Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Gatsby]

Hi there, Korean students of English.

Some of you may hope to attend college in the United States or another English speaking country. But you may wonder whether you are ready.

Here are some selections of books that I had to read my freshman year in college. As I said elsewhere, you have to read an average of one or two of these books per week, per class. And you must take four to five classes per semester. That means you must read one book of 100 to 300 pages every day or two. (There were no textbooks used in this college outside of the physical sciences and math, just original source works.)

If you can read one of these books in one to three days, and understand it well enough to write a 1,000 word grammatically correct essay on it in an hour, you are ready for college at this American university.

Here are links from gutenberg.org and other sites to some of the books. Others I did not list because they, or their English translations, are still copyrighted.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext98/repub11.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/815/815-h/815-h.htm and
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/816/816-h/816-h.htm

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645o/

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=eOl1Ad0xAVoC&dq=john+stuart+mill+utilitarianism&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=srcPXlI_U9&sig=gtk8ACT2nEXC3q02ywRtAWG-C6U&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10827/10827-8.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/8ethc10.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext93/dcart10.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/trgov10h.htm

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/lvthn10.txt

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/wltnt11.txt

Plus, you should read these:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16780/16780-h/16780-h.html

http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.overview.html

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/rights1.htm


I hope you enjoy reading them!

When you have finished reading these classics, there's plenty more to at these sites:

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/

http://books.google.com/books


If the above are a bit too advanced for you, there are plenty of easier, but still interesting and important, books to read on the middle- or high school level.

One of the best is the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I enjoyed reading it, and I hope you will too. There are several sites that offer this book for free. Here's one:

http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/index.htm

http://www.bartleby.com/ebook/

The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson are inspiring to read. Perhaps the most famous is Self Reliance:

http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm

Here is a sample of the above:

[moosehead]

I appreciate your post - honestly I do. However, science majors don't read all those books - I know because I have a B.S.

I would, however, like to suggest reading "Roots" by Alex Haley. It's a very interesting book and much better than the made-for-tv film series, altho that was good also.

And:

Anything by Mark Twain.

Perhaps Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov just for fun.

[rsmm0224]

Are you kidding me? Nobody reads these books! Unless you're a poli sci or philosophy major and even then you don't read it in one day and have an hour to write a paper on it.

I know because I WAS a poli sci major.

Stop scaring the poor Koreans with your inflated time table.

[Gatsby]

[mishlert]

If any Korean makes it to MIT, he or she can look forward to these courses:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/courses/courses/index.htm

Check out the lesson plans and required reading.

[contrarian]

I taught university in Korea. I have had three former students go to graduate work in the US. One young lady to the University of Texas (PhD in English), One fellow to the University of Georgia (Masters) and University of Tennesse at Nasheville (PhD.). The last one to Long Island University for a Masters.

I wrote honest letters of recommend for all of them.

[rsmm0224]

[Gatsby]

Apology accepted, rsmm0224.

I like to be direct; it clarifies a discussion.

I should have included this link to course requirements:

http://www.college.columbia.edu/students/academics/requirements.php

This shows that the CC and Humanities courses are required, along with other course requirements.

I think every four-year college in the U.S. requires some core curricula that forces science majors to take some liberal arts courses, and liberal arts majors to take some science courses. Sooner or later, everyone has to actually read some books and write something about them. For some, that reading list can be quite intensive. And even if it is not required, students, especially Korean students, should be taking liberal arts and social science courses like history, literature, sociology, economics and political science. If they don't why bother studying in the West?

Someone said the Koreans think Harvard is easier than going to a Korean university. I would assume the workload at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and MIT is at least as heavy as at Columbia. I have seen premed students who only slept about three hours a night.

Yes, there are Koreans who can succeed at first-rate American universities. There are typically one or two students in each English class who have potential. Why don't they just bring them together and have an advanced placement English class for college bound students?

But the rest of them don't have a clue.

Why don't Korean libraries have books in English for children? There should be at least three age-appropriate English books for each student in a school, and at least as many different books as there are students - not all copies of the same five or 10 books. Korean students should be required to read one or two books in English per month of their choosing, and they should be tested on it. There should also be movies in English, and tests to prove they watched them.

Then you would see some progress in learning English, and some interested students in class. These kids are bored out of their skulls because they are not using English. They are being told by adults to learn English, but they get the impression they are not supposed to use English.

To go one step further, there seems to be the attitude in Korea that learning is not supposed to be fun. If you are having fun, you are not learning. Students who have time to go to a hagwon do not have the time to watch one two-hour English language movie.

Sorry, Korea, you've got it backwards.

If you aren't having fun, you aren't learning. This doesn't mean English class should be fun and games. But if you aren't interested in the subject, you won't enjoy the class, and you won't learn anything that isn't beaten into your brain. But if you are truly interested in a subject, you can learn it with little effort, and actually enjoy studying.

[contrarian]

A Korean Professor I met my first year in Korea had excellent Englis skills. Enough that he had done about three visiting professor stints at American universities. But, he still had problems with the use of articles.

His oldest son got the highest marks in Korea, on his bar admission exams. The legal system is different and so he was appointed first as a district judge and then to the Supreme Court in Korea. He served at that and then went to Harvard for an LL.M followed by a De Juris (an academic not professional law degree). He is now back in Korea and at Seoul National University law department.

There are many Koreans who can handle just about any level of US University. I have met a number.

They have a different not inferior learning style.

[regicide]

delete

[marlow]

[billybrobby]

[branchsnapper]

Universities routinely lower the bar for non-native speakers - it earns cash.

[amilin90]

[branchsnapper]

In my experience libraries go overboard with English books, for kids and adults both, but only I borrow them.