Hilary Meets the Land of the Morning Calm

My last blog post was October 5th, and here I am on November 5th writing my next one. No, I didn't fall off the face of the Earth, actually, au contraire, I signed up for Intensive Korean lessons, everyday, Monday-Friday from 9-10:50AM before work. They took place about an hour's subway ride from work, which had me waking up usually around 6:30AM. Since I don't get off work until 7:30, and usually dinner and interneting consumes a few hours, plus studying means that I have been burning the wick at both ends so to speak.



So let me tell you about the class itself. Walking into the class I had 6 Korean words in my possession: yes, no, hello, thank you, discount please, and subway station. Not even numbers. It was slim pickins vocab wise! Which is why I signed up for this intensive 101 class. I thought that having class every day meant I would be getting a lot of practice speaking and I would learn fast.

Class the first day: we were six total and we all looked like we were roughly in our twenties. One guy was a Korean-American who grew up in Texas and was now living in Korea because he could from the sounds of it. He actually knew a smattering of Korean, having been here for six months and six aunts in the area. Another guy, a Canadian from from Ontario had been here a few months himself and also seemed to have good starter-amount of Korean, enough to be putting together some sentences that I certainly couldn't understand but the teacher could. There was a guy from Rhode Island that appeared just as novice as me, though had been here three months. There was one other girl, from Japan, who seemed to spending vacation here in Seoul for a month and learned quite quickly.

Newsflash: the class was immersion, with no English being spoken. The teacher started right away asking us in Korean our names and nationalities and what we did. Hearing all this Korean directed our way and then seeing some of my class mates not only understand but even be able to answer immediately made me think I had gotten the wrong classroom. I was about to ask where the 101 classroom was when the teacher started going over the roster, and my name came up, so I realized this must be the right place.

Second Newsflash: Class everyday doesn't only mean regular practice, it also means we cover material three times as fast. We learned the alphabet on day one, by the morning of day two we were supposed to have it committed to memory.

Probably doesn't sound or look that bad, but for me, I certainly needed more than 24 hours to commit this stuff to memory , especially when over 2/3rds of that time were spent working and sleeping!

Later in the month I asked my teacher for permission to take a short video during class time for this blog. I made it really short because she seemed camera shy and I didn't want to distract her. She is explaining to us some grammar rules regarding verbs.