Hangungmal Sueop (redux)

Today was my second day of class, and since yesterday was primarily a review class, today was the first taste of what the term will be like. I thought that the pedagogy was far superior to that of Yonsei's language institute, which I described in an earlier post.

Although our building is older than the Yonsei classroom building, the facilities in the classroom are better. I took this picture after class today:


Hanging on the wall on the left is a map of Korea. You can see hanging from the desks in front of it the Korean names of the students who sit there. There's a computer in the teacher's desk, with a monitor for her to look at, and it's hooked up to powerful speakers and the digital projector hanging from the ceiling. Our listening comprehension exercises are played over the speakers, loud and clear. In the TV cabinet are all kinds of teaching aids, including nicely laminated plastic strips with vocabulary words written on them, and big colorful magnets for posting them up on the board.

Unlike at Yonsei, the teachers used props to good effect -- holding up pictures to illustrate grammar and vocabulary and to elicit meaningful sentences from the students. It was also more interactive -- we were all invited to create and speak sentences on the spot using the grammar patterns we were learning.

On the whole it seems like a better environment for improving speaking and listening. (My listening is still terrible. I had a hard time with the exercise we did in class.) So I'm feeling pretty optimistic about my chances to make good progress this quarter.

I learned three interesting things from the teacher today:

1) It is illegal for doctors to tell expectant mothers the sex of the baby before the 8th month of pregnancy. Apparently this is because in the past it was common to abort girls.

2) The reason there are no trash cans in the subway stations (and very few on the streets) is that after Korea sent troops to fight alongside the US in Iraq, the government feared that terrorists might try to plant bombs in the trash cans, so they were all removed.

3) I'll tell you about the third interesting thing in a future post when I describe my neighborhood.

Today during lunch a big snow flurry suddenly started up. For about an hour it snowed big fat flakes, lending a festive atmosphere to campus. Temperatures have hovered around freezing since I arrived.

This is a picture of the main library, taken from the Student Union building. If you click to enlarge it you can see the falling snow.


In the afternoon I met with a linguistics professor who specializes in early Korean writing. He doesn't really speak English, so we had to communicate in Chinese, which really stretched me. He invited me to participate in a weekly philology seminar he is running this quarter with five advanced graduate students; they are going to work through an ancient Korean manuscript written in Chinese characters. It's not clear yet how much I'll be able to understand in a Korean-speaking advanced class, but it should be an interesting experience.