Category: 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

My students in the ED1 cohort had been developing an obsession with a toy called 액체괴물 [aek.che.goe.mul = liquid monster] in Korean, and typically marketed as “Slime” in the US. It’s not exactly a toy. It’s free-form goo, like runny play-dough. The kids carry their slime monsters around in buckets or tupperware containers. It’s easy to make your own at home, and many do that, apparently, but then keep the ooze like pets or something, and whip it out to play with it in the breaks between class.
The slime monsters were becoming a distraction, however. And getting on things (like the walls). They had to be banned.
The problem was that I knew, more or less, how it was pronounced, but couldn’t for the life of me figure out the Korean spelling, and I didn’t want to ask because I like to try to figure things out – I remember things better when I do that. The online English-Korean dictionaries weren’t being helpful. I finally figured it out yesterday, so now I can blog about it.
There are lots of sites with pictures of kids making and playing with slime. It’s huge. Not just in Korea, either – it’s popular in the US, too.
[daily log: walking, 7km]

Last night we had a 회식 [hoesik = work-related dining and drinking experience, for which I think there is no useful English Translation – maybe 50's style "Business Lunch" with lots of alcohol, but late at night]. 

As is so often the case, I found out about it only because of my efforts to be attentive to the Korean-language patter around me – they just assume I understand what's going on, anymore, which places the obligation on me to pay attention.

So I turned to my coworker Kay and said I would go, but I hate these "last minute" versions – as I've mentioned before on this blog. She was momentarily quite confused. We went back and forth a few times, before she finally said. "It's not last-minute. Curt announced it in the Kakaotalk last week." 

I checked my Kakaotalk (a kind of facebook messenger type app ubiquitous in Korea) on my phone. "Uh… you mean this?" Last week, there was the following exchange, in Kakaotalk (which I'd had while still at my mom's in Australia):

Curt: Happy day jared let's have a party soon~

Jared: Thank you! We can have an English-teaching party on Monday.

Curt: Ok let's.

Kay nodded. 

I said to her, "You realize I was joking when I said 'party,' there? And I thought it was obvious."

I use the word 'party' in this joking sense ALL THE TIME, at work. I use it with my students, as in, "uh-oh, I guess we need to have a homework party," in response to a class where the majority haven't finished their homework. I use it with coworkers, as in, "We're having a comment-writing party, I think." 

I don't know where I picked up this ironic usage of 'party' – maybe during my years working in tech in Los Angeles. We would have 'coding parties' and 'testing parties' for software. It seemed pretty common in the circles I ran in.

Kay was dismissive. "I knew it was a joke. But Curt didn't. So he made it a plan for a party."

I just laughed.

And later I went to the party.

It was at that meat place near the cancer hospital where Curt knows the owners, I think. It's OK – though this Korean-style barbecue-at-the-table is not my favorite cuisine, anymore. Requires careful chewing.

It made my first day back at work after my vacation VERY LONG. "Party as adverse experience." Hard to adapt.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Well, I admit I'm feeling more than a little bit grumpy about work, this morning.

Last night, we had one of those typical Korean after-work dinner events: 회식 [hweh-sik]. Not formally obligatory, but socially "highly recommended," as it were.

But here's the thing: I didn't go.

And I would have gone.

But I didn't even know it was happening. That's pretty annoying.

Typically, there are two kinds of hweh-sik. The first kind is the pre-planned, long announced one. Often, there's a message on the staffroom whiteboard at least several days before, which I try to take the time to look at once a day and see if anything new has appeared. Of course it will be written in Korean, but I'll decipher the handwriting, look up any words I don't recognize, and make sure I know what it's about. And hweh-sik is a common enough phenomenon that I recognize these readily, now.

The second kind is more spontaneous, as in, "hey, we're going out after work." Even then, I'm not always told, but if I'm in the staff room or at the front desk, I'll overhear the conversation, in Korean, and catch the drift and butt in and see if I've understood correctly. 

Well, last night, I guess the decision was made after 8 pm. I had classes for the last two periods of the day, so I wasn't out of the class room at all – I just went from one class to the other, and reappeared in the staff room after my last class. The decision had been taken. And no one was talking about it. And no one told me.

Sometimes, on these spontaneous kind, I will bow out. I don't like having my daily schedule discombobulated unexpectedly – it's part of my new, more stick-in-the-mud personality that seems to have been implanted with my re-engineered post-cancer tongue. I have been bowing out of these spontaneous ones less, lately, though. I really do see the value of these gatherings, even if they are stressful for me.

They are stressful – more than any other aspect of my job. I'm not particularly good at socializing, anyway. I'm a shy person, and not very good at what you might call "bar banter" which is, of course, the main semantic content of these types of outings. And of course they are 97% in Korean. I'm the only non-Korean speaker, after all. Why socialize in the second language, even if everyone is competent in that second language, when the first language is more comfortable?

So it's like a language immersion experience. And as you know, I have insecurities about that… about my abilities and competence, about my failure to do better, about my presumed identity as a "linguist" – "What, you're a linguist? Why haven't you mastered Korean?" Remember, linguists aren't necessarily polyglots. Those are different things. I study about language, I just don't learn languages – not very well, anyway.

Anyway, summarizing in brief, sometimes I decide not to go. And I might have decided not to go, last night – I wasn't feeling the best, already. I was tired, finishing a heavy schedule yesterday, and in a bit in bad mood because of my struggles with that HS1T cohort that's been giving me so much frustration recently.

But at least I would still prefer to have to option to make this decision. Instead, I was left out, which is altogether a different feeling.

I found out about it because it was announced, in Korean, on the Kakaotalk app  [ka-tok] Karma discussion channel on my phone (Kakaotalk is the most popular Korean chat chat platform, a bit like facebook messenger or the old yahoo messenger app). This is a thing I try to watch, too, like the whiteboard in the staff room. I'd even been aware there had been some discussion posted while I was in class. But it was a bunch of dense Korean text, and I didn't even scan it while I was still at work. Instead, once home, changed for bed, eating some dinner, I thought, Oh, I should see what that ka-tok was about. I will do a thing where I drop the text from ka-tok into my email drafts, then I can open the email draft in my browser on my computer and get a google-translate of it, which is a place for starting to sort out what it's about. And there it was – we were having a hweh-sik. Presumably, they were there as I read it. 

I don't know how I could have necessarily known about it even if my Korean were perfect – I would have had to have checked the ka-tok app as if it were potentially urgent, which is not how it's typically used, except in contexts where something is already in progress – i.e. where are we meeting? meeting tomorrow moved from 3:00 to 2:30… that kind of thing.

I was pretty pissed off.

[daily log: walking, 7km]