Month: November 2014

I've been so tired lately. I know that officially I'm not sick, but I definitely can assert that I don't feel my health is optimal. I feel as if I am "older" than my actual age – ever since my run-in with badly-behaved telomeres last year. I'm not used to that feeling – up until then I have always felt "younger" than my actual age. Now I have all these creaks and aches and twinges and I just feel that my body is decrepit and broken.

Random geographic trivia fact of the day:

King County, Washington, has a population of 2,044,449. King County, Texas, has a population of 285. Who's the real King?

 [daily log: walking, 5 km]

I woke up feeling weirdly disoriented – perhaps from the break in routine yesterday. I peered out my window, and the fog was humboldtian (i.e. resembling the thick, persistent fogs so frequent in my childhood, growing up on the northern California coast).

My friend Peter posted a question to my post from yesterday. He asked what I meant by "the stream of almost jingoistic Korean semi-revanchism of the cultural component of the 'training.'" I suppose that's a bit of an exageration, but there were a few things that always bother me when they crop up in the nationalistically-toned "get-to-know-Korea" materials that are common in venues liek this. 

Firstly, there are the historical inaccuracies. One video stated that Korea had never started a war with another country. I seem to recall several instances from the medieval period when the country entangled itself in conflicts with its neighbors. There was the citation of the 2333 BC date as the founding of Korea, without any kind of admission that this date has no foundation in actual historiography, and is simply fixed by tradition. There was the display of a map of "Korea" from the medieval period showing it including most of Manchuria and Primorskiy (I think from the "Balhae" period), which although accurate is difficult to justify when decontextualized. This latter is what I meant by "semi-revanchism." As far as jingoism, I would say only the several references to the Dokdo question, which seems to be a nationalistic narrative perpetrated by the powers-that-be mostly intended to distract regular Koreans from other, more relevant news (maybe not unlike the way conversations in the US get distracted by "there is too much illegal immigration" or "Obama is a socialist" narratives). What's doubly frustrating about that particular issue is that, given that possession is 9/10ths of the law, I don't see what Korea has to worry about vis-a-vis Dokdo, anyway. I don't foresee Japan starting a war over it. 

The other thing that bothers me a great deal about these presentations is that whenever they make a presentation of hangeul (Korea's writing system), there tend to be manifold linguistic inaccuracies that grate on my sensibilities as a linguist. There is, foremost, the inevitable confusion between the ideas of "writing system" and "language," as in "King Sejong invented the Korean Language." Further, the discussions of the actual writing system are full of terminology that is inappropriate for linguistic description: "a perfect match to the Korean sound system" (clearly not true, phonologically – consider as one example the issue of vowel length which is not written but which is phonemic, or the question of the phonemic -ㅅ- inserted between morphemes sometimes). Worse, the idea that Hangeul is able to represent "the most different sounds"  is risible – the number of sounds represented by a given writing system is always a match for a given language's sound system, with whatever kludges are necessary to make it possible – e.g. diacritics, etc. Therefore the writing system that represents the most sounds would be the language with the most distinct phonemic sounds – perhaps Georgian?

Hm. So that's a bit of a rant, I guess. The only other negative were several of the foreign teachers themselves – it's inevitable when you have a gathering of nearly 700 foreign hagwon teachers in one place that you will get to see not only the high quality ones but a few of the bad apples, too – and there are definitely a few. One gentleman stood up during a question-and-answer session with an immigration official and asked why it was "the government's business" to know so much about us foreign workers…. um, excuse me, did you happen to notice you were a guest in this country? Did you happen to read the Korean constitution, which guarantees a number of rights — to citizens?You're not in that category. You can ponder why Korea doesn't grant those rights to non-citizens, but I'm not sure the lowly immigration official is the one to ask about it. 

Having said that, I will return to the "other parts" of the seminar, yesterday. Except for the cultural presentations (which were only about 30% of the time), I was actually quite impressed with the quality of what was done. I was not, in fact, bored, as I'd expected to be. There was a dance/martial arts demo that was quite professional, there were several awards presented to some teachers, there were speeches by two foreign teachers that were mildly interesting, and there was the charismatic professor of education whom I mentioned yesterday.

[daily log: walking to the store]