Her name was Sandy. She was a bit chubby and had a good sense of humor. “What do you call people who are fluent in three languages?” asked Sandy, who was a teacher in an English language class. Her students, however, were silent. “Trilingual,” she said.
“How about the people fluent in two?” she asked, and the students said “Bilingual!” Then, Sandy asked her final question. “How about just one?” The classroom was silent, once again. She then said, “The answer is an American.” We all laughed.
It was a moment from my class during a fellowship in the United States a few years ago. At the time, Sandy said Americans should be embarrassed, but she showed no sign of embarrassment even though she only spoke English.
I am a narrow-minded person, and her attitude made me think: She was showing off the power of English because English-speakers did not need to learn another language. And I thought Americans would never understand the hard life of Koreans who had to learn English, Chinese and Japanese to be successful.
And ends:
There should be more items powered by Hangul’s competitiveness in the future. That’s the path for Korea’s intellectual survival and the path for Hangul’s survival.
When my dream of such a world is realized, I really want to do one thing. I want to invite Americans, Europeans and Chinese people and teach them Hangul.
And I really want to make the joke, “What do you call people who only speak one language?” The answer, of course, is “Koreans.”
Um . . . with few exceptions, that's pretty much the case now.
8 comments:
If I wanted to use a featural writing system, I think I would have used Tengwar. Or a modification thereof.
Too bad for Mr Yi and the rest of the petty Korean nationalists, but Hangul is too highly adapted to the Korean tongue to be useful in the outside world.
We all know how important looks are to a teacher's ability.
I like how he totally misses the point of her anecdote. Though this might also be a tongue-in-cheek article.
Nah...
I just don't see what the point would be. People learn languages because they are widespread. Korean is abound way from being necessary outside of Korea.
That was an excruciatingly long set up, but the punchline made it worth it.
Hahaha!! It's funny because when I was a little kid I thought Hangul was everywhere in America because it is all over my suburban neighborhood. The public school's website doesn't have Spanish translations, but it has Korean. I should take pictures before I move back to Korea. I think my new students might get a kick out of it.
i can dream about
jonathan hilts
I'm sorry, but "the hard life of Koreans who had to learn English, Chinese and Japanese to be successful"? I teach low-income immigrants in Canada, and my students are multilingual because they genuinely NEED to be, in order to, you know, feed themselves and their families. I know the social pressure to study (if not actually learn) English is tough on Korean students. But my students here aren't learning English because of social pressure; they're doing it to survive. And I'm pretty sure you won't see any of them writing opinion pieces about how much of a hassle it is for them to have to learn a foreign language.
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