The Hanja Teacher and I

[First, a message to my loyal readers (Long live the readership!): Believe it or not, I have been updating diligently. Unfortunately, I have been doing this on my laptop at my homestay, which is not connected to the internet. The reason you cannot yet see these updates is that I have neglected to transfer them to my jumpdrive so I can put them up when I get to school. I should really ask my host family about getting that internet access set up...

And now for the post!]

I seem to have curried the favor of a certain instructor here. She teaches Hanja (한자) primarily, which are the Chinese characters still extant in the Korean language. Though few and far between in day to day interactions between Koreans, they are very important for reading novels, newspapers, and especially academic journals. This teacher in particular wants to start offering Chinese courses at the school, and so she is taking Chinese at a local institute. When I heard she is learning Chinese, I showed off a little and said "Hello" and "Thank you" to her in that language. (Btw, it took me an obscenely long time to remember how to say these things, but I want to thank PBS in America for producing the show "Sagwa: The Chinese Siamese Cat", without which I would not be able to produce anything in Chinese.) She thought I could actually speak Chinese after that, and rattled off a string of unintelligible words. At that point, I had to explain that I only knew those two phrases. Oh! She understood then, and I thought that would be the end of that.

But, she seems to have this idea that we can have a trilingual exchange. On Wednesday, she asked me to take a walk with her to the bank and then to the supermarket for some fresh air and a popcicle. I thought, "Oh, great! She doesn't know very much English, so I'll get to practice some Korean and get out of this stuffy gyomushil (teacher's office, 교무실)!" Little did I know, she wanted to also teach me some Chinese. (Rebecca H. will probably be very happy about what follows.) And so begins our trilingual friendship of utility, in which she teaches me two languages, and I teach her one. (Maybe I'm winning?) Every morning, she will walk up to me at some point and say something to me in Chinese, say what it means in Korean, and if there is any confusion, clarify in English. It's a nice daily ritual, and I hope it continues throughout the semester. Though, I also hope the other Korean teachers will not think me ingenuine in my desire to learn Korean, which is still strong (see the post about my email from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).