Amanda Takes Off...

Friday night I met YJ for a language exchange. She read my three posts from my 한국 공책 blog and edited/fixed them. (Yes, even after Good Man edited it, she had some more ideas. It's one of the benefits of going to more than one person for help.)

YJ told me that instead of calling Master's Wife "Master's Wife" or the more usual way of greeting a mother, "Master's Daughter's Mother," (OK, it's actually "Eldest Child's Name's Mother" but since I call the eldest child "Master's Daughter," there you have it), I should call her 사모님 the title for a teacher's wife (can also be used for doctors' wives, etc).

(On a related note, 사부님is a teacher's husband. 부모님 is the title for "parents." 부 comes from Chinese (父) and means "father." 모 comes from Chinese (母) and means "mother." Hence, these are easy titles for me to remember.)

So last night, after class, I asked Master what I should call his wife. I said, "Should I call her [Her Name], Master's Wife, Master's Daughter's Mother or Samonim?"

He explained what Samonim was and said I should use that.

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

He shrugged, "Because you didn't know the word. But yes, it's good."

Master is really good about telling me proper titles and words. He's also good at letting me make mistakes for a long time if they aren't that important and don't impede with communication, so I'm guessing he didn't think the title thing was very important. Still, I feel a little rude.

Class is at 5:30 this month due to the winter camp schedule. Last night I showed up to class as kids from the previous class were leaving. One looked surprised, "앗! 아만다! 안녕하세요."

I greeted him in turn and the other boy just stared at me. "한국어를 몰라?" You can't speak Korean?

He shook his head and said slowly, "아니요." Yes, I can. Poor kid, he just looked so confused.

Class itself was good. Officer is a fan of jump roping and we've been doing it quite a bit lately. I got in 800 turns in less than 9 minutes, with brief breaks in there. My feet ached afterwards, though. They still ache today.

We did a lot of kicking drills and since there was an odd number of people, Officer held the targets for me. It was nice to work with her because she gave nice corrections. Also, she's been a bit less shy with me.

Tonight's class was really rough because every muscle below my waist hurt because of last night's class. Tonight I showed up 30 mins late (I had to go to the post office after work) and I was still dripping in sweat by the end of class. Officer runs a good class.

At one point she has us doing kicking drills in groups of three. One person would stand in the middle, two people holding targets on either side. We would do a barenbal (no idea what this is in English, a sort of sliding roundhouse kick) to one side then lightly bounce a few steps to the other side and do it to the opposite person with the opposite leg. We had to do 3 sets of 20, 120 of those kicks is exhausting.

I was working with two boys and we had fun. They were counting in Korean and English. They were counting in Sino-Korean and pure Korean, making up nonsense like 십두. The last set I counted off in Swedish, which confused the heck out of them.

Then we did barenbal and then a roundhouse with the opposite leg. Two sets of 40 (20 for each leg). We ended with alternating roundhousing (not jumping), 30 as fast as we could (less than 30 seconds). Left, right, leftright, leftrightleftright, etc. We did 3 sets of those.

It was a very good class, but I was really aching afterwards. I kept looking at the clock thinking, End it, let's do pushups and situps and squats instead... If I'm thinking that, something is terribly difficult, because I hate doing those things.

I got home, took a very hot shower and then slathered Mentholatum all over my body. I then cursed myself because my whole body burned for more than 45 minutes after doing so.

I am liking these classes with Officer more and more...she pushes me a lot.

Good Man's been out of town for work since Friday, so I've been all mopey and whiny about it. I know that sounds pathetic. I was single here for a year and dealt with it and enjoyed it...but this is the longest we haven't seen each other since meeting, excepting Vietnam. The good side of it is that I've gotten a lot of Korean studying done.

Today, I finally learned a word that's been in my flashcard stack for months. 사용하다 means "to use." I was passing the cabinet that holds the steel cups for kids to use to get water and saw that it said 사용전. I was trying to figure out what it meant and it clicked. 전 means "before," so I stood there thinking. Before what? Ahhhh... Now I will remember that word since I have a context for it.

I bought a copy of 이솝 이야기 (Aesop's Fables) several months ago thinking I'd be able to read it since I know many of the fables in English. I couldn't, but I decided to try again. I started reading "산토끼와 거북" ("The Hare and the Tortoise") on the subway last night. It was difficult because a) some man kept staring at me and I was trying not to pay attention to it b) I didn't know all of the words. (Heck, I didn't know 거북 but that was pretty easy to figure out!)

I read through it once, just to read it. That took forever. Then, on the way home, I read through it again, starting to to look for grammar patterns I know. I then started reading through it a third time, underlining words I didn't know.

I finished this morning on the bus, and finally looked up the words tonight.

I am an educator. I know that the best way for students to improve their reading is to read fluently—books at or below their level. I also know that if a student is determined to read a difficult book (those Potter books are nowhere near the reading level of many of their child fans!), you should let them.

Really easy books here are often boring or use kid words. (Graded readers don't really exist here, and because KSL is not a market like ESL, there aren't easy books that would interest adults.) This book is nice for me because the stories are quite short (2 to 4 pages, large type), mix Banmal (low) Korean (during dialogue, primarily) with the -sumnida form, and use fairly common vocabulary. Of the vocabulary I don't know, it's mostly a mix of guessable and unguessable, about half the time necessary to know and half the time not. "To be deep blue" neither guessable nor necessary. I couldn't guess "to humble somebody," but it's necessary to the story. Some of the vocab consists of idiomatic phrases, of course. There are lots of little markers I'm ignoring for now because I can figure out the story without them.

I'm enjoying my book. We'll see how many stories I read before getting bored or discouraged.