18 - Learning Korean

Summary

I’M RELUCTANT TO TREAT the topic of learning Korean because I don't know what to say that won't sound trite. In the 1960s, there was a school of thought that viewed efforts by foreigners to learn Korean as fundamentally silly. James Wade was the group's major general. Wade was an icon in cultural matters. A big-framed, handsome man, he was a noted music teacher and composer, and an all round man of letters, He had a column in the Korea Times – Scouting the City – which was eagerly awaited every Saturday by the ex-pat community. I loved his column even if I didn't agree with his views on learning Korean, but to be fair, his attitude to the language was based on the difficulty of getting anywhere unless you were willing to live with a Korean family, which would have been very difficult in Wade's time, and attend a full-time language institute, which would have been even more difficult since such institutes did not exist until the end of the 1950s. The Korean Language Institute of Yonsei University (KLI) was founded in 1959 and it claims to be the first of its kind in the country. Columbans ahead of me attended language classes in Seoul National University, but I’m not sure if there was a formal language school there at the time.

It's widely agreed that Korean is a very difficult language for a Westerner to learn. I put in the Westerner proviso deliberately because in my school days Japanese students learned in six months what it took us two years to learn. And my teacher told me she taught two Indian students in the 1960s who learned much faster than any Japanese student in her experience. No one is sure why East Asians learn Korean so easily and we find it so difficult. We complain about the particles nŭn/ka, ŭl/rŭl, and we gripe about honorifics and the irregular verbs. None of these is the root of the problem. Getting the particles right facilitates using nice Korean, but the particles were never a barrier to communication, not any more than confusing the definite and indefinite articles in English interferes with communication.