Day: March 4, 2010

I’m feeling very discouraged.  I can’t seem to understand anything my new teacher says.  Partly, it’s my “level-up” that I’ve just done, skipping a level.  Mostly, though, it’s because she’s got a different teaching style that I simply haven’t figured out yet – I can understand whatever grammar point / vocabulary we’re covering at any given moment fairly well, but I find her “meta-instruction” (i.e. what she expects us to be doing, her instructions to us, her explanations) incoherent.  I’m just not used to it, maybe.
Anway.  Sigh.

I was recently exposed to the term "낙하산 인사" (nak-ha-san in-sa) in one of the dramas I've been watching.  Literally it means "parachute personnel managment," roughly, but it refers to the way that Korean business and government organizations will "drop" someone into a given department or branch office from "above" (somewhere up the hierarchy) for either political or nepotistic reasons.

Anyway, I used the word "낙하산" (parachute) yesterday in class, to describe my situation.  The teacher laughed, so I must have used the word more-or-less appropriately.  What situation?  Well, I moved up a level in my Korean Language class, but found out yesterday that, because I was the only one enrolled at that level, that my class was cancelled for the term.  My instant solution?  I asked the hagwon manager (in English – my Korean's hardly that good, yet) if I could just jump up to the next level.  I'd have to work hard, obviously.  But she said, sure, give it a try – she hardly wants to lose a paying customer, right?

Actually, this may be a great development.  It will push me extra hard in my learning efforts, because now I have 16 chapters worth of grammar and vocab that I need to "catch up" on.  It will push me hard, preventing me from taking this "full-time-student" thing in too leisurely a way.

I have an ambition to put together a special web page that will be an index of Korean "endings."  I may have mentioned or undertaken this before, but without much success.   One of the difficulties with Korean is that given its highly agglutinative (this is the formal linguistic term) nature, it has a plethora of endings, for nouns and especially for verbs.  I even found a verb ending in my reference grammar that allegedly exists for the sole purpose of talking to oneself!  [-{ㄴ/는}담 … I have no idea how widely used this is, but the fact it's mentioned in a reference grammar highlights some of the fascinating aspects of the language.]

The problem, of course, is that it's hard to look up endings.  The online and cellphone based dictionaries I use are useless for this task.  If I put all the endings into a document or webpage, and ensure that it's consistently formatted and laid out, it will be easily searchable through the use of the simple "find" function, and I can look up endings.  And the fact of making it might help me remember things better, too.

The drawback is that, in fact, endings are not my particular area of difficulty.  I know far more, already, than I "should" given my level, at least from a recognition standpoint.  Grammar, in general, has always come easily for me.  My weakness is vocabulary.  So maybe this "endings" project is just my special way of procrastinating on what is, for me, the painful part.