Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ghost]

I take classes at the Korean Language Academy every Saturday from 10am to 1pm, and I study some Korean most days for about 1-2 hours, but after almost 4 months in the country, I can barely say 안 녕 하 싶 니 까
(how are you?).

Learning the alphabet is much easier than learning Chinese characters, but in my case, speaking is much more difficult in Korea, compared with Mandarin.

Last year in Taiwan, after a few months, I was able to get by with simple conversation, covering most of my simple needs, but in Korea, after several months here, I have almost zero ability to converse in Korean, and I am not the only one, by the looks of things.

I have seen lots of teachers here who have been here teaching English in Korea for years, but their levels are still basically non existent in Korean.

What is it that makes Korean such a hard language to master? Is it the environment we are in, or is more a reflection of the language itself, with its odd sentence structure?

It is very frustrating to live in a country, where it is almost impossible to communicate with the locals, because let's face it - outside of Seoul - most Koreans speak no English at all. You, as a foreigner, are on your own.

I have sadly come to the conclusion, that unless a person studies Korean at one of the language programs every day in an intensive program - other than that - it would be very difficult to make any progress in the language.

Are there any success stories out there, about teachers who were able to learn Korean to a good level?

Ghost in Korea

[billybrobby]

The only formal studying I've done in Korean was a month at a hagwon, and I think my Korean is relatively good (does that sound like annoying bragging?). You're right, though, it takes a long time to get off the ground. I was just saying childish phrases and silly rude stuff for months. But it comes in spurts. Once you get the ability to have basic conversations, you start talking more, and that makes you learn faster, and you talk even more, and the cycle reinforces itself. Unfortunately, I was a year into before I got there, but I'm pretty lazy about learning it, and I don't think I have any particular talent for it either.

Anyways, if you hang in there, I think you will eventually hit a point where things start working for you and your ability starts to increase faster. It won't be overnight magic, but it will make the whole process seem easier.

[albazalba]

I hear ya. Korean is by far the most difficult language I have tried to learn. I'm not quite sure why it's so difficult, because even though the grammar is so different, it's quite similar to Japanese, which doesn't seem as tough to master (correct me if I'm wrong).
The thing with Korean is it's a very precise language compared with English. By that I mean you have to use exactly correct words and phrases to get your point across in Korean, where with English you can use more general stuff to convey the same message. This makes direct translations usually meaningless, which makes it totally different than learning say French or Spanish in which you can pretty much build up a vocabulary and then just translate stuff in your head.
I've been here 2 years now and I struggle with it everyday, and I've pretty much accepted that even though I will continue to improve and become fully comfortable conversing in Korean, I will probably never truly master it. You just got to stick to it. Happy studying!

[HapKi]

In my experience, you have to use the language with Koreans in day to day interaction in order to see any progress. There are a lot of reasons why.
First, what you learn in a book in a class is not always what normal Korean conversation is like. For example, the words "Shillehamnida" (Excuse me) and "Chonmaneyo" (You're welcome). These appear on the first couple pages in any basic Korean study course. But guess what? Koreans don't say them. It's a waste of time to learn them when other words and phrases are so much more useful.
Second, if you don't use the language, it's just a bunch of book knowledge. I know people who study the language aggressively but can't communicate very well (pronunciation troubles, for example). This falls in line with being communicatively proficient versus accurate. I've always felt it's more important to get your meaning across than be grammatically accurate.

[cbclark4]

The Army Linguistic school used to pump out relatively good Korean speakers in three months, of course some graduates repeated the course 3 or 4 times before reaching the required proficiency level.

[Julius]

[Morton]

I hear you man. Korean is a tricky bugger to learn.

I usually practice with my students. They are usually pretty helpful, plus it helps students to see that their teacher is studying hard to learn a new language.
Hopefully they might think, "Well if my teachers making a lot of mistakes while learning a language, maybe it's ok when i make mistakes."

Good luck and keep it up.

[manlyboy]

[Scotticus]

[icicle]

I knew that I had read something recently which classified many languages into how difficult they were to learn which did put Korean into the most difficult category.

I couldn't find that reference but I did find what the US Defence Language Institute (which does much of the language teaching for the military) had to say.

"The Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, divides the languages they teach into four groups, from easiest to most difficult, as measured by the number of hours of instruction required to bring students to a certain level of proficiency. Here are their figures (from 1973; I doubt if they have changed much ):

a. Languages included
b. Hours of instruction required for a student with average language aptitude to reach level-2 speaking proficiency
c. Speaking proficiency level expected of a student with superior language aptitude, after 720 hours of instruction

a. GROUP I Afrikaans, Danish, DUTCH, FRENCH, Haitian Creole, ITALIAN, Norwegian, PORTUGUESE, Romanian, SPANISH, Swahili, SWEDISH
b. 480
c. 3

a. GROUP II Bulgarian, Dari, FARSI (PERSIAN), GERMAN, (Modern) Greek, HINDI-URDU, INDONESIAN, Malay
b. 720
c. 2+ / 3

a. GROUP III Amharic, Bengali, Burmese, CZECH, Finnish, (MODERN) HEBREW, Hungarian, Khmer (Cambodian), Lao, Nepali, PILIPINO (TAGALOG), POLISH, RUSSIAN, SERBO-CROATIAN, Sinhala, THAI, TAMIL, TURKISH, VIETNAMESE
b. 720
c. 2 / 2+

a. GROUP IV ARABIC, CHINESE, JAPANESE, KOREAN
b. 1320
c. 1+ "

Icicle

[Fresh Prince]

[Vancouver]

ya, its hard. give it lots of time, and you might be at their level http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d029aqaXPYA

[Qinella]

I don't agree with people who say you have to speak with perfect pronunciation and grammar to be understood in Korean. It all just depends on the situation, I think. A lot of times, they don't expect to hear Korean come out of a waeg's mouth, so the first line is gonna be a surprise to them.

I say stupid crap all the time and generally don't have many problems. Today I was at the KT place applying for my internet connection to be set up. Near the end of the ordeal, I wanted to ask if I could rent a modem so I said something absurd like this: 모뎀 비릴수있을수있으시요? And she answered me! (Sometimes I freak out when I conjugate~)


Ghost: I'm curious about what the class is teaching you and what you are doing as far as exercises and drills in your home study. Can you give me an idea of what goes on in class? I ask because, using only Ross King's Elementary Korean and Lonely Planet's phrase book, I was able to have basic conversations in about two months. The method involved tons of practicing patterns. I'd write out about 40 sentences using the exact same grammar, switching out only the nouns or perhaps the verb, and read them aloud. At least 40 times.

It's repetitive and boring, but seems to have worked well. I'm not a big fan of classroom environments, as I believe humans are perfectly able to self-teach. I would highly recommend trying to set up a language exchange if you'd like to improve more quickly. I wish I'd have done that in my first year.

[albazalba]

I didn't necessarily mean that your grammar and pronunciation have to be perfect in order to be understood (although that can be the case often), I meant that you have to be careful with your word selection when speaking, cause direct translations don't work all the time.
For example, let's say you want to say that something is "difficult to tell." e.g. "Q:Have you shown any improvement in Korean? A:Well, it's difficult to tell." You might think, "Ok, difficult to tell = 이야기하기어려운 것 because that is a direct translation. However, what you mean to say is 판단하기어려운 것 which directly translated means it is difficult to judge. And that's just in that situation.
In English we can use "it is difficult to tell" in many different situations, but you cannot directly translate it into Korean for any of those situations. Hence, you must be very careful of your word selection in Korean.

(I hope that made sense somewhat, sorry if it didn't.)

[icicle]