Final Exam and Reflections on Language Class

The final exam consisted of four parts. The first part was reading—25 multiple choice questions, some with fill in the blank grammar points, others with comprehension based on short paragraphs. This section, I feel, was very easy, and I may have gotten 100% on it. There was one tricky thing, though. I could not read the instructions for one set of answers in the comprehension section. This was worrisome as the question reoccurred with each paragraph. I was able, however, to determine what the question was asking using the good ol’ noggin. I noticed that, based on the paragraph, 3 of the answers were true and 1 was false. “Ah!” says I. “They want me to pick the false one. I can do that.” At least… I hope that’s what they wanted.

Part two was writing. This was more difficult as I can’t spell in Hangeul worth a lick, but I was able to show off some more complicated grammar structure based on what we had learned. That just means I was able to string some nouns together. Instead of, “The pen is on the table. The hat is one the table. The book is on the table,” I wrote, “The pen, hat, and book are on the table.” This is harder to do in Korean than you might think… but still not really that impressive.

Parts three and four were both conversation. In part three, I randomly chose a partner and we were told to wait our turn outside. Based on the intel from the others who went in before us, we determined that we would be given a situation to dialogue about (e.g. giving directions to the convenience store to a cab driver, or describing our rooms in the United States). My partner and I were each given a card. Mine had 10,000 won written on it, and a list of items of varying quantities. Ah! Grocery shopping. This I can do. Our dialogue commenced:

“Hello!”
“Welcome!”
“Do you have apples?”
“Yes, we have apples.”
“How much are the apples?”
“1,000 won each.”
“Do you have chocolate?”
“Yes, we have chocolate?”
“How much is the chocolate?”
“2,000 won each.”
“Do you have milk?”
“No there is no milk.”
“If so, then given me only apples and chocolate. Give me two apples and one chocolate. How much is that?”
[My partner goes to calculate on the chalkboard. The numbers we actually used were far more complicated.]
“4,000 won.”
“Here is 10,000 won.”
[Some more calculation.]
“Here is 6,000 won.”
“Thank you. Goodbye!”
“Thank you. Goodbye!”

We rocked it.

Part four was an interview with the teacher, which I botched completely. I stuttered out some nouns to indicate that I understood what she was asking me, and I just didn’t know how to respond. Of course it didn’t help that the first thing she said was “Introduce yourself.” In fact, as I recall, she said this English…

All in all, I think I did well, and it certainly wasn’t worth all the stress that a lot of us put into it.

As for the language class, I have a few parting thoughts. Language is hard. Korean is especially hard. When the Department of the Defense or the Foreign Service trains people in foreign languages, they rank the languages based on how long it takes to reach Level 3 proficiency, which they classify as professional level (i.e. you can give an extemporaneous speech in the target language on a variety of subjects and can read a newspaper fairly easily). For most Western languages, this takes six months of immersive study. For Korean, it takes two years.

It’s especially frustrating because, with the other languages I’ve studied, if something sounds familiar, it’s probably a cognate. Thus, I’ve trained my mind to search for the words that sound familiar and work from there. Unfortunately, now my mind tries to find cognates in Korean, and while there are loan words, there are no cognates. The entire first half of my language classes, whenever my teacher would say “next” I would hear “good job,” because, even though it actually sounds nothing like “good job,” by brain latched onto it as a familiar sound. When I hear something and think it’s English, I usually have to tell myself, “Think about the context. There is no way that word fits here, even if it is a cognate. Figure out what the word actually sounds like.”

Loan words are fun though. They give you an idea about what Korea was like before it met Westerners. For instance, “date” is a loan word. There was no concept of “dating”. They had arranged courtship, but not the sort of freeform system we are accustomed to in the west. Another interesting loan word is “juice.” Imagine a world without that! And “bread”, which is actually borrowed from a romance language, I think, as the transliteration is bbang (cf. pan in Spanish), imagine a world without that!

Finally, there is one cultural-anthropological observation I made that’d I’d like to propose a theory for. When referring to the future, the teachers always pointed behind themselves. When referring to the past, they would point ahead of themselves. In the West, I believe, it is usually the opposite. At least, it has always been the case for me that the future is ahead and the past is behind. I think it may have something to do with the way East Asian culture thinks about the best man has to offer, or at least how it thought about it for centuries. Usually in East Asian culture, especially in Confucianism, you are always trying to return to the times of the sages. Those were the days of harmony and prosperity. Thus, when you think of where you want your civilization to go, you always want to go to the past. In other words, you face the past and the past is thus in front of you. The future is behind you. You do not look at it because you want it to be the past. As I am a history major, I can appreciate this point of view, and I have tried to adopt my hand motions to this system, if only for the sake of clarity when I try to explain things to my host family.

Me: “Tomorrow, I need to go to the post office.” (Indicates in front.)
Family: “You went to the post office yesterday?”
Me: (Sighs…)