Korean is an unusual language in that no one is exactly sure of its origins.
The most widely accepted theory is that Korean is a member of the Ural-Altaic family of languages, which also includes Turkish, Finnish, Mongolian and Hungarian.
In reality Korean has far more in common with Japanese and Chinese than it does with Mongolian or European languages, and many Korean words have Chinese origins. Korea also uses two numeric systems, one of which is Chinese based.
Language in South Korea
As daunting as it seems, living and working in Korea without former knowledge of Korean is not that difficult.
In your classroom you are not supposed to use ANY Korean so students are forced to communicate with you exclusively in English. For all intents and purposes this seems to work quite well. There are times when you need more moves than a mime at the circus but you are still able to communicate quite effectively without any skills in Korean.
The beauty of the matter is that if you are interested in learning Korean, getting the basics is really quite easy.
Korean Language Breakdown
List of Korean Language Programs
Useful sites for studying Korean:
- http://www.learnkorean.com/
- http://yuldo.net/language.htm
- Sogang University Korean Program: http://korean.sogang.ac.kr/
- Online Korean classes: http://www.declan-software.com/korean.htm
- An introduction to Korean: http://www.langintro.com/kintro/
Learning Korean
This perspective is from someone who is living in a relatively small city (half a million) in South Korea where English is not widely spoken with much fluency:
Every now and then I run across someone who can speak English well, I am sure the experience in bigger cities may be different. But even if you live in Seoul you will probably travel somewhere else at some point so I still think knowing the basics is important.
The first thing you need to know is you can live here without speaking a word of Korean, but after a while you might get tired of pointing and grunting like a caveman.
Make Happy Time: Engrish in Korea
by Tamara Povarchook, Placement Coordinator for Korea & China
One of my favourite things about Asia was the plethora of poorly written English signs, menus and merchandise that were either the result of mistranslation, or full of grammar and spelling errors. I always had my camera with me on any outing, as I never knew when I might stumble upon another hilarious addition to my Facebook album.
One of the first instances of Engrish I recall was when my friend and I wandered into a church on one of our random afternoon adventures in Seoul. There, we discovered this poster on a bulletin board:
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Learn Korean
Korean is not an easy language to learn but hey, neither is English. The great thing about learning Korean while you are teaching English is that you will come to empathise with your students about some of the challenges in learning a second language. Learning Korean will also help you identify how the Korean language is structured which may help you in identifying areas in language learning where your students are struggling.
If you're going to teach in Korea for a year having some skill with Korean language is going to be incredibly useful in your day to day life but there is another tremendous benefit. By learning Korean, your students and virtually every Korean person you meet will be impressed by the fact that you are actually taking an active interest in Korean culture by way of learning Korean. Get started before you go, order the Rosetta Stone Korean Language learning set and take it with you or get it shipped to wherever you are.
