[KS] re: failed Koreanists littering the streets

[Stephen Epstein]

Dear list members,

I've been trying to resist the urge to contribute to this very intriguing thread.  Other things should be occupying my attention at the moment, but I surrender, and I hope I'm not too late to chime in with several points/queries.  I am hardly surprised that the issue of language learning has generated a flurry of list activity, because it is such a fundamental one, and represents a widely shared experience.  I suspect that for most on this list our relationship to language acquisition and to the Korean language specifically (whether as native speakers of Korean or another language) constitutes an important part of our identity.

If I can make a number of scattered observations that retreat a bit from the very practical (and helpful) suggestions about establishing an IUC:

Like Gari, I too have been impressed with the Korean ability of those who have been trained in language programs in Russia.  I'd be interested in learning more about how to account for their success.   Perhaps some of the native speakers of Russian on board have some thoughts, here?  I'm not aware of anything structurally in the Slavic group that would make its speakers more naturally able with Korean than speakers of a Latinized Germanic tongue like English; I can't imagine that an elaborate case system would make much difference.  Quality of textbooks?  Teachers?  A much fuller level of immersion in Korean even while in Russia?  It occurs to me that a possibility is simply that the Russian-trained scholars whom Anglophone/W. European academics come into contact with represent the cream of the crop of the system, and that we just don't get to see the "failed Koreanists littering the streets" of Moscow. Is this in fact the case? I appeal to Russian-born colleagues on the list for more info about their experience of learning Korean. (A side issue: two years ago I did have a chance to meet some foreign students at Kim Il Sung University.  I'm sure there is next to no information on this, but I'd be curious how learners of Korean do who are in North Korea vs. South Korea.)

I've long been interested in observing how people from different language spheres learn Korean.  It goes without saying that the structure, phonology and lexicon of one's own language have an important effect.  Thus Japanese learners obviously do the best overall.  Reflecting on my days at Yonsei's KLI, I would note that much as I enjoyed having Japanese students in my classes at a personal level, it can not have been effective pedagogically, as it created feelings of frustration/inadequacy for me in that they were able to progress so quickly while I muddled along, and much of language acquisition is an issue of confidence.  (These issues of inadequacy were replayed in a different way in classes I had in the US where I was one of only a couple of non-heritage learners: although I struggled to acquire the crucial oral/aural skills, a high level of motivation on my part meant I could at least more than hold my own on tests that focused on new vocabulary, hanja, reading comprehension, etc.)  The enormous advantage native speakers of Japanese have in terms of basic grammatical structure and syntax, means that for them fluency in Korean essentially becomes a matter of vocabulary substitution.  And given the common stock of Sino-Korean and Sino-Japanese vocab, there's a huge advantage here too: how hard can it to be to remember that a highway is a kosokdoro when your own native term is kosokudoro? Sure, there are plenty of English borrowings in Korean too, but these are often shared with Japanese (and I'll add that there are usually few things that can baffle me more in conversation than a Koreanized English term unexpectedly thrown in).  

Native Chinese speakers, with a similar lexical boost, seem to pick Korean up more quickly than most foreign learners of Korean as well.  The Mongolians I've met in Korea also seem to do very well for structural reasons, although I've been curious whether there are more than a scattering of dimly recognizable cognates (Ross, can you help out here?).  Ditto for the few Uzbeks and lone Azerbaijani I know.  I don't know any Finnish or Hungarian speakers of Korean, but I'd be curious how their experience differs from those who come from W. European I-E languages.  

Through a couple of extended stays in Ansan and by keeping an eye out on TV shows, I've also tried to observe how foreign workers in Korea accomodate to the language.  A group I find particularly impressive are speakers from the N. Indian languages: many foreign workers with Hindi/Urdu, Nepali, and Bengali backgrounds seem to do very well, often with little formal training.  But even though those are all Indo-European languages, they also have SOV structure and use postpositions.  So while I certainly take the points that have been made about motivation for language as crucial, the situation is complex.  My general impression is that Indonesians and Filipinos do not fare as well in learning Korean. In the case of people from the Phillipines, I've wondered whether it may in part be that they have a high enough degree of English competence that it runs interference, that is, b/c occasionally they can get by here with what is often close to native English, they may rely on that rather than Korean, the way some long-term Anglophone residents never progress either.

On these lines, I think it is worth mentioning that native speakers of English, for all the advantages they receive b/c of the prominence of their native tongue, can wind up disadvantaged in learning foreign languages.  Unfortunately, English is a juggernaut.  Writ large, speakers of English do have less incentive to learn other languages than vice-versa, but there are many--and I suspect several people on this list can be included--who truly are highly motivated learners of foreign languages. English's position as a global lingua franca means that its native speakers often encounter situations where their interlocutors will be exceedingly fluent in English.  Many of my friends in Korea have outstanding English--PhDs from American universities, professional translators, people who have spent many years living abroad.  Sure, we could communicate in Korean, and often there is code-switching, but why deny it? In the majority of such cases their English is better than my Korean.  If communication is the main goal, why persist just for language study?  Conversely, I've often been in situations where English's position means that people in Korea have insisted on speaking to me in English, either for practice or out of pride, when it was clear that using Korean would make the conversation flow more easily.  I suspect that speakers of French or Russian don't have this experience of being forced back into their native language (granted, they may be forced to make their way in English as well).

I've noted with interest that people have often written North American on this thread, when, in most cases, Anglophone could be substituted.  It would be worth examining in more detail at how the different Anglophone countries do relative to one another with what Ross calls the KJC crowd.  New Zealand, in many ways, is just as insular and short-sighted as the US when it comes to support for language learning (as of recent program closures, e.g., no university in the entire country now offers Indonesian--a national disgrace that I won't get started on).   S. Korea bounces between being fourth and fifth ranked among NZ's largest trading partners (meaning it outranks China), but there are still few resources being plunked into raising knowledge of Korean in NZ.  Where NZ does fare well, however, is with Japanese, and many Kiwis speak it very well, but that is because it's offered in high school and many follow up on that with work/study in Japan.  Perhaps this will change as the number of NZ English teachers in Korea increase.  

There are one or two high schools in NZ that do offer Korean (in areas of high immigrant population), but that's unlikely to change in the near future.  Btw, people from the N. American university system may be interested to learn that, in fact, there are few heritage learners in Korean classes at university in NZ, in part b/c the immigration history is so young, although Koreans have been the fastest growing ethnic group in percentage terms in NZ over the past decade.  The majority of students, actually, are native speakers of other Asian languages, whether as recent immigrants to NZ themselves or as yuhaksaeng.

Finally, I do want to return to Ji-yeon's remark that there is a level at which rules don't apply in language learning.  I understand what is being driven at here, and I think we basically have a similar view of the way language operates, but I would express it differently.  Certainly if one is equipped only with the basic rules of grammar, one will soon run up into a wall of idioms and exceptions.  But even these exceptions follow their own rules.  Deciding upon the mental process by which an anomalous utterance is produced or discovering the historic origin of an idiomatic phrase can be difficult, to say the least, but I think the crucial point is that language is not arbitrary and not to let students think that. It might be discouraging to have to learn too many discrete items as exceptions or as the result of historical accretion, but, to me at least, it is more discouraging to believe that it is a matter of "feel".  In this case "feel" is really the result of sufficient exposure to a language so that one can produce the rule, subconsciously or not.  It's the job of educators to pin down as many of these apparent exceptions as possible and to make them explicable to students so that they can arrive at the point of automatic reproduction more quickly.  Or perhaps let me just say that it's important to recognize that "convention", while perhaps not logical, rational or scientific, needs to be considered as rule.  I don't think any conventional utterance is inexplicable, even if many explanations of a phrase's origin have been lost.  I suspect Ji-yeon and I are ultimately saying the same thing, but from the perspective of language acquisition it seems to me a matter of converting a half empty glass into one that is half full.

Sorry for babbling on, but the general topic is an endlessly fascinating one.

Stephen