[KS] re: failed Koreanists littering the streets

[Yuh Ji-Yeon]

A bunch of scattershot responses and more musings:

I do think that Stephen and I are talking about the same thing, and I'm 
sorry I came across sounding as I were saying the glass is half-empty. Of 
course it's half full!

Many people seem to think that when I talk about getting a "feel" for the 
language, I am somehow descending into blabber. Perhaps "feel" is a bad 
word choice. As I explained in my previous posting, it's what comes out of 
intimate familiarity with a language (which comes from immersion, or what I 
termed making Korean a part of your life so that you start actually 
experiencing things--playing tennis, cooking a meal, taking a bath, making 
friends, hiking on a mountain, shopping for groceries, having an argument, 
dreaming, talking to yourself, planning the next day's menu, etc. --- in 
Korean), and of course for the foreign language learner that familiarity 
includes understanding the rules and all the various exceptions. It also 
must include understanding the culture, so that you know when and to whom 
to say "annyung hasimnika" and when and to whom to say "jal issudni?" Yes, 
there are rules for this, too, but again, the rules aren't always enough. 
There is also lots of vocab for which a definition really isn't enough. You 
have to see it used in many contexts, understand something of the history 
of the term and its usage, experience it yourself, in order to really 
understand that word. In some ways, you have to know more about it than a 
native speaker in order to get it. An example might be the Korean word han, 
or the English words cool/hot in their slang meanings.

In some ways, acquiring feel is simply getting to the point where the 
correct linguistic utterance (complete with the correct cultural nuances, 
grammar/syntax/etc.) is an automatic habit in which you no longer think 
about the rules and you can make accurate guesses about what's right and 
wrong with an utterance even if elements of the utterance are unfamiliar or 
new. I'd also like to point out that when I wrote about this feel, it was 
in a context in which we were talking about acquiring fluency in a language 
(i.e., why is it so hard to get fluent or even competent in Korean?), not 
about the beginning stages of learning it. I don't think "feel" is terribly 
important for the beginner or even for the intermediate learner when that 
learner is already college-age or older. (It's a different story the 
younger the learner is.)

Learning grammar is terribly important if you want to learn a foreign 
language (and also important if you want to be educated in/about your own 
native language/s), but grammar is a bunch of rules and their exceptions 
and the rules for the exceptions and the exceptions for the exceptions and 
the rules for those exceptions.. Rules are great and they are vital at all 
levels of language study, but they are far from enough for acquiring 
fluency. Plenty of Koreans, for example, know the rules for passive 
voice/active voice, and they can conjugate verbs like pros, but they can't 
hold a decent conversation in English. What are they missing? Basically, 
language immersion in situations in which they could actually apply the 
rules and the exceptions and develop an intimacy with English as a habit of 
speech so that they can produce the correct speech utterance even if they 
don't really know why it's correct. This is what I call a feel for a 
language and it involves no mystery at all. I would say that my approach 
emphasizes linguistic/cultural immersion as the necessary and critical 
accompaniment to the traditional fare of grammar and vocabulary. Foreign 
learners of Korean can get this feel and acquire that supposedly elusive 
fluency ----  please note that I never said or implied that foreign 
learners of a language cannot acquire fluency.

Regarding considering convention as a rule -- fair enough, but that means 
that the rules are neither logical nor consistent, and this goes against 
the definition of a rule. It also means that convention/rules don't really 
help students understand the language or grasp a principle -- it's just 
something to memorize. So I do think that we have to distinguish between 
rules (that are relatively logical and/or consistent) and convention. 
Besides, by convention I also meant such things as usage and what people 
say when, and this varies greatly and is difficult to codify into rules.

Also, of course I agree that we should get explanations for things in 
language. But what I'm saying is that often a "logical" or rule-based 
explanation just doesn't exist, and therefore really of little help for the 
foreign language learner who wants to know how to use language. Sometimes, 
we just need to accept that there may not be a rule for why we say what we 
say. A book written by a native Japanese for English-speakers learning 
Japanese put it well: Sometimes we just need to accept that we say such and 
such in such and such situations and not get too bogged down in dissecting 
the grammar or the exact meaning of the words, because the grammar and the 
exact meaning of the words aren't central. I found this terribly helpful 
when learning Japanese, for it prevented me from getting bogged down in the 
similarities that segued into differences between Korean and Japanese. 
(Despite their similarities, the two languages are quite different and many 
Koreans/Japanese say it's difficult to master Japanese/Korean, especially 
the spoken versions. In many cases, the differences are based more on 
culture than on language per se.)

Dr. Lankov's remarks concerning Korean language education in USSR/Russia 
were very illuminating. Korean language education there has everything it 
lacks in most, if not all, Anglophone countries -- prestige, a long, 
unbroken history, a student population composed of the cream of the crop. 
And therefore it also has the educational materials and the trained 
teachers that can lead students to fluency. In addition, the fact that 
students begin to learn a foreign language, even if not Korean, at an early 
age is important. This means that students have early language exposure, 
and studies have indicated that early language exposure helps students 
learn foreign languages better, even foreign languages which they were not 
taught early. In other words, studying English as a foreign language in 
junior high school or earlier can indirectly help you when you study Korean 
in college, simply because you are better trained in the art of learning a 
foreign language and your mind, early on, has encountered a language other 
than your native one.

Claire Kramsch is quite right, but she wasn't really referring to learning 
grammar and talking about grammar. She was referring to talking about how 
language is used, why we say what we say, and about learning the cultural 
context in which language is used. Her main point is that language is 
culture-bound, and to become fluent in a language you must attain some 
level of fluency in the culture. So language classes can't just teach 
grammar and vocabulary. They have to also teach culture and the 
relationship between language and culture, and how the language you're 
learning is used in a cultural context quite different from the culture 
your native language is embedded in. In a sense, she was talking about 
teaching cultural fluency hand in hand with language fluency.

Also, no one has talked about learning language completely outside a 
classroom--just picking it up without any formal teaching and getting up to 
a basic conversational level. Does this not happen with Korean for 
English-speakers? This does happen for Japanese for Korean speakers, and 
used to happen for English for both Korean speakers and Japanese speakers.

Horace Underwood's comments are much appreciated, for he gives a very good 
overview of Korean language education and the situation in South Korea. 
Thus I hope that the talk about a kind of IUC comes to something --- leave 
the current language programs to keep serving its current constituency and 
create a program of the sort that you need for your constituency --- 
foreign learners at upper levels who are in some way linked to academia. If 
you can't get the permission to start one in Korea, why not start one in 
LA' s Koreatown or create somewhere out in the rural areas a Korean 
Language Village for adults, complete with a library of books, newspapers, 
magazines in Korean and internal broadcasts of Korean television and radio.

Best,
Yuh Ji-Yeon