TKD Week 1 and Hanja lessons

This was my first week of TaeKwonDo since orientation. It wasn’t even a full week because of the English teachers’ welcome party and the festival, but I certainly did learn a lot. Mostly, I learned that two weeks off of TKD and going to a class with 40 students to start off with isn’t very good for form. In other words, I spend the majority of my first lesson just going over the first kick I learned: apchagi, or front kick. This is a two-hour lesson mind you. This week, I also learned the fourth form, though I’m sure if someone asked me to do it at this point, I’d be slow as molasses. But now I supposed know two forms, first and fourth, so that’s pretty cool.

(CULTURAL NOTE: For those who don’t know, a form is essentially a choreographed routine of different punches, chops, kicks, and blocks. As far as I can tell, you’d never use it in fighting, but it looks pretty darn cool. I believe memorizing forms is one of the main components to advancing through the belt rankings in TKD. As such, just because someone has a black belt in TKD, that doesn’t mean they win a fight. It just means they can look cool in a fight. Most of the black belts in my class would probably get creamed in a brawl. Not that I want to fight them, mind you… Just saying.)

What’s nice about the class is that pretty much everyone in there is a black belt or a red-black belt, so if the sabeonim (sp?), the kwajangnim’s assistant, needs to spend extra time helping me get my form down for a kick or a punch, he can just tell the other students to work on something for a while and then give me some private instruction. So, I’m getting private TKD instruction for about $70 a month. Pretty groovy.

It’s also fun because most of the students are elementary school kids. Thus, they aren’t actually black belts because they need to be 15 or 16 years old for that. They wear the red-black belts instead because they know the forms necessary to have a black belt. But the fun thing is, even though they can show me up anytime on the forms and the drills, they still have to respect me because I’m older than them. Plus, they’re just fun to play around with. Especially in sparing. Every time I spar with one of them, their eyes get wide as they think to themselves, “This guy has a foot of reach on me with his kicks and one of his lunges equals two of mine. How the heck am I supposed to practice with him?!” To be honest, I’m thinking the same thing.

There’s one student that’s a little older though. Still doesn’t have his black belt, but he instructs me when the sabeonim is busy training the others in more advanced forms. He’s the one that taught me the Fourth Form. He smiles at me a lot, and I think he likes having me around, but he can’t speak English. Alas. He’s at the middle school in the Hamlet, I think, so maybe I can ask if he knows one of my host sisters.

At any rate, I speak a little Korean with the kids. Mostly, they ask where I’m from and stare at my eyes and beard. The sabeonim even had me give a little speech in Korean to introduce myself, which went much better than the speech I gave to the high school two weeks earlier.
The dojang I attend also has hanja classes. By hanja, I mean the Chinese characters that still exist in Korean, and by classes, I mean that the TKD students have to write out two characters several times before they can practice. I think I’ll join them. If I go to graduate school, I’ll have to learn the characters anyway, and it will help me bone up on my vocabulary as the pronunciation of the characters is just their Korean equivalent. I’ll just have to bring a dictionary along to translate what I’m writing.