Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Unfortunately most hogwans cater mostly to elementary kids. Most have some middle schoolers, but few (that hire foreigners) have any high schoolers, which is a shame as these are the nicest to work with in small groups. Generally, the hogwans that have lots of MS and HS students and hire foreigners tend to be better, from what I've heard.

Hogwans are all about market demand, and if the owners see a demand for anything from kindy to adults they'll want you to cater to it, regardless of your preferences or what age you're more skilled at teaching.

It's fairly easy to land a middle school gig with EPIK (though the pay at the lower end of the scale is quite bad), but you may find yourself with very large classes you only see once a week in quite a regimented system.

June or July would be an unlikely time to start a public school gig - they'd be looking at late August.

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[ontheway]

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The "��" sound in "�п�" is closest to "hot, cot, got, lot" for North American English speakers. That's why the Canadian speaker was confused. He was attempting to use a British transliteration which didn't match his native vowel pronunciation.

The "wan" sound is the closest to the wan or gwan of Hogwan.

It's the word "won" that's used for money that's funny.

one = won in English sound.

The Korean money word "won" sounds like wan = Juan (the Spanish name)

one, WON, fun, sun, done, money, wonderful (not the Korean sound)

Juan, WAN, John, Don, on, McDonald's, Hogwan

So, you're right, the money should be the Korean "WAN".


When I lived in France, I found that British English native speakers could never even come close to the French sound. For some reason, the same is true for Brits and the Korean sound.

Native speakers of Korean often cannot say "l" or "r" because they cannot hear the difference. Their ears and brains have been trained to group all of these sounds as"��" so that's what they hear and that's what they say. One of the hard tasks as a teacher is to train the students to both hear and pronounce the sound as both skills are connected in the brain.

The British have a similar problem that comes from the language sound system hardwired into their brains in childhood. Many Brits simply cannot hear the sounds correctly, so they don't know how silly they sound when they are speaking and transliterating French and Korean.

[Lizara]

Purely anecdotal of course, but I've noticed that although my Korean is generally better than that of my British boyfriend, I always struggle with that Korean "a" sound (can't type hangul on my computer, sorry) while people understand him immediately when he has to pronounce it. It's just not a vowel sound that's in my Canadian pronunciation.

so yeah, I'd write it as hagwon because that's the "correct" romanization, but I don't pronounce it like hag-one, I say it more like hogwon, approximating two short o sounds, and Koreans understand what I'm talking about. It seems like kind of a silly argument when I'm sure we all understand what people are talking about regardless of how they spell it.

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[Son Deureo!]

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[Lemonade]

[escapeartist]

Yeah, I probably don't want to try and teach a group of 40 students as my first introduction to teaching English in Korea. Well that's good since I don't want to be out in the boondocks anyway. So what does "OP" stand for and how do you copy and paste what another person said into the body of your own message? I'm new to this whole forum thing. Thanks![/list][/quote]

[Poemer]

OP= original post or original poster, depending on sentence context.

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