Hangungmal Sueop

Had my first Korean language class today. There are twelve students in my section. It's a diverse bunch. Countries of origin include China, Japan, America, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Latvia. (It seemed as if our teacher had never heard of the latter.) My section has no Korean-Americans (or Korean-anything-elses), although there are many such students studying here (including Erma). (There are over a thousand students taking Korean here. I'll let you do the math to figure out how many simultaneous sections there must be.)

The presence of a Latvian in my class may be less surprising than it first seems. The school has just revised its textbooks. Our textbook isn't going to be ready for another week or so, so for now we are using photocopies. The teacher said that when the textbook does come out, there will be different versions for English, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian speakers. The number of Russian-speaking students must be increasing rapidly.

Erma has two Mongolians in her class! Even if those are the only two Mongolians in the entire program, that's a nationality that is vastly over-represented when compared with their percentage of world population.

The class schedule is intensive. We are in class from 9:00 to 1:00 every weekday. That time is divided into four class sessions, with a 20-minute break between the second and third session, and a 10-minute break at the other two junctures. During the breaks, the number of students crowded together outside the main entrance to the building smoking is impressive.

The teaching style is not as interactive as in America. There are obvious similarities with the Chinese-language classes I've observed in China. Our reading teacher, for example, spent most of the 50 minutes of her class session talking. When she wasn't explaining the reading, she was posing questions and then answering them herself if no students were forthcoming with answers. But in the other three sessions we did have a reasonable amount of time to practice speaking with the teacher and with the other students.

Most of my classmates took Level 1 Korean here. They have been in Korea longer than me, and have better listening comprehension and spoken fluency than I do, and are familiar with the teaching style here. They also share a common set of vocabulary and grammar patterns that only partially overlaps with what I learned when I studied in Seattle two years ago. So I definitely feel that I'm playing catch-up in the class. But I'm confident that this is the right level for me and that I will progress rapidly in this environment.

The homework load this first day was light, but I still spent about 3 hours on it. So I think I should expect that school days will be an 8-hour proposition. Among other things, that will probably translate into shorter and less frequent blog entries.