An-yeong-ha-se-yo: Korean Hello. In what was a super-unexpected moment last night, I learned the value of speaking a new language and the difficulty in acquiring that ability. To be perfectly honest, I was on a date with a Korean woman in which one of the rules was, “What you say goes.”
At one point, she said to me: “All right. From now on, I say that you can only speak Korean, and I can only speak in English.”
This semi-ridiculous request is possible only in light of the fact that I have acquired some Korean language skills and sometimes respond to her in Korean.
What I hadn’t realized before this time was that my skills were pretty much limited to the ability to say hello, read a menu, order food, beer and soju, ask how much something was, answer yes or no, and ask somebody “Really?” or "Are you okay?"
The truly coincidental nature of this encounter is that I had just spent the last two hours working on English pronunciation and conversation with a pair of high school students. From a purely technical standpoint, there are four sections to language acquisition: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I have long considered reading and writing to be the two most integral aspects of language acquisition. This is because when you read, especially out loud, you are reading, speaking and listening. Then, when you start writing, you are officially practicing all four aspects.
The reality is that all four aspects have a certain personality that MUST be respected.
Reading. When I read a menu. I understand what it is I’m ordering. This has been an extremely valuable skill to acquire. Korean food is delicious, and it’s even more delicious when you have some idea of what it is you’re ordering. When I read out loud for a Korean person, I have to repeat things three times because my pronunciation is terrible.
Writing. I can write in Korean characters. As a matter of fact, I can create Korean phonetic equivalents for most English words, and this is extremely valuable for teaching when a student can’t quite understand how to pronounce a word. I could not write a Korean sentence to save my life. I could copy one out of a book, but I couldn’t create one of my own volition.
Listening. I pick up bits and pieces of conversations. This is a naturally occurring phenomenon any time you are immersed in a new language. I know when my Korean teachers are talking about me. I know when they’re talking about the food. In other words, I know what they’re talking about, but I have no idea what they’re SAYING. The cook at my school knows zero English, and she’ll just jabber away to me in Korean, and I know WHAT she’s talking about, but I couldn’t respond to her if I tried.
Speaking. The clang of a shop bell means 안녕. Reading out loud, speaking the words off the menu to order food. Talking to the attendant at the bus station and getting tickets to Oksan. Saying yes or no to the students. I can’t create a Korean sentence. It’s hopeless.
What I’m really getting at here is that the creation of the language is the key to understanding it—and by “it” I mean the language itself. Whether in the context of reading, where your reading out loud is a creation of language audibly. Or when you are writing and creating language that means something above and beyond the simple ability to write the letters or phonemes. Or when you can actively listen and respond. Listening and responding are connected in the same way that the earth and the sky are: you are always on the earth and under the sky (only on very rare occasions is this not the case… which is why climbing a mountain is such a worthy endeavor). Having a conversation and seriously being able to communicate with the language, creating meaning, is the key.
When I come back to Korea for my next contract, acquiring Korean is going to be of the utmost importance. Koreans don’t HAVE to speak English in Korea. If I’m living in Korea, it is rude of me to EXPECT it. The contract I will have with myself is that I will, by the end of next year be able to sustain a conversation in Korean. It’s printed now, and it will come to pass.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Monday, August 3, 2009
The Way of
nature. The incredible power of nature was recently re-thrust upon me.
I have been aware of the immense power of the natural for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time its immensity was thrust upon me—I was in New Zealand, lost in the bush, surrounded by mountains, and crying because I didn’t know which way to go. Once you have been humbled by nature, even just once, you recognize it, forever afterwards, as the predominant power on the planet.
For example, so much talk these days is revolving around the greenhouse effect and what we’re doing to “destroy” the planet. Nobody seems to think about the fact that all we’re doing is creating an environment that is inhospitable to human life. The planet heats up a few degrees, the polar ice caps melt, there is massive flooding, and the end result is simply that the planet takes a blow.
We cannot stop the earth from rotating. We cannot stop the earth from revolving around the sun. This is the bigger nature that we forget about, I think. In our hubris and naiveté we believe that what we have built is the best part of nature, but the fact of the matter is that almost everything humans have built defies nature. Wal-Mart strikes me as one of the most absolutely nature defying edifices in the world. Convenient or not, it seems slightly unnatural that you can go to a building and get fruits, vegetables, frozen fruits, frozen vegetables, canned fruits, canned vegetables, dried fruits, aerosol cans full of things that smell like fruits, fruit of the loom underwear, fruit decorated wastebaskets, orange hunting vests, berry vine seeds.
Granted, I’m taking a somewhat super-naturalistic point of view in terms of nature. In other words, I’m thinking about it in terms of what I have seen and experienced while spending days in the mountains where it can sometimes be a mission to find the next stream and collect some water. And let me tell you that if you don’t have food with you, finding food in nature can be a painstaking task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All our most revered structures will collapse one day: the stock market, the government, society, and, eventually, mankind. That is the way of nature when you attempt to control it. It is slow, patient, and willing to take a lot of punishment, but, in the end, it will always manage to overcome.
Futures are perpetually unknowable… this is a fact it isn’t even worth debating any more. So, it is entirely possible that we were meant to develop like this. It is entirely possible that nature pushed us in this direction so that we would destroy ourselves. Perhaps the great wheel of existence saw that this particular creature was pushing the boundaries of goodness and needed to be flexed in a direction that would eventually put it out of the world’s misery. I guess I am thinking here of an enormous tree that looks so strong from the outside, but inside is little more than a hollow, ready to be pushed over by a strong wind.
There are only two options these days: fight the fight against the unfathomable structures of humanity and attempt to get people to turn away from their greed-mongering, stuff accumulation, and (to be frank) comforts—which seems a little bit like attempting to hold the ocean back with a spoon—or suck it all up, squirt it into a drying purulent vein, and pray that the end isn’t too painful. Has it gone too far? Do we still think we can conquer nature? When was the last time you climbed a mountain? What good are guns and bombs against the methodical march of rivers and magma?
I have been aware of the immense power of the natural for quite some time. As a matter of fact, I remember the first time its immensity was thrust upon me—I was in New Zealand, lost in the bush, surrounded by mountains, and crying because I didn’t know which way to go. Once you have been humbled by nature, even just once, you recognize it, forever afterwards, as the predominant power on the planet.
For example, so much talk these days is revolving around the greenhouse effect and what we’re doing to “destroy” the planet. Nobody seems to think about the fact that all we’re doing is creating an environment that is inhospitable to human life. The planet heats up a few degrees, the polar ice caps melt, there is massive flooding, and the end result is simply that the planet takes a blow.
We cannot stop the earth from rotating. We cannot stop the earth from revolving around the sun. This is the bigger nature that we forget about, I think. In our hubris and naiveté we believe that what we have built is the best part of nature, but the fact of the matter is that almost everything humans have built defies nature. Wal-Mart strikes me as one of the most absolutely nature defying edifices in the world. Convenient or not, it seems slightly unnatural that you can go to a building and get fruits, vegetables, frozen fruits, frozen vegetables, canned fruits, canned vegetables, dried fruits, aerosol cans full of things that smell like fruits, fruit of the loom underwear, fruit decorated wastebaskets, orange hunting vests, berry vine seeds.
Granted, I’m taking a somewhat super-naturalistic point of view in terms of nature. In other words, I’m thinking about it in terms of what I have seen and experienced while spending days in the mountains where it can sometimes be a mission to find the next stream and collect some water. And let me tell you that if you don’t have food with you, finding food in nature can be a painstaking task if you don’t know what you’re doing.
All our most revered structures will collapse one day: the stock market, the government, society, and, eventually, mankind. That is the way of nature when you attempt to control it. It is slow, patient, and willing to take a lot of punishment, but, in the end, it will always manage to overcome.
Futures are perpetually unknowable… this is a fact it isn’t even worth debating any more. So, it is entirely possible that we were meant to develop like this. It is entirely possible that nature pushed us in this direction so that we would destroy ourselves. Perhaps the great wheel of existence saw that this particular creature was pushing the boundaries of goodness and needed to be flexed in a direction that would eventually put it out of the world’s misery. I guess I am thinking here of an enormous tree that looks so strong from the outside, but inside is little more than a hollow, ready to be pushed over by a strong wind.
There are only two options these days: fight the fight against the unfathomable structures of humanity and attempt to get people to turn away from their greed-mongering, stuff accumulation, and (to be frank) comforts—which seems a little bit like attempting to hold the ocean back with a spoon—or suck it all up, squirt it into a drying purulent vein, and pray that the end isn’t too painful. Has it gone too far? Do we still think we can conquer nature? When was the last time you climbed a mountain? What good are guns and bombs against the methodical march of rivers and magma?
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