한국어 공책

(Korean Blog)

I wonder, from time to time, why I bother with Korean. I know enough Korean to deal with my in-laws. I can hold my own in Korea. Anything complicated, Good Man or his family would handle (or Master, if need be). I don't intend to study in Korea. I don't want to become famous there. So why do I bother to continue my Korean studies? Why not plateau out where I am right now?

And then I pick up one more book written in Korean...

One of the joys of reading in Korean is that it forces me to slow down and enjoy a book.

One of the pains of reading in Korean is that it forces me to slow down and understand a book.

Months ago, I ended up finding an article about a North Korean who was born into Camp 14. His North Korean name was Shin In-kun, but in South Korea he goes by Shin Dong-hyuk. He lived in the camp his entire life until he escaped.

(Some people don't believe his story and say it's impossible that he escaped from the entirely controlled zone of Camp 14. I know memoirs tell the author's truth. I also know that terrible things are happening in North Korea, and nobody wanted to believe the atrocities that Nazi Germany was carrying out were true when they came to light.)

He wrote a book about his experiences in Camp 14, but it's only available in Korean (세상 밖으로 나오다). I asked Sister to buy it for me and she did, reading it herself before she sent it to me. Sister wrote on the note she sent:

그리고 2시간만에 다 읽었어요... 읽는 내내 답답하고 화나고.. 그랬어요. 휴~

And I read the entire book in only two hours. The whole time I was sorrowful and angry. Well... sigh...

I put the book aside for a few months. I was working on my million characters goal, and that was all about extensive reading. I was reading for pleasure, not worrying about what I couldn't understand.

I feared I wouldn't be able to understand the language, and I worried that it would be too hard. I picked up the book about two weeks ago, and I gathered my mini flashcards on a ring (also sent by Sister in the same package), prepared to make a lot of flashcards. I was ready to do a slow, intensive reading so that I wouldn't miss anything. I wanted to give Shin the respect I suspected his work would deserve.

The chapters in the book are very short, and it's illustrated in Shin's own hand. The great thing about short chapters is that I'm not overwhelmed by a huge block of text, and I can pick up the book, read it for just a few minutes, and end at a good stopping place.

The book is just about perfect for my reading level. The words I don't understand are almost always either North Korean (with South Korean equivalents given parenthetically) or political words specific to North Korea that even Good Man doesn't know. I can mostly figure those out by context. I'm sure I don't get all of the details, but I get far more than I was expecting.

So I haven't made a single flashcard. I haven't needed to. Even so, I've only been reading this book for twenty or thirty minutes a day. It's intensive reading, but not in the way I expected.

When I read in English, images flash into my head quickly. The pace of my reading makes it necessary to shake the image away quickly. By the time the image has been created, I'm already halfway through the next sentence.

But when I read this in Korean, the image builds itself piece by piece. Slowly.

When the image fills in, I exhale deliberately, close my eyes, and hold the picture in my mind. I've read about these things in English. I know these things happen.

But reading the words in Korean, by a Korean, held as a prisoner in North Korea? It's much more powerful. The image lingers. I can't shake it away. I can't ignore it.

농촌지원을 나가면 쥐를 많이 잡을 수 있어서 일주일 내내 쥐를 잡아먹은 적도 있다. 쥐가 보이지 않으면 한 달에 한 번도 못 먹은 적도 있다.

쥐를 잡으면 그 자리에서 바로 먹지 않고 학교로 가져와서 "화구"에 구워먹는다. 작업이 끝난 후 친구들끼리 모여 잡아온 쥐를 꺼내 놓고 함께 먹는다. 친한 친구들끼리 모여서 먹는데, 쥐 잡아먹는다고 나무라지는 않는다. 여름에는 나뭇가지를 모아서 굽기도 하고, 작업반 내 불 피워놓은 곳에서 구워먹기도 한다.

화장실에도 쥐가 많은데, 화장실에 있는 쥐를 잡아먹기도 한다. 쥐가 관리소에서 많이 걸리는 병인 "비라그라"(펠라그라)에 좋다고 한다. 오히려 뱀보다 쥐가 영양가가 많다.

If you went into the fields, there were many rats, so sometimes we were able to eat a rat every day of the week. Sometimes, we didn't see many rats and we went a whole month without eating one.

When we caught rats we didn't sit down and eat them right away. We went to the school and roasted them over a fire. When labor ended we shared the rat with our friends. Good friends gathered together and didn't get punished just for eating rats. In the summer we made a fire of twigs and the labor group met in that location to roast the rat.

There were many rats at the bathroom, so sometimes you could grab rats there. At the political camp, rats were a good way to treat pellagra. Rats had more nutritional value than snakes.

I read almost 50 books in Korean this year. Most were books that I would've had access to in English. In fact, many of them were books I've read in English.

Interestingly, I found that reading books I've read in English was both easier and harder than blind reading in Korean. It was easier because I had some background knowledge, but it was harder because I tended to think in English while reading those books. I tended to remember big moments from the books in English in my head, and then I'd search for them in Korean in the books. It became a bit distracting.

But I bought so many books that were translations from English because I wasn't sure what I wanted to read in Korean. When I was in Korea last year, I couldn't read enough to figure out what I wanted to read!

The library books from my co-worker's daughter have been a godsend! Those books expanded my horizons and allowed me to take reading risks with no financial risk.

At least ten of the books I read were ones I would not have had access to in English. If I count the Kare First Love manga series (would I would not have read in English, but enjoyed reading in Korean), I read more than twenty books I wouldn't've been able to read in English.

English is such an international language that it's easy to think that we have access to enough books to read. And perhaps we do. Still, there is something magical about getting access to a whole other language-worth of books.

I read several awesome picture books that are only available in Korean, including one about a man who sucked up his wife in the vacuum cleaner. (Seriously. It was awesome.) I learned about the moon rabbits because I could read about them in Korean.

I ended up reading some propaganda that I borrowed from the gu office in Seoul when Good Man and I were registering our marriage. I learned "nuclear weapon" from that book and figured out a lot of political words from context.

I enjoyed the book about the third grade boy who was growing up (I'm Not a Kid Anymore) because it was such a Korean book.

Although I ended up throwing Body across the room, I am still amazed that I was able to read a book for Korean adults in Korean.

Now that I can truly read native content in Korean, it makes me even hungrier for the language!

(Cross posted.)

I had a realization today while reading 반쪽 마법.

I was trying to decide if "20세끼" would be Sino-Korean numbers or pure Korean numbers. And it occurred to me that in the books I've been reading, pure Korean words are spelled out but Sino-Korean words use numerals, even if the numeral is the first thing in the sentence. "1초..." "말 한 마리..."

"[Good Man], it seems like Sino-Korean numbers use digits, and pure Korean numbers are written out."

"Yes."

"Seriously? Did I just figure that out?"

"Yes."

The reason this is so exciting to me is because when I decided to read 1,000,000 characters of Korean, I did so to increase my passive vocabulary, naturally learn some grammar, and enjoy the language—and it's working.

For example, one of the first random words I encountered when I was reading the Pippi series was "식인종" (cannibal tribe). I was reading a book about Obama a few weeks ago, and the word reappeared.

I also learned "palm tree" from Pippi (야자나무) and it came up in Half Magic. I learned "magic" (마법) from Half Magic and then a student at school gave me "마법사의 돌" (hint: she gave me the first Harry Potter book).

And the grammar realization today was not forced or searched for or even something I actively wondered about. It came about from a very natural place. It came about from using and enjoying the language.

The books I struggled to read in January and February are coming in handy in December. It really is...magic.

(Cross-posted on Korean blog.)

I'm not sure why I chose "Read 1,000,000 Jaso" as a new year's goal this year, but I am happy that it gave me a push to really read in Korean.

I have studied, to varying degrees, Swedish and Spanish. Although I am apparently competent in Spanish due to my college studies (ha!), I have never read a book in Spanish. I tried reading a few books in Swedish, but I got caught up in all of the words I didn't know. I would stop at every unknown word and look it up in a dictionary. Bad idea. It was time consuming, discouraging, and boring. I subscribed to the idea (probably influenced by the never-ending intensive reading done in Spanish class!) that I had to understand every word.

Of course, this was untrue.

When we planned to go to Korea, I decided to ramp up my study efforts, primarily by building my vocabulary base and writing. The studying improved my Korean (or perhaps just my confidence?), but a side effect that I wasn't expecting was that not studying Korean at least a little bit every day felt...strange. Now doing something in Korean daily is a habit.

Around the beginning of the year I read about a project to read one million words in a foreign language over on Language Fixation. I thought, 'Well, I can do that. It'll be a challenge though.' I had been reading a bit and my speed was slowly picking up. I knew that committing to that much Korean reading was meant excluding most fun reading in English for the year, but I wanted to try it. I hoped that reading would increase my vocabulary, my comfort with Korean, and my understanding of Korean grammar.

I immediately realized that Koreans are loosey-goosey with spacing and I wasn't sure how to count a word. Good Man told me in Korean each character is counted rather than each word. I decided it was fair to go for 1,000,000 characters.

Part of taking on the challenge of reading 1,000,000 characters in a year was to see if the old saws I rattle off to my students are true. "The best way to improve your reading is to read at home daily for at least thirty minutes." "You should be making pictures in your head as you read." My grad school profs told me that, and Fountas and Pinnell said it, so it must be true, right? Another teacher line? "We learn to read so we can read to learn."

When I started reading extensively in Korean, I carried my intensive-reading habits with me. I would get frustrated when I couldn't understand a sentence or paragraph perfectly. Finally, I realized that I had to relax and just read.

Practicing reading near-daily led to a cascading series of events.

• Fluency. When I first started reading more (before I started the challenge), I read so slowly. I was embarrassed by how often I was reading syllable by syllable. (I do remember when I was reading Korean letter-by-letter, so I'll give myself some credit!) But after some practice I start reading full words. And eventually phrases came.

• Endurance. At first I could only read for 10 or 15 minutes at a time and then my brain would turn off. Now I can read for extended periods of time. More than thirty minutes, if I wish.

• Self-Correcting. I started correcting misunderstandings. I'd read something, realize it made no sense, glance back and correct myself.

• Visualization. At some point, pictures started forming in my head instead of English. I remember realizing I was making pictures in my head after reading Korean. I was so excited.

• Predicting. Soon I started making predictions as I was reading. I could often figure out what word would come next. Pippi would 외치다. She always does, that Pippi!

• Vocabulary. I am figuring out words from context. Words with multiple meanings? I used to run through the meanings in my head. Now I can usually predict or figure those out from context, too.

• Grammar. I hated studying grammar in school and couldn't tell the difference between a verb and a noun until I was a sophomore (seriously), but I usually knew what sounded right—probably because I read so much. I don't enjoy memorizing grammar rules in Korean either, but I'm starting to get a better sense of what to say, when. I can more easily pick out the parts of speech in a Korean sentence. Using the topic/object/topic markers is getting easier.

• Thinking in Korean. This one is coming along slowly. Sometimes my predictions or thoughts are in English, but sometimes they're in Korean. With more and more practice, this will come, too!

And this is where the allure comes from. I don't recall learning to read in English. I just recall devouring books. Now I am learning how to read all over again. And it's fun!

There is a deep sense of excitement and joy that comes with understanding a passage immediately. I am excited when I figure out a word in context and then see it in other contexts that prove I was right. I love finding a word in a book I just picked up for the first time—a word that I just learned from my previously read book! Most of the books I picked up in Korea are favorites from my childhood. Even so, these books spark something some magic inside of me. Part of this could be rereading the books as an adult, but I think more of the magic comes from discovering a new word or way to phrase something in an old favorite. 아바마마 is so much more delightful than "my Father, the King!"

I have read seven books in Korean so far this year. Now I feel like I can continue to tell my students that reading books for fun daily improves your reading. It's absolutely true.

Tonight I peeked at my worms. I couldn't remember the Korean word. "에비? 발이?"

"벌레," Good Man said, "but we call those worms 지렁이. Earthworm."

"지 like that word I asked about last night?" Last night I'd been reading The Little Prince and kept running into 지구. I thought it might be "region" or something similar since 지역 is region.

"Ah, 지구, yes."

"지리학!" I yelled out. Geography. Good Man nodded and I smiled. "I am very clever."

지 (地) Earth
지구: globe; earth
천지: heaven and earth (also a series of forms in taekwondo)
지옥: hell
지진: earthquake
지하(철): underground (subway)
지도: map
지리(학(자)): geography (geographer)
지역: region
현지: that very spot

There are more examples, of course, but these are the ones that made me smile or nod. I've been confusing 지도 and 기도 (ji-do and gi-do, map and prayer) for years. I finally came up with "jeez, I forgot the map" and "God, I forgot to pray" to link English letters with the Korean sounds. But this root knowledge will make a much better hook!

(영어)

오늘 시어머니께서 전화하셨어요.

시어마니: 아만다! 스웨터 이뻐!

저: 제 미니 홈피 보셨어요?

시어마니: 어!

저: 여자친구가 남자친구를? 남자친구한테? 남자친구로? 앗! 남자친구 위해?

시어마니: 어.

저: 여자친구가 남자친구 위해 스웨터 만들면 헤어져요.

시어마니: 하하!

저: 그리고 우리는 결혼 안 했어요. 저는 헤어지고 싶지않아요... 우리는 결혼하면 괜찮아요.

시어마니: 알았어, 알았어...

I knew I was using the wrong verb, but I couldn't remember 뜨개질하다.

I learned "위해" from Korean music and actually got to use it. Random.

This always happens. One of my current grammar points in Sogang is -처럼. A few days later, I started listening to this song and ta-da! -처럼!

가지마 가지마

우리 함께했던 날들 그 기억들만 남아
너를 지워야만 내가 살 수 있을까

우리 함께했던 날들 자꾸만 너 떠올라
너를 보내야만 내가 살 수 있을까

(가지마) 떠나지마 제발 (가지마) 사랑하잖아
(가지마) 나 혼자 남겨두고 제발 제발 제발
가지마~ 가지마~ 가지마~

아직 너를 위해 바보처럼 살아가는데
너는 어디에 니가 필요한데
oh~baby 내 사람아 이제 그만 내게 돌아와줘
장난처럼 그렇게 돌아와

항상 너만을 위해서 살아가고 싶지만
때론 그 사랑마저도 힘이 들잖아

(가지마) 떠나지마 제발 (가지마) 사랑하잖아
(가지마) 나 혼자 남겨두고 제발 제발 제발
가지마~ 가지마~ 가지마~

아직 너를 위해 바보처럼 살아가는데
너는 어디에 니가 필요한데
oh~baby 내 사람아 이제 그만 내게 돌아와줘
장난처럼 그렇게 돌아와

아프고 아플만큼 지치고 지칠만큼
지워봐도 참아봐도 니가 떠올라
너도 나처럼 아프잖아 너도 나처럼 힘들잖아
돌아와 내게로 잊지 못할 내 사람아

아직 너를 위해 바보처럼 살아가는데
너는 어디에 니가 필요한데
oh~baby 내 사람아 이제 그만 내게 돌아와줘
장난처럼 그렇게...
oh~baby 내 사람아 이제 그만 내게 돌아와줘
그때처럼 그렇게 돌아와

나: 건? 건? You have a counter for ACCIDENTS?

굿 맨: accident or event

나: 이상해!

I had another brilliant realization about 날/일 today, this time while studying flashcards on the subway.

I have been using 다음년 for a while now. Only recently did people start correcting me, saying it was 내년. Today my boss said, "Amanda, it's 다음해 or 내년."

"But it's 다음달? And 내일?"

"Yes! OK!"

I started thinking about it and suddenly an idea that it might be related to pure Korean vs Sino-Korean words popped into my head.

Hey, what do you know! The prefix for "next" and "last" indeed depends on whether the word is Sino- or pure Korean. A few notes, however. 주 apparently has no pure Korean word (at least none that Koreans could tell me). Some of these words do exist technically, but are very, very rarely used; the bold words are most often used.

As a special note, 어제 is used for yesterday. 그저께 is the word that I can't remember that means "the day before yesterday." While I was on a dictionary rampage, I discovered 어제 comes from the longer version of the word 어저께. Now it makes sense.

Good Man and Diana's coworker helped me out with this, but the idea popped into my head on its own.