2006-05-27

My first Korean class

Had my first formal Korean class today. (Don't laugh! Yeah, in a real classroom with real foreign students.) It's a practical training of the KFL course at HUFS I'm taking since this March.
One Chinese girl, one Polish boy, and three Japanese girls, learning Korean at FLTTC, in the basic course(level 2) were my students. (In fact, I expected some cute Chinese boys; not very tall, with big, black eyes, and such an innocent face that melts every teacher's heart^^)
Today's objects of study were 'AVst기로 하다', 'AVst(으)ㄹ 만하다', 'AVst느라고', 'AVst는/DVst(으)ㄴ 척하다', and I had to give them a lecture about the expression 'AVst느라고' for one hour.(Well... to be exactly, it was only 40 minutes.)

This is actually not the first time to teach foreigners Korean for me; I'd worked as a volunteer in Ansan Migrant Shelter in 2002, and I used to visit two Burmese in Bucheon twice a week to teach them Korean in 2002 and 2003. The Korean class with the two Burmese was not exactly a 'Korean language class', but rather a discussion about Korean politics, history, society and culture. (I'd like to remind you that I studied Politics in my undergraduate days.) Thus, most of the topics we had that time were about migrant worker's issues, Korean modern history("How did Korea achieve democracy?" - this probably was the most interesting topic for my two friends. They were involved in the pro-democracy movement in Burma and came to Korea in 1994), and many other issues in Korean civil society. But I rarely explained something about vocabularies or grammar.

Frankly speaking, I'm not quite sure whether I know all the grammatical category of my own mother language. I speak and write Korean everyday every moment, mostly unconsciously, without paying much attention whether I'm grammatically correct or not. But to explain something to foreigners is a quite different thing.


Things I found out today:

1. Korean is VERY VERY difficult.
2. Teaching Korean is EVEN MORE difficult.
3. Sometimes, students are SMARTER than the teacher.


Why am I soooooooo stupid???

Argh...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha interesting!I'm expecting this kind of expereince, as a teacher in the classroom!

BTW,how old are your students?

cute Chinese boys? ;)

Song said...

Foreign students at HUFS are usually very very young, and not a few of them have just graduated from the highschool and came to Korea - especially the Chinese.
Yes Dora, students from China are soooooooo cute, with an average height about 150~160cm, big black eyes and looking at the teacher with a shy smile. Just LOVELY!!! Japanese students are also cute and polite.
(The majority of foreign students learning Korean in FLTTC are Chinese and Japanese.)