Sang-eul Tatda

Warning: Boastful blog entry alert!

Had final exams Wednesday and Thursday. As promised, the listening comprehension was definitely harder than it was for the midterm. I had to make guesses on three or four of the 20 questions. But I knew that I did well on the other parts of the exam.

Yesterday, Friday, was our suryo-shik (수료식 修了式), or "completion ceremony" for the end of the term. It's not called a graduation ceremony because most students aren't graduating from the program, just completing one level and getting ready to move on to the next.

The ceremony was pretty fancy. It was held in an auditorium. As is standard practice for events of any size in Asia, there was a large banner strung up at the front of the room.

It reads: Congratulations, everyone! / Korean Course Completion Ceremony / Seoul National University Language Education Institute

Some students were graduating from the program -- those that had completed Level 6. They wore borrowed gowns and mortarboards, and one of their number gave a short valedictory speech. (Interesting fact: By my count, of the 18 graduating students, 16 were women.)

Graduation was actually the last event on the schedule. I'm showing pictures out of order.

The first event was entertainment. Various students performed songs and dances.




It was all very professionally done, with lighting effects, excellent sound quality, and projected images on the big screen.

Before the ceremony began, I and a handful of other students were asked to move down and sit in the front row. So I knew I was likely to get some sort of award.

As it turns out, I was called up twice. First for having the highest total grade out of all the four Level 3 Classes (about 40 students), a combined score of 99. I apparently got a perfect score on the final exam listening comprehension, which means I guessed right on all those questions I was unsure about.


For some reason I had decided to put on a tie that morning, so I looked rather professional receiving my award. It consisted of a certificate and a nice SNU pen/pencil set.


Not long after, I was called up a second time to receive 300,000 won (about US $300). These scholarships are given to a handful of students in recognition of "sincere attitude" and "superior performance" that makes them a model to other students. I think the award was based on a combination of my grades and some subjective judgment on the part of the teachers.

It sure is fun to get an envelope full of cash!


I feel like I have a lot of advantages over many other students -- maturity (well ... age anyway), experience, knowledge of other languages, no need to work part-time jobs, etc. -- so it doesn't seem entirely fair for me to compete directly against them for these awards. And many other students are certainly in greater need of cash assistance than I am.

But it is wonderfully satisfying to come for just one term of study and feel a real, and publicly acknowledged, sense of accomplishment at the end of it as I prepare to head home in little more than a week.

Yeongeuk

On Monday we had a play contest at school. Unlike preparations for our singing contest at Yonsei, which seemed to take months (and come to think of it, it probably was technically more than one month), we only really learned what was going to happen last Friday.

Our lesson text was in the form of a play script. The play is set back "before people knew what mirrors were", and tells the story of a man from the provinces who purchases the wonderful device in Seoul and brings it back home. His wife discovers it, and looking in the mirror, assumes that the woman she sees there is a concubine that her husband has secretly brought back with him from the capital. Wacky hijinks ensue, with the inevitable result that the mirror is smashed to pieces.

We actually read a different version of this story in our textbook at Yonsei last fall, so I assume it is a well-known folk tale in Korea.

After we read the script on Friday, we were each assigned parts and told to memorize lines. On Monday, five classmates would be chosen to represent our class in competition against the three other third-level classes.

I ended up being selected to play the shop owner who sells the protagonist the mirror at the beginning of the play.

In our classroom we practiced for a while, and then put on hanbok 한복, traditional Korean dress.


Here I am holding the mirror during the practice session.


The competition itself was held on the fourth floor, in the same large classroom where I had taken my placement exam back in February.


I decided to play the character like a sinister peddler of the mysterious and strange -- not unlike in the Monkey's Paw or, to choose a more topical reference, Gremlins.


With me out of the way, the rest of the cast gets down to the wacky hijinks. The wife, second from the right, is bemoaning her situation, while her mother-in-law looks in the mirror and finds that the woman in there isn't her son's concubine, but her husband's!


After the performances we watched pictures taken by students back on taekwondo day, and had a pizza lunch. Take-out from Domino's. This pizza was topped with potato wedges, bacon, and hot sauce.

And this one with pineapples, mushrooms, green onions, and various meats.


These pizzas came with garlic dipping sauce and pickles, just like the ones we ate last year from Mr. Pizza.

After lunch the judges had finally finished their deliberations. Our class won for best overall performance (hooray!). I won an individual award for best performance as the shopkeeper, and my classmate won for best performance as the mother-in-law.


It was actually a good day for prizes for me. One of the pictures I took of taekwondo won a prize too, although the prize was not awarded to me but to my classmate who was the subject of the photo.

You are probably wondering what I got inside that "Happy Mind" bag. It was a Peter Rabbit travel toiletry kit.

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.

Iphak

Today was the first day of classes at my new language school at Seoul National University. SNU is the flagship school of the Korean public education system, and the most respected in the country. Today was not only my first day of class, but also the beginning of the new academic year for all SNU students. (The Korean academic year begins in the spring.)

The main gate of the university was decorated with a sign announcing the matriculation ceremony.

The shape of the gate is quite unusual. It is meant to resemble Korean letters. You can clearly see the first syllable of 'Seoul', 서 (seo). I think the rest maybe is supposed to resemble the first syllable of 'university', 대 (dae), although I can't figure out how that could be. Maybe Erma can help here. [Thanks, Erma for pointing out in a comment that the right side is a small (apparently epiphytic) ㄷ, the letter representing the d sound at the beginning of the Korean word for university. -- note added by Lance March 4.]

SNU is a steeply sloped campus, set in the foothills of Gwanak Mountain. The views can be quite dramatic, although today it was a bit hazy.


There were a lot of banner recruiting signs all over campus. Since SNU has the country's brightest students, its graduates are in high demand. This sign is for the Boston Consulting Group. Most of the signs were announcing meetings with recruiters taking place later in the week.


Let's be sfersian!


There were a number of Pojang Macha like this one set up around campus, selling hot snacks.


I don't know if these are there every day, or if these were serving the large crowds expected for the opening ceremony. [It turns out these are not regularly on campus. I haven't seen them since. -- updated by Lance, March 7.]

As I walked up the hill, the sun looked eerie in the morning haze.


This is the Language Education Institute, where my classes are held. All SNU buildings are designated by a number. If you click on the picture to enlarge, you'll see that this building is number 137-1.


Just uphill from my building there is some major construction going on:


The feeling at the language school here is quite different from Yonsei. For one thing, the program is considerably smaller, so it feels more intimate. Whereas at Yonsei there were 14 classes at my level, with 12 students each, here there are 4 classes at my level, with 10 students each. And while it is a very international set of students, the ratios are more balanced than at Yonsei. This is because SNU, as part of their application process, considers nationality as well as academic merit in order to achieve a balance, whereas Yonsei automatically accepts all minimally qualified applicants.

Before I took my placement test, I jotted down the listed nationalities of the students taking the test with me. (These are only the students entering the program fresh, who need to have their Korean level evaluated; the numbers don't include continuing students.) I'll list the numbers, I found them quite interesting:

Holland: 1
Taiwan: 2
Russia: 4
Germany: 1
Malaysia: 2
Mexico: 1
Mongolian: 13 (!!!)
USA: 16
Vietnam: 1
Brazil: 1
Sweden: 2
Spain: 1
Singapore: 1
United Arab Emirates: 1
Uzbekistan: 2
Japan: 19
China: 15
Hong Kong: 3
Chile: 2
Tajikistan: 1
Thailand: 3
Poland: 1
France: 2
Philippines: 2
Korea: 6
Australia: 5

I was startled to see that one of the people taking the test was an former classmate from Yonsei, a Japanese woman. We'll call her Mayumi (not her real name). Mayumi was a very serious and successful student, but she disappeared without a trace a few weeks before the term ended. We were all worried about her. She told me that she'd had some sort of health problem and had to go back to Japan. Like me, she had spent the winter quarter at home, and was now planning to take spring term classes at SNU. I asked her why she picked SNU this time instead of returning to Yonsei. She said that she wanted to try SNU because it had fewer students and they weren't as young.

From what I could tell she's right -- the average age (and presumably maturity level) of the SNU students appeared to be higher.

In my class there were two students from mainland China (one of whom is of Korean descent, but knew no Korean before), one student from Taiwan, two from Mongolia (one of whom is of Korean descent and speaks Korean), one from Uzbekistan, one from France, one from Australia, and one other American.

[We've since added another Mongolian and a Japanese, for a total of 12 students. I was mistaken about one Mongolian being of Korean descent. They are all of Mongolian ethnicity. Two are from the capital Ulan Bator, and one is from the countryside. It also turns out that both of the mainland Chinese students are of Korean ethnicity; one grew up in a Korean-speaking household, and one didn't. -- Added by Lance, March 7.]

The class seems to be right for my level; from what I can tell, the curricula of Yonsei and SNU are structured very similarly. Some of the students spoke better than me, some worse. I knew pretty all of the material we were given for review at the beginning of class, and I know very little of the material that we'll be learning, judging from the contents of our textbook.

The classroom building is older, more run-down, and cramped compared to Yonsei's language institute. Yonsei runs a huge operation that rakes in a lot of money, which is probably why they could afford to put up a brand-new building. But I actually found the facilities inside the classroom to be better at SNU -- there's a computer built into the teacher's desk, for example.

After class I went over to the Student Union's main dining hall for lunch. I've posted before about student dining halls, but I don't believe I've ever shown a picture of the post-prandial section. Koreans generally don't drink with their meals (unless it's alcohol), and as far as I can tell don't use napkins either. Those are after-meal activities. So after you drop off your tray of dirty dishes, you get in line for a drink.


This is a particularly fancy water dispenser. You grab a clean cup, and then you choose either near-boiling hot water from the left-hand-side taps, or cold water from the right-hand-side taps. I like hot water, but let me tell you, a fashioning a cup out of metal is a pretty stupid idea if you want to drink hot liquids from it. A lot students mix hot and cold to get the right temperature.

You sort of stand there and drink quickly, trying not to slow the line down too much. Then you drop your dirty cup into one of the blue tubes at the far end of the dispenser.

In every dining hall I've been in, right near the exit are some napkin dispensers and a mirror. (They are against the far wall in the photo above.) So you can wipe your face, and then check to see if you've done it right. (It's really a pretty civilized idea to be able to look in a mirror after the messy business of eating.)

One last photo -- this is for Erma. It's Gate #8 on campus.

Norae Jarang

One of the big events of the quarter here at the Language Institute is the Singing Competition (노래 자랑 대회 Norae Jarang Daehoe), which pits each of the 15 second-level classes against each other performing Korean songs karaoke-style.

We've been preparing for weeks. I was, against my wishes and better judgment, named banjang (반장 班長), or class leader, which meant it was my responsibility to make sure that we chose a song and organized practice sessions. (I did have help -- one of my classmates was named vice-banjang.) Many of the classes chose to do Korean pop songs, but we opted for a cute children's song called Kokkiri Ajeosshi 코끼리 아저씨 "Uncle Elephant", about an elephant who falls in love with a whale; they get married in an underwater ceremony attended by a bevy of sea creatures.

Most classes were able to get their music at a noraebang 노래방, or singing room. I'll write more about those in a future post.

The big contest was held this past Thursday in the main auditorium at the Language Institute. This is the first group, performing under the large banner bearing the name of the event.


Here we are getting ready for our turn on the stage:


Highly coordinated dance moves:


I'm carrying a picture of an octopus, the officiant at the wedding:


Marriage proposals:


The big finish, a rather chaotic chorus line:


Each group was briefly interviewed after their performance. I was asked if everyone had practiced diligently. I responded in halting Korean that everyone had studied hard. Oh well.

You can hear one version of the song here.

I and the other second-level banjang were rewarded for our efforts with gifts. This is what I got.


Sigh.

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.