Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ghostrider]

[Deja]

Spanish? It's spoken in the very poor South American countries mostly. The bigger and more developed ones use Portuguese, which while fairly similar, is not similar enough when you need it for business.

Not to mention that known Spanish/Portuguese in South America is not of great use - they have enough English-speaking folks for what they need them.
Unless you offer something extremely positive to them, it is not as useful.

[World Traveler]

[Fox]

Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are certainly more time consuming to learn than Spanish, and yes, East Asian culture is probably more xenophobic than, say, Spanish culture. None the less, we live in Korea, not Spain, some of us for a long period of time. Whatever one might think the value of Korean in Korea is, it's higher than the value of Spanish by a substantial amount. Of further importance is the matter of your goal for the language you're learning. I've got concrete goals for both Korean and Chinese, I don't have one for Spanish, so why should Spanish's relative ease be a factor? I don't buy something I don't want just because it's on sale, and I don't forego something I really want just because it's a bit expensive. The same principal is at work here (of course I'm not discouraging anyone from learning Spanish if they feel they'd benefit from doing so, it's just a personal example).

Moreover, Ghostrider suggests that Korean/English bilingualism is not especially rare. Look at almost anything translated from Korean to English to see how questionable that assumption is. The article goes into this as well; right after it suggests that learning these languages is simply too challenging for Americans, who simply cannot learn a language to fluency, it suggests that the denizens of Korea, Japan, and China -- at least the ones "worth" conversing with -- will all speak competent English! The simple fact is that East Asian English proficiency is ridiculously low. Guys like "Yoshi" from the article -- Japanese natives who go on to study for an MBA at Harvard, and possessed of adequate English proficiency to do so -- are the atypical elite in this regard, not the norm. Korea and Japan have some of the worst TOEIC scores in the world, and it's not because the nation is full of competently bilingual people. The fact that Koreans often undermine their English education system in the exact same way described in the article in the shipping company example, while it may reinforce the xenophobia point, completely diminishes the point about them having "learned" English.

Finally, almost every person I've met with serious complaints or unhappiness about being here in Korea is a person who didn't bother to learn Korean. Not knowing Korean results in at least some degree of increased isolation, both in the work place, and outside of it. Moreover, for all the talk of xenophobia, I've had plenty of Koreans acknowledge the efforts I've made to learn their language and lament that more foreigners don't do the same thing, because they really would like to interact with them, and because it makes them feel the foreigner has no respect for them or their culture (a sentiment shared by plenty of people in the United States when confronted with the notion of a foreigner who doesn't bother to learn English). Let's not take the truth that Korea is an atypically xenophobic nation and extrapolate it too far: most people here are still reasonable human beings.

Oh, and one last chuckle from the article: "How do Chinese, Japanese, and Korean dictionaries and filing systems put things in alphabetical order when they have no alphabet?" Yes indeed, how do the Koreans manage without an alphabet? I don't know, best not bother learning their language. It's probably a dumb language anyway, right?

[robbie_davies]

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[robbie_davies]

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[robbie_davies]

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[robbie_davies]

[Kuros]

OP,

You're quoting a Harvard MBA. C'mon.

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[robbie_davies]

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