The Good and the Bad

Korean classes resumed after a half month hiatus. First, the bad:

I made the mistake of telling another foreigner living in the prefecture that I was taking the classes. He's decided to take them too. Class is conducted in Japanese, of which he understands not a sentence. Therefore, I am shunted to the back of the room every lesson to sit next to him and translate. This irks me for three reasons, namely:

1) I pay tuition and transportation each week to learn Korean, not to be your pro bono Japanese-to-English translator/grammar tutor. What the fuck are you doing trying to learn Korean while living in Japan if you haven't even bothered to learn Japanese yet? I'm sure you are a nice person, but I am here to learn, not to babysit you because you don't have a goddamn clue as to what's going on.

2) I pay tuition and transportation each week to take this class and meet with Japanese people. Because I'm now being forced to sit next to you and translate, I am not meeting Japanese people. I barely know you. I am sure you are a nice person, but I do not want to be your friend. I am here for a purpose. Please do not get in my way.

3) After class each week I go out on town for the express purpose of meeting eligible Japanese bachelors. I barely know you. I am sure you are a nice person, but I do not want to spend every Friday night hanging out with you when I hadn't spoken two words to you before you started the class. Also, Japanese boys assume that you are my boyfriend, which gets in the way of my cruising. When I say that I already have plans to hang out with friends, I am giving you a polite out. Do not force me to be direct.

Now onto the good:

Our teacher is apparently back in Korea. This came as a surprise to the heads of the International Center as well. They brought in a Korean exchange student from a nearby university to fill in. cinderfalling, your menfolk can put on height in a way the Japanese boys, however pretty, do not.

I've also discovered that I'm going to have an easier time than I thought learning Korean. The kid came into class and said, 'Hi, my name's Kim and I'm a student at the local university.'

He then asked us what he'd said.

The Japanese people were stymied. Much toothsucking ensued.

I said, 'He just said, 'Hi, my name's Kima nd I'm a student at the local university.''

People were shocked. How did I know that?

It was only then that I realised he hadn't said that in Japanese.

Korean is like weirdly pronounced Japanese. In my half-attentive state, I was able to understand the Korean-Japanese cognates effortlessly. This made me quite happy. (In a related note, I'm sure the Chinese would say that both Korean and Japanese sound like weirdly pronounced Chinese, but as the Chinese class was full when I tried to enroll, that's neither here nor there.)

At any rate, it bodes well for future language study.


We received our textbooks today. (They were not included in the cost of the class ::grumbleargh::.) The sensei ordered English language textbooks so that the predominantly Japanese students would not be reliant on the (horrid attempts at) katakana transliteration into Korean. The fact that the textbook is written in my native language is nice bonus #1.

Nice bonus #2 is that the textbooks were written by a bunch of Korean dudes with a ... passing familiarity ... with the English language. Aside from providing hours of hilarity as I try to figure out what they intended to say (All your base are belong to us!), this is helpful, because the mistakes they make while writing in English are already giving me some idea of how ideas are expressed in Korean. Very good.

I'm going to be bugging all of the Koreans in you lot to help me out, so be prepared.

That will be all.