Korea's Newest Export: Hangeul

Following up on my post from a couple of days ago about Korea's hi-tech prowess, here is an interesting story, reported by Yonhap and Korea Herald:

A tribe in Indonesia has begun adopting Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, as their writing system to express their spoken aboriginal language, which is on the verge of extinction. It is the first time the alphabet has been officially adopted outside the Korean Peninsula.
The 60,000 person tribe in the city of Baubau, located in Buton of Southeast Sulawesi, has been working to transcribe its native language "Jjia jjia" into Hanguel.
The Baubau city counsel decided to adopt Hangeul as the official alphabet for in July of 2008. Work soon began and the textbooks were completed on July 16. By July 21, elementary and high school students began learning their spoken language through the Hangeul writing system.

Who are the Jjia Jjia (or Cia Cia), you may well be asking. After all, you've never heard of them. Neither have I. Neither has Google (beyond the news story quoted here). Neither has Wikipedia.

Buton Island is there in Wiki, and Bau-Bau comes up on Google Earth (if you haven't downloaded it, do so as soon as you finish reading this--it is awesome fun, and useful, even). Still, the place is little-known, so much so that Yonhap's brief story calls it "Bauer and Bauer." Which I think is actually a men's clothiers. Or a financial consultant.

The Bauer and Bauer meme has been propagated to Korea Times and KBS in the last couple of hours.

Anyway, I am reminded of the story of Chief Sequoyah, who developed a Cherokee writing system after seeing the power it gave the white man who raped his people's land, stole their property and banished them to Oklahoma. Well, the pen may be mightier than the sword, but rifles throw off the balance.

Rather than reinvent the wheel alphabet, the Jjia jjia made the decision to borrow a pre-existing phonetic alphabet. They chose hangeul, invented in the fifteenth century at the behest of the enlightened Korean Emperor Sejong, who ruled with a scientific bent. I don't know if this was a good decision, compared to, say, using Sequoyah's alphabet, since I don't know the first thing about his "talking leaves". Or compared to English, which has trouble representing even Korean, much less, say, Swahili or Tonga.

However, if the Jjia jjia use a lot of "f","b","I","r","l" or "z" sounds, they've made a spectacularly bad decision. You cannot represent "cob" in hangeul, only "cop", though can have "cop" two ways. What you can have is "caw-buh". You can't have "shun" only "sun". And so on. As a phonetic alphabet, this system works well for spoken Korean's sounds, the purpose for which it was invented. Hangeul has 24 characters which can be arranged into several dozen syllables which compose the phonetic units of the language.

If your language doesn't use those units, then hangeul can only approximate it. This is the fundamental fact behind what is called Konglish, Korean-English. E-Mar-tuh, pok-uh, English-ee and all the rest of it.

햅브 나이스 대!

Tragical Grammatical: A Musical in Three Acts

So this has been gnawing at me all afternoon.

Yesterday, a pair of students came to me with a question about one of their English exam answers. As you know, if you pay attention here at least, I have nothing to do with grading, testing or assessment. But they were asking me a usage question.

To summarize, the item was as follows, more or less:

'Blah blah blah Even though I've only been on the honor roll twice before, I'm going to try my best to make it this term.'
Q: The phrase make it in this sentence means:
a) be successful at my job
b) succeed in reaching a certain place
c) blah blah blah
d) blah blah blah
etc.

Long story less long: according to the teacher, A was correct and B was wrong. He asked me about it at lunch today, since the students had obviously gone back to him, so I explained my thinking. The dictionary will say that "make it" in this sense is "be successful." So functionally, both A and B are correct. In fact, you could even argue that B is more correct than A, since the honor roll is a place, in the sense of position in a list or a series.

He said that "it" refers to being successful in school. "No," I said, "'it' specifically means 'honor roll'. Replace 'it' with 'honor roll' in the sentence, then replace 'it' with 'success in school' and you'll see what I mean."

He thought hard about it, but decided that just because I'm a native speaker didn't mean I was right. He showed me some Korean site with an English dictionary on it (from which his choices A, B, C, and D had come verbatim). We went to www.m-w.com where I showed him the def. of 'make it' as 'be successful':

1 a: to be successful [trying to make it in the big time as a fashion photographer — Joe Kane]

--right there, hell, it says in the big time, a position or place, not just a job! Then there was 'place':

5: relative position in a scale or series: as a: position in a social scale [kept them in their place] b: a step in a sequence [in the first place, it's none of your business] c: a position at the conclusion of a competition [finished in last place]

--I'm pretty certain that honor roll fits in there. I told him that if choice B had been about reaching a certain 'location' instead of 'place' it would be different.

He was still "not convinced." He was going to think about it and make his own decision.

I said, "Well, I don't know what you want, but I've proven it pretty conclusively for myself. I'm even more convinced that B is marginally better an answer than A. It's colloquial usage, which is not cut-and-dried, or exhaustively listed as examples." I even showed him some current usage of 'made the honor roll'. I wanted to say, "Maybe you shouldn't ask questions that you don't the answer to," since around exam time I am bombarded with similar usage questions by the English faculty.

Apparently, he wants a source that has his exact question with answer B highlighted as the correct answer. Again he stressed that just because I was a native speaker didn't mean anything.

So, this has been gnawing at me all afternoon. And actually, not even mainly that he doesn't consider me a worthy source of English grammatical knowledge, even though I've forgotten more grammar than he'll ever know.

It's mainly that he's going to mark that kid wrong, simply because the kid knew something the teacher didn't. So, he's going to undermine the kid's confidence in English, or undermine the rightful authority of the teaching profession, or both, because the student felt that the honor roll was more of a position than a job.

Dear Readers, please feel free to chime in here and tell me I'm wrong. I'll read your comments if you do, but I probably won't publish them ...

But the bigger issue is this: when the students approached me, they hemmed and hawed, and finally came out with, "Cam-berr Teacha, question exam you?" or some such gibberish. These guys, the English faculty, I mean, are splitting hairs on the fine points of grammar--which even they don't properly understand--instead of providing the fundamentals of practice and reinforcement that the students need to speak the language. It would be comical if it weren't so tragic.

Or is that 'tragical'? Hell, don't ask me, what do I know!

Bad Advice for ESL Teachers

I was at the Times Online Games page (Why? If you have to ask, you shouldn't be reading this blog), and saw a link to the Times archive titled "1939: English for Foreigners". I'm going to quote the article in its entirety as the link appears a bit squicky, but don't feel obligated to read it all. [Blog continued below]

English For Foreigners - The 250 foreign students who are attending the annual Holiday Course in English at the University of London were advised by Professor Sir Denison Ross, in his inaugural address yesterday, to tackle the crossword puzzles in The Times and to read the books of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse. This far from disagreeable syllabus of studies was commended as the best avenue to knowledge of what Sir Denison Ross called "the neglected background" of the study of English, as of any other tongue-the secret repertory which formed, as it were, the physiognomy of a language, just as grammar and syntax formed its anatomy. Acquaintance with the background demanded familiarity with proverbs, catch phrases other than purely idiomatic phrases, contemporary slang, history, folklore, and the daily life of the people using the language. He wondered how many of his audience had noticed the crossword puzzles in The Times, and how many had tried to write the answer to even one question. It was, he thought, almost the greatest possible test of knowledge of a language to do a crossword puzzle in that language; and he had met none in any language as good as those in The Times and one or two other English newspapers, for they were really an intellectual exercise. Merely putting down a synonym required the kind of knowledge possessed by anyone with a rich vocabulary. But the kind of question The Times asked in the course of a puzzle was the kind of thing he asked his hearers to study in order to acquire the neglected background. It was composed mainly of allusions, many of which presupposed a familiarity with English history and English poetry of what he would call the taken-for- granted type. The men who set those puzzles had a distinct notion of what poetry the English reader was familiar with. He advised the students during their course to try to tackle one of them--though he himself had hardly ever completed one. CRICKET IN ITALIAN Another test of English, Sir Denison Ross continued, was the writing of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, one of the greatest writers of the English language. Mr. Wodehouse always took for granted the repertory that formed the English background. He would give you a quarter of a quotation, he would give you half a word, and you would know the rest. That was why the speaker maintained that Mr. Wodehouse could not be translated into any other language. To illustrate this contention Sir Denison Ross read the account of a cricket match from an Italian translation of "Piccadilly Jim," with the technical terms all rendered with perfect literalness and therefore unintelligibly. "Since Mr. Wodehouse is one of the most delightful authors in the world," he added, "quite apart from improving your English, let me recommend you to read him as much as possible. And if you would go through one book by him you would know twice as much English, as when you began it." DR. GEORGE SENTER, chairman of the University Extension and Tutorial Classes Council, who took the chair at the opening session, introduced Sir Denison Ross as a great traveller, a great linguist, and one of the most interesting men in this country. "I think I am within the mark," he observed, "in saying that he could speak to each of you in your own language." Dr. Senter also said that the largest number of students that could he admitted to the course (which is being held at King's College of Household and Social Science, Campden Hill Road, W.8) was 290, and that in the existing very difficult inter- national circumstances it was remarkable that there were present 250 students, of 26 or 27 nationalities, many of whom must have found great difficulty in coming. The university attached great importance to the course as some contribution to international understanding and friendship. At no time had a contribution to that end been more necessary. ENGLISH FOR FOREIGNERS 'THE TIMES' CROSSWORD PUZZLES SIR DENISON ROSS'S ADVICE

On first glance, I held out great hope for this article, mainly on two grounds: I am a frequent crossword-filler, and even a sometime constructor, back in the days before the internet and crossword-making programs took the fun out of it; and during my voracious adolescence, I read most everything written by "Mr. P. G. Wodehouse" and can even tell you those initials are for Pelham Grenville without looking it up. And his friends called him Plum.

Crosswords, after all, have a place in ESL teaching--just as they do as vocab review for any classroom. But let's not pretend we're fooling anyone; vocab review is vocab review, whether it means writing the words in horizontal blanks, choosing the correct letter a) b) c) or d), or drawing a line from the word to its definition or its picture.

A Times crossword, however, with its hundred-plus clues and arcane words, is a different animal than a worksheet with fifteen theoretically familiar, well-rehearsed terms with textbook clues. Even a small-town paps "13 by" crossword relies on cultural, idiomatic and "crossword-ready" terms totally past kenning for 90% of ESL learners. Y'know, ken, three-letter word meaning "to descry."

With regard to Mr. Wodehouse (later Sir), it is easy to argue that his work speaks to universal themes--in fact, I'm so certain it does, I'm not going to try. It's beyond the ken of this blog, anyway. While my beloved Plum writes on love and human foible, he does so in a milieu so foreign to, say, a Korean or Chinese, that explaining about manservants and Spinoza may well have diminishing returns. The window-dressing, so delightful to those of us from the West, makes the picture opaque to the viewer with occidental eyes.

Sir Denison Ross gets something right, though: we should teach proverbs, catch phrases, slang, history, folklore and daily life. Done properly, these topics are ideal fodder for well-made ESL lessons. But I can promise you I won't be bringing a full-out Times crossword into class anytime soon. Unless I'm working on it!

Prepositions: Language's Little Helpers

Honest to God, if you asked me a few years ago what a preposition was, I would have said, It's some damn part of speech. No idea. I am clueless about the intricacies of direct objects, subjunctive clauses, dangling participles (although that one sounds dirty, if you ask me), impersonal pronouns in the subjective case and similar grammatical minutiae. At least, when one gives them names.

My personal theory is that in moving a great deal as a kid, which I did, I somehow managed to miss all the units on grammar and just arrived in time for literature. Oh, I vaguely remember writing out sentences and underlining nouns once and verbs twice, but I couldn't tell you why. And I've never diagrammed a sentence in my life. Unless you mean, draw a picture.

Still, I speak and write clearly, even beautifully, or so I've been told. That's because I've always read voraciously, and have usually read great writers--maybe it's easier to understand how a fine sentence works when you encounter it in the wild than when you try to reconstruct it in the laboratory. Or maybe it's just that the ear has become more finely tuned due to repetition.

All this is to preface my description of this week's Spoken English lesson at Youngil HS. Which is a review of prepositions. These are words, like in, on, at, under, beside, that lend temporal or spatial specificity to other words. In I'll meet you at 2 o'clock, "at" is a preposition. I hope.

The starter activity has the students draw a map of the route from home to school, then give verbal directions to a classmate. This follows up on what we've done the last two weeks. Next, they read aloud and fill in the blanks on a preposition review exercise I ripped from the internet and refined. Finally, I give them the base diagram below (which I whipped up in MS Paint):


They then add elements to the picture by drawing:
* There is a window opposite the door.
* There is a potted plant in the back right corner.
* There is a small dog under the table. Etc.
Nine things in all. They mostly like to draw. At least, they stay awake, it's less like pulling teeth to have them draw than speak a lot of English, and they've done something tangible at the end of class.

And we're reviewing prepositions, language's little helpers.