[KS] over the hill Koreanists littering the streets

[jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca]

Dear list members: 

David McCann, Michael Robinson and Jay Lewis all posted some useful comments. First, if and when there should ever be a Korean IUC, David McCann’s idea of refresher courses for the ‘hopelessly over the hill mob’ is a great one, and is, I believe, part of the missions of the Japanese and Chinese IUCs (in fact, my understanding is that one does not even have to be over the hill to qualify for ‘refresher’ courses). 

Once the life-long learner of Korean gets a job – any job (assuming it is outside Korea), it is just plain difficult to get over to Korea for any more than a few hectic days of meetings, conferences and book buying. I myself am here in Korea now for more than 10 days for the first time in 16 years. Shameful. But there just aren’t enough opportunities to get away and get over to Korea, whether for students or over-the-hill profs. An IUC might be a vehicle to provide such language-focused stays. 

This brings us to one of Michael Robinson’s key points, the “… seeming lack of the mention of the ultimate necessity of immersion in the language culture for any hope of fluency…”

In my postings, and I’m sure in John Duncan’s, too, the need for immersion in situ is meant to be so basic and so obvious and so crucial as to be hardly worth mentioning. But again, there just aren’t many well-structured and well-funded opportunities for, say, university students to, say, spend their ‘Junior Year abroad’ in Korea. Even something as simple as round-trip airfare bursaries and a modest book stipend would be enough of an incentive to get more would-be takers thinking about such an option, but at present, Korean universities – even those with the well-established KFL programs – are not all that well equipped to accommodate foreign students, and if other North American universities are at all like my own beloved UBC, they could be doing a lot more, too, to encourage (require, in the case of majors?) Korean language students to take a year in-country. 

I’m not quite sure how much I agree with the following statement of Mike Robinson’s:
”… even some schooling whether or not it can create complete language products is better than nothing.” 

The rub is that, in the case of Korean, ‘even some schooling’ is, at a minimum, 4 to 5 times more than what it is for French or Spanish. We should at least brace ourselves and our students for the knocks and blows (to the ego, that is) to be encountered. 

“And I don't think any of our Korean language programs are built to produce a perfect end result in a four year program.”

Of course not. But I think the problem in the USA (and Canada) right now is that those rare universities that DO offer 4 years of Korean instruction actually present a sort of mirage – an illusion of 4 years of interconnected and sequenced instruction where the 4th-year students are reading newspaper articles and short fiction just like they might be in 4th-year French, but the number of students in 4th-year Korean who got there by taking 1st-year, 2nd-year, and 3rd-year Korean in that sequence is close to zero – each level is its own discrete entity, with massive jumps in presumed knowledge/background between each level, and only the occasional language genius or maniac proceeding through the courses as they’re laid out in the course catalogs. This outward veneer of normalcy and superficial comparability to the European language curricula is a product of the overwhelming number of heritage learners in the Korean classes, and of what I have referred to elsewhere as the “KFL charade in North America” – Korean language programs and ethnic Koreans think, or pretend to be doing KFL, but in actual fact, they ought to be doing KHL with appropriately targeted KHL materials.
	Anyway, Mike Robinson’s remark reminds me of a hilarious comment I heard recently from Viktor Kozhemyako, long-time Korean language pedagogy expert at the College of Korean Studies, Far Eastern State University (Vladivostok), where they have over 300 students per year taking 5-year intensive courses in Korean language and Korean Studies. When his Russian-speaking students ask him how difficult Korean will be, his response (in typical Russian droll ‘anekdot’ style) is: “In the West, for language learners it is the _result_ that is important, while in the East, it is the _process_ that is important. But in Russia – it is important during the process to drink lots of vodka.”

We should be in the business of preparing life-long learners of Korean (some of whom will find it useful to embibe frequently during the process), but the minimum threshold required to set such learners on their way is still might steep.

Finally, with regard to Jay Lewis’s remark: “It [an IUC] might better succeed in the short-term if we attached it to an existing program, say at Yonsei or Kodae, or better yet - the Academy of Korean Studies…,” I respectfully disagree. I think any such move would be the kiss of death for a Korean IUC. At least, better to be both out of Seoul and away from pre-existing and entrenched programs and hiring networks, with the freedom to do things the way constituent members see fit. 

Onward and upward, 

Ross King