The Grand Narrative

(Update Novermber 8: In hindsight, I think I berated myself too much in this post for doing so badly in the TOPIK test. Being lazy does mean that one’s speaking abilities deteriorate of course, but seeing as I was perfectly capable of handling bank tellers and delivery guys etc. in Korean 3 years ago, and study and speak a lot more Korean now than I ever did back then, then it’s not like my Korean speaking abilities are worse…I just stammered and sweated much more at first when dealing with strangers than I used to, because I always got my wife to deal with them when possible instead, but that’s about all. Indeed, I’ve already followed my own advice from this post to deal with people myself from now on…and have had no problems whatsoever. The test was just a damn test after all, and at the higher levels an increasingly obtuse and academic one at that. So who cares?)

(When I wrote yesterday that I’d be “back to more serious topics tomorrow,” this topic is what I meant. But I’m sure you’ll agree that when dancing girls at a wedding unexpectedly turn up, then a blogger’s got to do what a blogger’s got to do)

Ever grateful, but as a blogger very concerned that 30-50% of my readers come to the site via a blogfeed at pusanweb, I check the Korean forums at Dave’s esl cafe everyday for avatars I can stealthreads that I can advertise the blog on while pretending to comment, especially the ones dealing with learning Korean - after all, it’s a captive market for people interested in Korea. In them, I surely must come across as some sort of Korean-language guru, which to be fair I, well, am compared to probably 99% of readers there, but readers who clicked on my ads links because they wanted to learn Korean are probably:

A) Pretty disappointed, because after a promising start in the first three months of the blog, clicking on my ”Learning Korean“ category these days only seems to yield translations, and nothing about learning Korean per se (Update March 2008: Now there are two seperate categories, one for learning Korean, the other for Korean translations).

But as you shall see, this is more due to the phase of learning Korean that I’m in right now rather than a disinterest. Talking about learning Korean is much more interesting when a dearth of materials, and being surrounded by 49 million natives who have issues with you speaking their native tounge, means you have to pretty ingenious just to find something to study. But I have figured out methods to overcome both for myself and have talked about them on numerous occasions on at daveseslcafe in the past 2 years, so I think I can be forgiven for not feeling like repeating them here (although you can soon find them if you look at my posts on dave’s by clicking on my profile here). And even 18 months ago there were still big holes in materials for studying Korean with, but the plethora of good quality materials available for studying Korean now is simply unbelievable for someone who came in 2005, let alone me in 2000…in this sense, I am very jealous of newbies here.

Put those both together, and these days most of my Korean study time can be spent actually studying Korean, rather than trying to make a damn lesson my damn self just to begin studying at all. And for that, blogs like Let’s Learn Korean are much better than mine, with more relevant links, and don’t seem to have so many distractions.

(More distractions available here. She’s called 한영/Han Yeong by the way)

B) Wondering what the hell happened with my TOPIK test. The results did come out on November 1st after all, and with me making such a big song and dance about it about the test over two months before the actual test date, then you’d think I’d be the first blogger to mention the test again after the 6 week hiatus(!) the marking of the tests somehow requires.

But, well…ahem…the reason I haven’t mentioned it is because I did not get the 70% average in the intermediate test to pass Level 4. Not only was my 60% not even close, it was only a few per cent more than what I scored in the same test a year ago. So yay, today I received a beautiful certificate for Level 3 in the mail, and much prettier than my one for Level 3 from last year for sure, but a physical symbol of the fact that, apparently, my Korean hasn’t improved at all for the past 365 days.

In fairness, I did sleep terribly the night before the test, and…ahem again…had diarrhea on the day…*cough*…but although I’m not beating myself up too much, I honestly don’t think even a good night’s sleep and some muffins and AllBran for breakfast would have helped me jump that 10% gap. Sure, I have of course learned some things after at least 365 hours of Korean study in the last year…okay, maybe 200-300…and I genuinely think that, when I’m not tired, my speaking ability has jumped by leaps and bounds, although in hindsight I wish I had devoted a few of those hours spent chatting to my Korean tutor going over some practice tests with her instead, full of some pretty obtuse Korean in them at the best of times. Hell, I didn’t do a single practice test, what score did I expect? I wouldn’t do all that well at the very fast-paced TOEIC exam if I’d never done one 6 months prior either.

But to completely honest, I’m not so worried about not passing the intermediate level 4 test, and moving on to the advanced level 5 and 6, because I simply don’t feel like an advanced student. For despite all my Korean guru bravado, and despite what I just said about my speaking ability, other than blog translations I use it in my daily life for…hell…a good hour a week. Three if I meet my Korean tutor. I am still technically enrolled in a Korean class at Pukyong University, which would bring that weekly total to 9, but I actually stopped going a while ago, 50% because I’m lazy, 10% because of issues I had with my teacher’s methods, 10% because going to any class 10-12 M, W, F with a baby daughter to look after at home is always a challenge, and 30% because I realised that I just wanted to damn well talk in Korean, which I manifestly didn’t get the chance to do in that class (but I still recommend the lower classes there).

Yes, I know my wife is Korean, but I’ve already discussed at least 10 times, either here somewhere or over at daves, why we don’t and are unlikely to start speaking Korean to each other rather than English after 7 years together, especially with a daughter living in Korea with limited English exposure otherwise (update: I’ve found the post where I discuss all that here). I will remention though, that if you’re a procrastinating lazy wanker like myself, then living with a Korean partner or spouse can be the beginning of the end for your progress in learning Korean, because as it’s infinitely easier for him or her to deal with the bank clerk, delivery guy, woman checking there’s no gas leaks than you…than you don’t. Ever. Even if you did everyday and were perfectly capable doing so before you started living together. It’s one of the reasons why, when we’re out together random Koreans often prefer dealing with my friend to me, as even though he rarely studies and has a long-term Korean girlfriend he doesn’t live with her, and having to do everything himself means his accent and choice of words are much more natural than mine. 

So, despite my image of myself vis-á-vis my Korean ability, and probably of many people who know me, I can’t consider myself an advanced speaker when I’m scared of dealing with the bank clerk, delivery guy, or woman checking the gas myself. Don’t get me wrong, I can have conversations in Korean for hours, but in reality that’s because in those instances I’m generally the one controlling the conversation, and what’s more I’m with friends and/or tutors who are familiar with Korean learners and/or me. But throw me in a situation where I’d have to deal with wierd accents, unfamiliar vocabulary, assholes who won’t slow down and/or choose simple words for me, and especially no transcript of our conversation for me to study in advance…and then I feel like running for the hills.

Yeah, I know what I have to do, although it’s going to be difficult to make the shift from feeling like a confident old-Korea hand to a nervous, trembling mumbling newbie again. It reminds me of how I felt on my last trip to Japan in 2004 before my marraige made the visa-run unnecessary, as going from savvy-as in Korea to virtually fucking mute in Fukuoka made me feel deeply uncomfortable while I was there.

Usually when I have a crisis of confidence about Korean I go on a spending splurge of new Korean books, and this time was no exception, but remembering that some of the 35(!) or so I have now have barely been opened since I bought them I was more circumspect than usual. I also remembered that part of my problem was that 24/7 access to the internet at my desk, and a daughter that at any moment will come in to my bedroom and demand I read 20 books to her, means that for a long time I have never actually fulfilled my lofty goal of sitting down at my desk and studying Korean for a full hour with no distractions, let alone the three a day that I still think are necessary. Not being able to restrain myself from playing chess or checking my blog stats every 5 minutes is another issue of course, but I think my plans of 1 hour uninterrupted sessions of Korean study are forever doomed to failure with my daughter awake. Bearing that in mind, I think I found a perfect solution:

These two books have 4 pages of explanations and exercises each devoted to 60 sayings and common phrases respectively. There’s a third one advertised in the front cover of each devoted to sayings deriving from Chinese characters (한자성어), but I haven’t seen it in a bookstore yet, but as these two are only 6 weeks old(!) then I’m sure that that one will be available soon too. They’re all in Korean, so they’re definitely not for beginners, but looking at, learning from, and going over the unfamiliar vocab in 1 chapter only takes me about 20 minutes, so they’re perfect for someone with limited uninterrupted blocks of time.

And I’m not learning interesting but essentially useless things equivalent to “that’s how the cookie crumbles” in English, for sayings and analogies and metaphors are used a lot more in everyday Korean than in English, where a lot of sayings (like the above one for instance) are known but never actually used in real life, at least by me.

I also considered this listening book, as despite what I said about improvements there’s still a relative dearth of intermediate-level+ listening materials in Korean: 

But the grammar they use in the listening practice was stuff I already know very well, so this is still a good book, and I would have bought it had it been available a year ago, but I restrained myself in this case.

If you are interested in any of these books, details for buying them are available at the Language Plus website, albeit entirely in Korean.  And on that note, one not minor issue with my Korean study is that I spend entirely too much time on the blog these days instead, so that’s enough for now!

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