Your typical evening-Korean class at Ewha U.
Most of the students are Japanese executives

Getting the Hang of Hangul

by Donald Burns

I am a born whiz at puzzling out road signs in Hangul. I’ve also dragged myself through two years of Korean language lessons since arriving here, including a company-sponsored tutor and evening classes at Ewha University. But waiters in the local restaurants here in Suwon act dumbfounded when I try to order anything in Korean: Nothing happens until I write some characters on a napkin--then they bust up laughing. I’ve learned about a thousand words; using them in sentences is extremely difficult.

I really liked the tutor, but lately I’m convinced that the Ewha classes are more effective, albeit less convenient: Commuting to Seoul is a pain. And in winter, howling winds rattle classroom windows--the only heat comes from a kerosene stove that pulls the students in close like a campfire. Each class has about a dozen students, typically half of whom are Japanese (grammar masters and meticulous note takers, but they seem to have as much difficulty with Korean conversation as the Westerners). The teachers are the greatest.

"What homework?" The Ewha classes are conducted completely in Korean--I break into a nervous sweat whenever called upon to answer a question. Hey, so what if I score poorly on the tests or barely comprehend what’s going on in the classes--I DO make one helluva good impression with visitors from the States as well as cocktail waitresses in the western hotels here. A month ago, hosting a small contingent from the USA, I applied ten months of lessons to order four beers. "WOW! How long did it take you to get good at Korean?" they all asked. Then I got a little rap going with the waitresses, who gathered around amazed--like they’d seen a talking dog.

Until you attempt to learn some Korean, you cannot appreciate the extraordinary intellectual accomplishment made by any Korean who can speak English. In my class at Ewha, I had to give a little speech--all in Korean, of course--an ordeal more awkward and excruciating than the oral exams in quantum electronics that I periodically bombed in graduate school. (Eventually I was steered into sales.)

Some Koreans get offended when foreigners muck up and mess around with THEIR language; they perceive a kind of invasion of privacy. Conversely, I’ve met many Koreans--superb at spoken English--who have an arrogant "blind spot" for writing, i.e., they cannot recognize really BAD English when it’s published. You see examples of this phenomenon everywhere in Korea, sometimes perpetrated by "professional" translation companies: A big billboard ad at KOEX broadcasts a simple misspelling ("electornics"). Or you’ll see a bathroom door at a top hotel that boasts "Man!"

Sometimes--on the job--an engineer will ask me to fix an English-language document, and later on I’ll discover that the piece was secretly restored to its original, obviously-flawed version. Why? "The engineer liked it better ‘his’ way." Unbelievable. A non-idiomatic, non-perfect English presentation is probably tolerable if the audience’s native language is Chinese, French or Spanish. But in the USA, that same English-language presentation or advertisement would immediately brand its company as ‘third world"--Koreans don’t really believe me when I report this fact-of-life about doing business in the States.

While here, I’ll keep chipping away at this mission-impossible task of learning Korean, but my confidence gets shaky when I see the problems encountered by Koreans struggling with English--despite years of classes in middle schools and universities. Back at the restaurant, Suwon, a waiter who spoke pretty-good English was trying to describe his roots: "Home town is in Iceland," he insisted. "ICELAND?! No way," I kept thinking. He repeated himself three or four times before eventually giving up, all flustered and defeated. Later on it hit me that his problem keyword was "ISLAND"; he probably grew up on an island, but all meaning was temporarily obliterated by a tiny phonetic mistake.

Maybe people are right when they tell me the fastest way to learn the language would be to find myself a Korean girlfriend. When I got here last August--my third week in Korea--I met three Generation X sisters in a local "Hof" (tavern): Mid-20’s, one pocket dictionary among them, speaking about as much English as I speak Korean.

Periodically we’d get together for chaotic night drives around the countryside. Inevitably I'd get lost, and these girls had NO sense of direction. None. They’d argue noisily among themselves, and the scene inside the car was bedlam as they shouted contradictory commands at me in Korean: "LEFT! RIGHT! STOP! GO! LOOK OUT!"

One night we got completely lost trying to drive to Inchon, and I came dragging home about 3:30 AM. The next day I showed up for my appointment with the tutor, feeling brain dead and guilty about not having done any of the homework--again. Halfway through the lesson she said "Well, I can see you were studying VERY hard this weekend." Come to think of it, that’s how I became a whiz at puzzling out road signs.

(Originally published in the Korea Times)