fairly stilted. I get the impression she has a fairly good command of regulac (non-speech) Mandarin and is a bit nervous 1) using less familiar vocabulary, and 2) talking in front of an audience. Even for a president who is also the daughter of another president, talking in a half-fluent foreign language can be intimidating.
The number of foreign visitors to Jeju-do went down slightly from 2007 (541,274) to 2008 (540,516), but starting in 2009 (632,354) the numbers started to increase. 2010 had 777,000 visitors to Jeju-do, in 2011 visitors passed a million for the first time with 1,045,637, and last year the number was 1,681,399. Jeju-do's goal for this year is 2.2 million.
The number of foreign visitors as of March is 285,547, compared to 210,199 last year, an increase of 35.8%. The number of Koreans visiting Jeju-do, however, has gone down a bit (3.1%) from 1,818,581 to 1,762,291 in these first three months. Adding these together there is a slight increase in total visitors, 0.9%.
Comparing the money spent in Jeju-do vs. Hawaii and Okinawa:
- In 2011, 8.74 million visitors to Jeju-do spent a total of $4.5 billion,
- In Hawaii, 7.174 million visitors spent $12.8 billion,
- In Okinawa, 5.5 million visitors spent a total of $4.4 billion.
Having the same number of visitors as Hawaii may seem odd at first glance, but Jeju-do is not nearly as isolated. It can be reached by plane under an hour from any part of the country as well as from most of Japan and much of China, and Taiwan is only about two hours away. Most Koreans go there on their honeymoon and well-off Koreans will go there every few weeks to golf. I've been there three or four times too.
Buried in my YouTube account is the following video of a temple there from six years ago, grainy and eerie:
I keep track of the numbers of visitors to Jeju-do (the island in the south of Korea with the mildest climate in the country) from time to time, and this year's numbers are particularly interesting. A few years ago (seven or eight, I think) Jeju-do established itself as a visa-free zone for certain countries including China, making it the easiest location in the country to visit for a Chinese citizen. Since then the number of Chinese visitors has increased each and every year, and now they make up the vast majority:
More and more foreign nationals are visiting Jeju-do, but in a more skewed fashion. As of the 16th of April, the number of outside visitors to Jeju-do is 394,291, a 40.3% increase compared to the same period last year when the number was 281,052. However, the numbers look very different when visitors from China are excluded. Those from China numbered 277,981, an increase of 78.3% compared to last year's 155,871 at this time. Excluding these, the remainder numbers a total of 83,256, a decrease compared to last year's 92,056 at this time. The number of people from Japan has decreased considerably, decreasing from 46,536 to 30,551, a reduction of 34.3%.
I have one more article I found in Korean on these numbers to reference, and will probably post that tomorrow.
A mock space shuttle is displayed in the lobby of the Mangyongdae Children's Palace in Pyongyang, North Korea, Thursday, April 18, 2013. The label on the space shuttle reads "Roundtrip path to space" and "youth" on the bottom. (AP Photo/Alexander F. Yuan)
"Roundtrip path to space?" Oh, you mean 우주왕복선, clearly displayed on the model. That's the word for space shuttle in Korean, which literally means "space round trip ship" (not path) if you truly want to break the word down into its component parts. But the correct translation is just space shuttle.
Here's the other translation done by the New York Times that stood out to anyone with a good proficiency in the language. So why is the translation for a language of such geopolitical importance being done by such rank amateurs?
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North Korea not publishing news in any language but Korean for a day was enough to make the news a few days ago. Looking at their site they are publishing in multiple languages again so this was not really anything worth noting. On the other hand, it does make one wonder how many news agencies need to rely on other languages besides Korean for their news on what North Korea is thinking at the moment. Even official agencies can mistranslate their own statements, sometimes purposely, giving a different impression in another language. Ahmadinejad's "Israel should be wiped off the map"-type comment (اسرائیل بايد از صفحهی روزگار محو شود) was apparently translated in the "wiped off the map" way by an Iranian news agency, don't remember which one. And even the most prominent news agencies sometimes come up with some pretty nonsensical translations when it comes to North Korea.
New York Times needs a new translator: has translated 독기어린 치맛바람 as "venemous swish of skirt". reddit.com/r/worldnews/co…
— Dave MacLeod (@mithridates) 14. März 2013
That venemous swish of skirt "translation" was either: 1) bad enough that the translator needs to find a new job, or 2) done intentionally in order to make the statement sound comical. Either way, it does a disservice to the reader.
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Here's an episode of Roller Coaster that may appeal to Korean language learners more than the average episode:
It starts out with different types of 몰라 (I don't know, who knows, no idea...) said by women - the first one is the angry one, the next is the oh I don't know (= please buy it for me) when holding up something while shopping together, and the third one is the pretending to be embarrassed 몰라 when asked for a kiss. After that we have what 미안해 (sorry) can actually mean, 맘대로해 (do whatever you want), and lots of others. Somewhat exaggerated and generalized for comedic effect, but worth a viewing or two or three depending on your Korean level.
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time, to serve as a reference for whenever I am asked how I learned Korean. To begin we will need a bit of linguistic background to show where I was just before I began learning it.
My linguistic background until beginning Korean: only English until the age of 18 with the exception of the few years of French all Canadians take in and quickly forget after school, one semester of Japanese in grade 10. At the age of 18 after beginning to work in offices in downtown Calgary and disliking it I decided to learn Japanese to fluency and thereafter devoted my every waking moment to it while still working full time, temporary office jobs. In 1999 I lived in Japan for the first time for almost a year, took the JLPT level 1, failed it by a few points, later took it again in December 2000 when I was living in Vancouver, passed it, returned to Japan in April 2001 (Kurume, near Fukuoka), and began to learn Korean then. I also learned a bit of Estonian in 1998 and lived there for a month.
In short: English mother tongue, a tiny bit of French, a tiny bit of Estonian, and fluent Japanese before beginning Korean. Learning Japanese took a total of three years, and having this base helped me immensely with Korean, more than knowing any other language could have.
First contact
First contact with Korean: this was actually in Vancouver while studying for the JLPT for the second time: while reading a Japanese book about common vocabulary between Japanese and Korean I picked up a few words, as well as hangul, which does not take a great deal of time to learn.
Second contact with Korean: this is when I first began seriously studying the language. I was in Japan for the second time, teaching English to kindergarten students during the day and adults at night, driving around rural Kyushu in the car provided to me by my company. I study languages fairly intensely and as a rule never use English when living in another country where another language is spoken, and by my second time living in Japan there was continually less and less to learn. I had a great deal of free time between the morning kindergarten classes and the evening adult classes, Korea was just across the bay and KBS radio could even be picked up when the car engine was turned off, and I made the decision to learn Korean. At the time I had only ever seriously devoted myself to one language and had not really thought about starting a whole new one after, so deciding to completely up and learn a new language was quite a big change.
The first few books I bought to learn Korean were those made by Toshin Books (今すぐ話せる韓国語), such as this one (though cover has changed) and this one, as well as this one called 韓国語で歌おう, meaning 'let's sing in Korean'. The regular textbooks were what one would expect, and learning Korean through Japanese was much clearer than learning through English ever would have been. Things like '가 is mostly like が except that it becomes 이 after a batchim and is used a bit differently' were much easier to assimilate than any explanation one finds in an English textbook. Same thing for politeness levels, vocabulary, kanji-based words, and so on. Even the Korean vocabulary that uses different hanja was easier to understand as the hanja shown still gave clues to a word's meaning. The words that I found the hardest time memorizing were long Korean verbs with no hanja to reference like 가라앉히다 or 얹혀살다.
Let's sing in Korean: this book was a nice diversion from simple textbook study. The pop songs in the music were not particularly to my liking, but they were songs I could at least pretend to like while listening to them, and they were catchy enough. Using music is one of my favourite methods to learn languages, not only because listening to music itself is enjoyable, but because songs stay in one's head for hours and hours and can resurface at any time. Simple recordings of a language don't have that staying power. Some of the songs here were by 김건모, another one was called 우린 하나 되어 이겼어 (we became one, and triumphed/won), one of those 'let's get dozens of famous singers together to record a really uplifting music video filmed inside the recording studio itself'. Here it is:
That's the kind of song you'll find in that textbook. Over-produced, uninspiring pop, yet quite good for the beginner. After some time with this textbook I began to wonder what good Korean music would sound like. Sheena Ringo being my favourite Japanese musician, I had something like that in mind.
In the meantime, this first stage was a pleasant discovery of finding out which parts of Korean were the same as Japanese and which were not. Trying to master the difference between 애 and 에 was no fun, 하다 verbs were great because they were just like する verbs, finding 걸리다 to be very similar but slightly different from 掛かる was interesting and a bit tricky, consonant changes like 독립 being pronounced 동닙 were weird, words I liked in particular in the beginning were 날씨, 손, 고양이, 하늘, 구름, 왜, 학생, 사람, 사랑, and more.
NHK also proved to be a great help in the beginning with their TV and radio shows geared towards language learners. The radio programs were 15 (or 30?) minutes in length and one could buy the monthly textbook accompanying them for just 250 yen, and the shows on TV at night were longer and always had a Japanese person accompanying the Korean (and other language) native speakers for a few months as they struggled with the language along with the TV viewers that were also learning the language. NHK's Korean course also had some music, but with a more concentrated focus on small snippets of music from songs such as 아시나요 sung in a set made to look like a local bar.
One weekend I made the trip to a Korean clothing store in Tenjin in Fukuoka where CDs were also sold, and I picked up two CDs, one by a group called 서태지와 아이들 (Seo Taiji and Boys) and another with a few alternative rock bands, including a band called Roller Coaster and another called Jaurim, both seemingly woman rock bands. I liked these bands enough that I made the decision to buy some more of their music later on when I could find it -- more on that in a few paragraphs.
First trip to Korea
After a few months of this it was around fall 2001 and it was time to go to Korea for the first time, not too hard a trip to make for someone living near Fukuoka. I took a week off of work and took the Beetle ferry over to Busan (2 hours or so), then the Mugunghwa (무궁화호) up to Seoul, which took a bit over five hours. This was still three years before Korea had the KTX, and the faster train (Semaeul, 새마을호) was about twice as much and shaved off less than an hour of travel time. Being in a country without knowing the language fluently was an experience I hadn't had for a while, and the pleasant yet mentally exhausting experience of trying understand and make oneself understood was something I hadn't felt in a few years.
The man who sat next to me noticed that I had opted for a Korean newspaper and began talking to me, and I was able to stumblingly say the things I wanted to say. Here was when I had my first experience of knowing a word I had never heard before thanks to Japanese: he mentioned the word 사고 (sago) while pointing to an article in the newspaper. This word I had never heard before but from the context and having seen that Japanese words with ji- often become sa- in Korean I realized that sago was the same as Japanese jiko (事故), or accident. Having that internal dictionary in one's head thanks to knowing a related language helps immensely, and I loved the rush I felt whenever I tried Koreanizing a Japanese word I knew and seeing it work. One time later on I wanted to say higaimousou (被害妄想, paranoia), sounded out how it might work in Korean, said pihae...mangsang? and saw that I had indeed conveyed what I wanted to convey - 피해망상. It doesn't work all the time (八方美人 - palbangmiin is a good thing in Korean, the Japanese equivalent happoubijin is not), but it does most of the time.
First impressions of Seoul: not that good for the first two days, because of the place I had chosen to stay at. I found about a youth hostel called Traveler's A, which was located in a place near the centre of the city called 을지로4가. Location seemed good from what I could tell from a map and I looked forward to a fairly cosmopolitan place in downtown Seoul. Upon arrival, it was unfortunately neither cosmopolitan nor a particularly nice-looking neighborhood. One may ask why not, considering that it's close to a number of subway lines and right next to the Cheonggyecheon:
But this was 2001, and instead of the restored Cheonggyecheon stream nearby we had the bottom of a raised highway and about ten or so lanes of traffic to cross underneath, to get from textile and furniture shops to...a neighborhood with more textile and furniture shops.
Upon arrival I found myself in a place that looked like this:
and this:
These back alleys have a charm of their own, but only when you know that there is an end to them, for the first two days (the first night plus the day after) this was all I saw of Seoul. Street after street with textiles and furniture shops, leading to some larger streets which upon crossing led to more of these streets. My first day in a new city I will usually walk a few blocks one way then back, a few blocks another way and then back, and this was all I could see.
My second night after walking around for a few dismal blocks I noticed a sign on the second floor that said 다방, which I knew meant coffee shop, so I went into that building to check it out. I didn't know at the time that dabangs were not quite the same thing as a classy coffee shop replete with espresso-based drinks, but rather local businesses that serve watery coffee and some toast, a few couches to sit on, and a very local clientele. And sometimes some shady services, depending on the dabang. This one had about four or five people in it and I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged man and what I think was his son, who were a bit intrigued by the sudden appearance of a lone white 20-something guy of 194 cm in height who had decided, of all places, to check out the local dabang.
Day three: after enough walking around 을지로4가, it was time to take the subway and randomly find another place in the city and hope it was nicer than the neighborhood where I was staying. Looking on the subway map, I saw that one of the subway stations on Line 2 (the green line) was 신촌 (新村), which meant new village (looks like atarashii mura in Japanese). The name made it look like an interesting enough place to visit, so I made my way to this subway station called Shinchon, made my way up the stairs, and finally found the place I had wanted to see since my first day: bookstores, coffee shops, universities and students, and the atmosphere that came with it. This is where I came every day for the rest of the 9 or so days I had during my first visit to Korea. There was a bookstore right by the subway entrance that was about five floors in height, and I bought a few literary classics rewritten for children, like Moby Dick (백경), which were only about 100 pages in length with large font and plenty of pictures to keep you from getting lost. Then I would take these to a coffee shop and read them, and bug the people working there or sitting close to me when I found a word I couldn't identify or find in the dictionary. That, of course, resulted in lots of conversations and acquaintance-making, and is one of the best ways to study a language.
Besides that not a great deal happened on my first trip, but I did make sure to buy some extra CDs and audio tapes (my car in Japan at the time just had a tape player) for my return to work, and I bought the following:
- one more 서태지와 아이들 CD (turned out to be not as good as the one I already had)
- one more Roller Coaster CD, turned out to be quite good
- two Jaurim CDs and one tape: their second album (연인), their 2.5th album, and their 3rd, called Wonderland.
Looking inside the albums it turned out that neither Roller Coaster nor Jaurim were all-female bands: each was all men with the exception of the singer. Roller Coaster was a nice chill band to listen to while driving, Jaurim...was phenomenal.
Jaurim
At the time there were a total of four Jaurim albums to be had: their first, their second, their 2.5th (remixes of the first and second plus a few new tracks), and their third. At the time I had all of these except for the first.
Music is extremely helpful when learning languages, but merely listening to an album is not the way to do it. A student that has been studying a language for a few months will be able to decipher most texts in a language with the help of a dictionary, and this time spent alone with the lyrics without listening to the music itself is necessary. Deciphering a song will probably take about an hour, remembering all of the words in the song will require some more rereading of the lyrics while listening to the song. All in all, an album with ten to twelve songs takes a student at this level about 20 hours to completely absorb, so a good number of sessions at the local coffee shop spent in study will be required to do this. After an album is more or less understood and memorized, simply listening to a song will cause it to repeat over and over in one's head for the next few hours.
At this time back in Japan after my first trip to Korea, Roller Coaster was still the easier of the two bands to understand. "내게로와, please come closer" was much, much easier than "지껄여대는 궤변과 내뱉어내는 욕설이 있지". On the other hand, I wanted to understand the Jaurim lyrics more as I could tell that they were more than just fluff, and I spent more time going over them than the Roller Coaster lyrics, even though I still ended up 'absorbing' the Roller Coaster songs first. Jaurim was a much harder nut to crack.
How would one describe their music? The easiest way to describe it in a sentence is that it is reminiscent at times of Smashing Pumpkins, Faith No More and Radiohead, but with a female singer and a different language. For those learning Korean now there is a lot more of it to listen to, about three or times more music in total compared with 2001 when I first heard them.
If you have never heard Jaurim before and are not sure where to start, allow me to recommend a song or two or three from each of their albums.
1: 마론인형, Violent Violet
2: 落花, 그래 제길 나 이렇게 살았어
2.5: V.V., 레테, 안녕 미미
3: 그녀와 단둘이, 마왕
4: 望鄕, 無言歌
5: 거지, 우리에게 내일은 없다
5.5 (청춘예찬): 새, title track, 누구라도 그러하듯이 (cover of an older song), Social Life
6: Seoul Blues, Loving Memory (these two songs should be listened to together), Beautiful Girl, Blue Devils
7: 幸福한 王子, Drops, Poor Tom
7.5 (2009 untitled album): all five songs where Yuna is singing
8: Red Rain, 피터의 노래
9: 님아, 전하고 싶은 말, 이카루스
10: Sleeping Beauty, Over the Rainbow
11: Sandy Beach, Da Capo, Dadada
And Kim Yuna's solo albums:
1: Flow, 담, 파랑새
2: 야상곡 (夜想曲), 봄이 오면, 증오는 나의 힘
3: 가만히 두세요, 도쿄블루스, 검은 강
4: 강, 독, 은지
Second trip to Korea
Christmas to January 2002 I made my second trip to Korea, for two weeks this time. The months before it were the same as before with continued progress and my average day went something like this:
- music in the morning while driving to the kindergartens I taught at,
- an hour in the car with the ignition turned off in a field somewhere during lunchtime to listen to faint KBS radio,
- study in the afternoon at the Kurume International Center after the 1 pm kindergarten class using either books or the computer there to chat or write emails to people I had met during my first trip,
- more music while driving in the evening to the adult classes,
- an hour or two at the coffee shop near my house at night to study from textbooks, music, or read some of the books I had with the help of a dictionary,
- then about thirty minutes at night with my ear pressed to the radio in the room in my house that faced north and thus had enough clarity to make out KBS radio coming in from across the bay.
Progress was steady but I didn't see fluency coming anytime soon at this rate, and the rest of my life was in Japanese. I hoped the two weeks would make a big difference.
I stayed at the same place as before and went to Shinchon most days, went off to Anyang to see a friend in the hospital who had been hit by a car and had some minor injuries (that was the day I tried using the word 피해망상), hung out on an icy lake with some friends, found out that Korea, like Japan, does not usually bother to heat entire buildings in the winter, got better at Korean, and watched the two weeks go by in the blink of an eye. On my last day before going back I had a kettle full of kiwi soju by myself in a bar in Shinchon, tipsily played the drums in a game room on the way back, and sullenly went back to Japan the next day by the Mugunghwa train and ferry again, feeling fluency to still be very far away.
This point in learning a language can be very fulfilling when one is in the country, but when in another country working a full-time job it is more frustrating than anything else. Some progress can be made in the two or three hours one has to allocate to studying a language, but it is never enough, and it lacks the necessary interaction that helps the muscle memory-like skill to build. Without the need to use a language every day and the constant random interactions that come with it, it is easy to stay at an intermediate plateau for a long time.
I had saved up a certain amount of money and was continuing to do so. The World Cup was coming up, and I would have about 1 million yen in the bank by then. I asked my company a month or two later whether I would be able to have three months away to live in Korea, they replied that they could do up to one month. Thinking about how short and unsatisfying two weeks had been I knew this would not be enough time, and I decided it was time to leave the company behind (regretfully, as it was not a bad place to work) and move to Korea. The next three months were similar to the other three I had spent before my second trip: music, classes, lunchtime KBS radio in the field, class, Kurume International Center study (yoshinoya for lunch), classes, evening study at the coffee shop, radio at night, repeat, spend very little, watch my account balance grow.
In April 2002 I took my 1.1 million yen out of the bank, closed the account and took my things to Seoul.
Third trip to Korea
This time I had found a goshiwon (a small room students live in when preparing for tests) in Shinchon itself called MAX Livingtel, which actually still exists. The building looks like this:
The rooms are on the 4th and 5th floor with access to the roof as well, and I paid 300,000 won a month there. The building looks fairly small but from the roof one could see right across the city at night.
The three months spent living in this area were the most poignant and memorable of my time studying Korean, and also the one where I made the most progress by far. Work was now a thing of the past, I had nobody to speak with in Japanese, no daily schedule, no school to attend, no English-speaking friends, just the desire to finally learn the language to fluency that I had only been allowed to dabble in up to now.
In the goshiwon were some interesting people: the guy who worked there wrote scripts for dramas in his spare time, a girl from Shanghai was there learning Korean and her boyfriend was a Korean that had lived there for a few years before where they met (he didn't live at the goshiwon), a girl that worked at Hyundai Department Store and was unhappily trying to help her mom pay off her debt, a physical therapist, lots of other people that had recently graduated and were working and trying to save up the money for a down payment on a place.
One particularly surreal night was during the first few days there when I was invited to go eat with the girl, her boyfriend and some of his Chinese friends. Not knowing a word of Chinese at the time, the Shanghai girl's boyfriend would explain to me in Korean what they were saying, and having Chinese explained to me in Korean was...well, surreal.
My daily routine went something like this: wake up in room in goshiwon at about 9 or 10, turn on the TV and watch one of the dramas on Arirang in the morning that had English and Chinese subtitles. One I made sure to watch every day was called 내일을 향해 쏴라. After that it was time to shower (there were two showers on each floor) and leave the goshiwon. The small size of the rooms really helped here, because after about an hour watching TV in a room as small as that (4 square metres / 40 square feet or so) the only thing you want to do is quickly shower and leave the place and not come back before nightfall. The communal washrooms and showers made it even less desirable a place to spend one's day, so once I left I had a good eight to twelve hours to kill outside before I went back.
After leaving the goshiwon it was time to go study at a coffee shop, usually the Starbucks by Shinchon Station or Ehwa Station, or the Ediya nearby which was cheaper and on the ground floor. I had found a number of other books that I wanted to get through, such as a children's version of Hermann Hesse's Demian, and a book by Dostoevsky called 악령 (Demons). The latter was huge, over 1000 pages, and I spent a whole month tackling it. This type of study was what absorbed me most during the afternoons: I would take a book and a newspaper or two to Starbucks or Ediya along with a Korean-Japanese-Korean dictionary I had, and just read for hours on end while looking up just about every unknown word in the dictionary, writing them down a few times on paper and repeating. From time to time I would ask someone in the coffee shop who looked friendly about the meaning of a word that I couldn't find in the dictionary, and as before that would often lead to further conversations and invitations to hang out. One time I asked a few people about the meaning of the word 새끼 because it wasn't in the dictionary. It was obvious that it was a bad word, but I wasn't sure how bad. That one came from a story about a Japanese professor visiting Korea who was called Iseki (井関), and his interpreter would introduce him as 이제키 instead of 이새키, but the professor caught on to this and asked him if he would please properly pronounce his name when introducing him. I was told 이새끼라는 단어는...말하자면 영어의 son of a bitch 같은 의미겠죠?
This (unplanned, naturally-occurring) method I used to finally get from intermediate to fluent Korean was basically this:
- Never use English anywhere ever with anyone. For every Korean that wants to use you for language practice there are ten that don't, and there is no reason to spend one's time chatting with the former when you are the one who has made the effort to save up and make your way to the country. The person may be really nice, may want to hang out and buy you dinner, doesn't matter. You can hang out with that type of person after you've become fluent and have been in the country for years and don't particularly need the practice anymore.
- Read about six hours a day, with dictionary, write A LOT.
- Always have Korean TV on at home.
- Meet with friends in the evening as much as possible. If no friends are around to be had, head off to a random bar and make some there or talk with the bartender.
The six or so hours of reading was the most mentally exhausting. When working through the book 악령 I would keep track of the number of pages I got through in a day and compare that to the number of days left in Korea. In order to get through it in a bit over a month I needed to read at least 60 pages, and since reading implied writing down all the words I didn't know in a notebook and giving them a certain amount of time to try to memorize them it was very tiring but also extremely satisfying since I never had enough time during the day in Japan to have myself reach that point.
Reading massive amounts of interesting content in a language is just as necessary to reach fluency as long hours of conversation with native speakers. I would try out some of the new vocabulary I had picked up during the day at night when hanging out with friends or at a bar, and their reaction is what told me whether what I had learned was actually useful in daily life, or just an expression confined to the literary world. Trying out the ending ㄹ 것일세 was particularly fun.
The idea that a language can be learned solely through fun daily conversation 'because that's the way native speakers naturally pick it up' is not true - native speakers do not pick up their native language that way. Much of our ability to communicate comes from this, but then there are the years spent in elementary school with wobbly hands practicing our handwriting, having our spelling corrected, writing book reports and having them handed back with red ink all over them where corrections have been made, years spent being made to read classics from centuries past, getting a bit of an inkling of archaisms such as 'thee' and 'thou' and 'methinks', and everything else we were forced to do. Koreans are made to do the same thing with their language, and they did not just pick it up from conversation either. The seemingly useless literary expressions one encounters in books don't end up as a part of one's active daily vocabulary, but they do remain as a kind of extended realm of understanding that is activated upon passive hearing or reading. Much in the same way that most understand thee and thou without knowing the exact conjugation, Korean speakers have watched enough of their share of 사극 (historical dramas) that shows like Gag Concert (개콘) often use these settings for their skits. Without a bit of understanding of the language used in these shows, there's no way to understand the humour.
A fluent speaker of a language has a vocabulary set up like this: a core vocabulary of a few thousand words that are used daily with a very quick reaction time and perfect understanding. Behind this is a larger, less active field of vocabulary tens of thousands of words in size that is less frequently accessed but still there. Techniques to gain quick (seeming) fluency in a language emphasize the former but don't spend a great deal of time on the latter, since the former is the easiest to demonstrate.
On a related note, the answer to the question: "how long have you learned (language)?" should be given in hours, not days or months or years. During those three months in 2002 I spent on average about ten to twelve hours a day studying the language, and in addition to that the lack of external distractions (work, family, etc.) probably resulted in each day being worth about seven days at the pace I was going in Japan where I would get about two to three hours in, but not in a single study session, and with plenty of distractions.
A great many other things happened during these three months (including the World Cup), but writing too much about these would change the focus of the post from language study to travel diary. But here are some of the things that come to mind in brief: getting taught how to play hwatu / go stop in a local coffee shop (nobody wanted to show me how in Starbucks), sky bars, celebrations on the street until the morning every time the Korean national team won a game, teaching hanja to an American friend of mine once a week or so (the only time I ever used English and even then the focus was on Korean), the back streets of Shinchon and the park on top of the steep hill, walking around 대학로 for about eight hours one day trying to find an address and later finding out that the place I was looking for had moved to 청담동 but getting to drink some unknown liquor in plastic cups with university students in the park in the evening instead, nightly visits to the local PC bang for 750 won an hour, others more memorable but not suitable for public disclosure on a blog.
It may seem anticlimactic that the way I improved my Korean most during those three months was simply lots of reading plus lots of speaking, but once a student has grasped just about all the grammar of a language that's about all there is left to do: hundreds or thousands of hours of practice with interesting, compelling content and interactions. And in fact, it just so happens that this is the most effective way to learn a language:
The role of grammar in a language is more auxiliary, more often something you will reference after encountering something in a language than something that is used outwardly as the core upon which one builds. Grammar generally goes like this:
-- Stage 1: basic grammar, very little active experience. A focus on grammar here is necessary and unavoidable, without which you will not even be able to do much more than parrot stock phrases.
-- Stage 2: grammar begins to get more complex, context is more difficult to imagine. What's the difference between 면, 라면, ㄹ거면, 는다면, 만약 ~ 는다면, 만일 ~ ㄹ거면 and all the other ways of saying "if"? Without a good amount of active experience hearing and seeing these phrases in action it will be impossible to use them naturally.
-- Stage 3: tons of interaction, with the occasional return to the textbook to reference grammar or vocabulary. A native speaker will almost always correctly use a term but it will not always be obvious why, and this time alone to research what you have encountered remains necessary.
So three months passed, and I was finally somewhere near fluency. Though I ended up devoting about ten to twelve hours to the language every day this was basically all my waking time. Even the few remaining hours that were devoted to simple daily tasks (going for walks, hygiene, eating, staring into the darkness from the goshiwon rooftop or whatever else) did nothing to break the Korean study bubble I was in and so even though the actual time spent working on the language was only about half of the 24 hours in a day, the remaining time did nothing to bring me out of this state. I can't recommend this method of study highly enough.
Anyone already living in Korea that has a passable but not yet fluent command of the language should try to find a way to emulate this method at least once. Sever as many contacts as you can, move to a part of the country where your English-speaking friends can't easily visit you, avoid English forums or other communities online, try to keep to pen and paper as much as possible (something about physically writing out vocabulary seems to make it stick, though your mileage may vary), do whatever you can to create an untouched bubble of immersion that you can maintain for as long as possible. This may not be possible for those with families or other responsibilities (or student debt), but the closer you get to an experience like this the more satisfying the outcome will be.
So what happened after July 2002? This is perhaps the most anticlimactic part of all: after a disastrous week and a bit in France (started walking the Santiago de Compostela beginning in Le Puy-en-Velay, bruised my heel and ended up going back to Canada) and a few months in Canada, I simply went back to Korea in 2003 and since then I've been surrounded by the language, and it has become the language I use the most in my daily life.
The final sign of fluency is also just as anticlimactic: once you have more or less absorbed a language, use it daily and find fewer and fewer surprises in it, the language almost seems to fade from consciousness as your mind begins to accept it as a core part of your neural makeup. The more it becomes a part of you the less you notice it, and reaching this stage almost feels like saying goodbye even though it has never been closer. In the beginning of any conquest (study, love, success, fame, etc.) you begin with both the act as well as the imagined success. As time goes on the imagined success is replaced with reality, which is just as good yet also always different than what was originally imagined. So this feeling of saying goodbye is to the original driving force, what was imagined and striven after in the beginning, not to what was actually obtained.
