Settling a bit

It's been a while since I've posted anything so I'll cover a bunch of random topics.
My last post was actually just taken from an email I sent my folks.

We have been pretty busy and our internet doesn't always work so we have been lax on posting.
Things are pretty great. Really. I think we are both finally adjusted to our jobs and the environment. We are familiar with the bus system and getting around our town so it’s much less stressful performing daily activities now. We are also getting used to standing out and being stared at everywhere we go. No joke, Laci and I were walking down the street on a Sunday morning to go to a bakery and study Korean and a man in his fifties stopped dead in the middle of the street staring at us. We walked about 30meters toward him and he never moved, never blinked, dumbfounded. We deal with that by singing songs about what’s going on like, “oh, you’re starin’, you’re starin’, you’ve never seen whitey before. I know were huge and kindy freaky lookin’ but what you stare for?” Things like that make it easier to laugh at it. Sometimes you get really mean stares or just people who are way too intrusive with their looks so I have perfected a little look that says, “I’m a demon from the Wild White West” which instantly ends any unwanted attention. We are also used to the cold. Since gas is so expensive we have been leaving our heat off and we just realized we are quite comfortable when our breath is visible in the kitchen.
My school is great. I had a similar school dinner/party experience with my school. My principal really likes me because I try hard to speak Korean, I eat everything and I requested that he pour me a shot of soju without anyone prodding me. I think most of my teachers respect me even though I am very young (age is very important here) because I am so interested in their culture. I always carry around a little notebook, which I use to write down names of people, foods, places, colors, et cetera to help me learn daily Korean vocabulary. Even when everyone is drunk at 2am I can always find a willing Korean teacher. My vice-principal was pouring me beer and giving a pronunciation lesson, which really helped because we were both shouting the sounds.

My classes are going well. I am teaching the Beatles’ songs, “Hello, goodbye” to my third grade classes and “No Reply” to my sixth graders. They love it. Getting to use music in school is such a boon because it is fun for me and it gets the kids involved and rolling off English words with more fluency. I also teach my co-teachers advanced English points on things like accents, rhythm and prosody so that they sound more fluent. They really impress me with their English vocabulary but they have a lot of difficulty understanding me if I speak normally. I am trying to transition into not using my teacher voice with them so they hear English the way it is actually spoken. Korean pronunciation is mostly very regular and English pronunciation is a bitch so I feel for them. See the poem "The Chaos" to know what I mean and to have a good laugh. I am also giving one of my co-teachers French lessons in return for Korean lessons. French and English are so similar that she was astounded to see that she already knew much of French vocabulary.

I wish I could say the same for my Korean studies. Every vocab word is a struggle but at least the tenses of the verbs are very regular. Korean does not conjugate person or number and often drops pronouns so everything depends on context. This is good if you are speaking because you don’t have to say much, noonchi let’s the listener figure it out from context. This is bad if you come from western culture where we are very specific about everything. We would never say, “where go?” to mean “where are you going?” The same phrase could mean, “where are they going?” “where is he going?” “where are we going?” and so on. Korean is called a situational language because of this feature. This, plus the different sound structure makes listening comprehension very difficult for me. Also, verbs carry many possible markings for different levels of familiarity with the speaker as well as the formality of the situation. Verbs look and sound completely different when I speak to my students, my teachers, and my principal. It is difficult to find a resource on what these levels are exactly and they are maddening to learn, as we have no such conception of this in English.

Nevertheless, trying to speak makes people happy so I do it a lot. I can order food, bus tickets, find the bathroom, and give simple commands to my students. Listening to announcements or questions is a very different matter. We use a lot of gestures. In Korea, you cross your arms in front of you in an “X” to say “no.” So at the grocery store I do this and say “kabang” to mean I don’t need a bag. It works alright. They also say “ne” which means “yes.” That doesn’t seem to difficult unless you have only studied European languages where “no” is “no”, “non”, “não” or other words that begin similarly. I never thought it would be so hard to say “yes!”

Jarrett