A Separation proves less is more

The Iranian film nominated for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay, A Separation, is rewarding and memorably old-fashioned. It had no CGI, no fancy direction, no shaky-handheld cameras, no narration. It's a drama. It could have been made in 1980 or 2011; the themes are timeless. It has a powerful story to tell about people going through very hard times. The acting was so good I forgot I was watching a movie. The plot was so complex I rewound back to a pivotal moment to watch it again. The direction never got in the way of the story (unlike The Tree of Life, to name an obvious offender).

This young lady broke my heart.

It is an unusual film to receive such positive word-of-mouth because it is so different from the films that usually get accolades. Drive had slick, stylized direction and hip stars. The Descendants had Oscar pedigree and quirky characters grieving in their own ways. The Tree of Life has insufferable pretentiousness. The Artist and Hugo have "movie magic." In fact, I think this film is better than The Descendants, Drive and The Tree of Life. The Artist, however, was pretty special, and I haven't seen Hugo yet.

I think the fact that A Separation lacks so many things that Hollywood spoonfeeds us every year could work to its advantage. This humble drama reminds me of The Hurt Locker. Everyone put their money on Avatar. It made movie history! It's so big and shiny! Then the little movie that could, the one that showcased acting and storytelling first and direction and effects and editing second, stole the Academy's hearts. They remembered what people really love in a film: to hear a story and to see real people's faces. I was underwhelmed by The Hurt Locker, but a Best Picture win might have inflated its stock.

Next month, this little gem could be 2012's The Hurt Locker to The Artist's Avatar (for Best Original Screenplay). If so, you heard it here first.

How to Learn Hangeul Part 3/4

Right. You have now learned all the vowels and consonants. You've been practicing reading loanwords. If you are in Korea, I'm sure you've been sounding things out. (In Western-style cafes and restaurants you can read more loanwords, I'm sure.) In this lesson we're going to learn the remaining vowel combinations, how to say sh, and read some more loanwords. 가자! ('Sko!)

Vowel Combinations

You've already learned all the vowels, but some vowel combinations turn out sounding different than you'd expect. Korean treats the sounds w and y as vowels. 


Y


(Because we like you. Mickey Mouse Club? Anyone?) If you see a double line attached to a regular vowel, it means there's a y sound before the vowel. Gentlemen, start your flashcards.

ㅕ yeo

ㅑ ya

ㅠ yu

ㅛ yo

ㅒ yae

ㅖ ye

(If you recall,  ㅐ and ㅔ are actually pronounced the same. Similarly, ㅒ and ㅖ are both pronounced "yay" by almost all Koreans.)

If you continue to study Korean, you'll see ㅛ at the end of a lot of sentences. "-yo" is the polite, or honorific, verb ending.


W


Adding a ㅗ or a ㅜ to any other vowel puts a w sound in front of that vowel. Whether or not a vowel takes ㅗ or ㅜ depends on whether it is a dark or a bright vowel.

ㅘ wa

ㅝ weo

ㅚ we

ㅟ wi

ㅙ wae 

ㅞ we 

(I'm sure you're wise by now to the fact that both ㅙ and ㅞ are pronounced like the English word "way." Good news! ㅚ is pronounced like "way" too.)

And the one that has no English equivalent

Maybe this one is just in here because learning Hangeul was too easy. Remember the ㅡ vowel that you make by making a grimace while you make a u sound with the back of your throat? To make this diphthong (vowel combination), say the  ㅡ vowel and then quickly say ㅣ. It helps if you don't move your lips. Keep them stretched wide across your face (like you've been off guard by a would-be photographer although you don't want your picture taken) as you make both sounds. Don't try to be perfect. Just keep going.

ㅢ eui

If you want to hear this vowel, copy this Hangeul syllable: 의. Then, go to Google Translate and paste the syllable into the box on the left. Finally, click on the volume sign to hear a native speaker say the vowel.

SH

This is pretty simple. When Koreans see a ㅅ + ㅣ, it is pronounced "shee." The Korean language does not allow the pronunciation "see." (If you've ever taught low-level Koreans English, you may have noticed their love of "sheefood".)

시 shee

This rule also applies in some (rare) vowel combinations.

쇼 shyo

쇠 shwe

More Reading Practice

After you more or less have a handle on the vowel combinations, try reading the following loanwords:

컴퓨터
샌드위치 
위스키
콜라  
주스
카메라
노트북
피아노
아이스크림
테니스
오아시스
오렌지
레몬






Now try reading these proper nouns:


뉴질랜드
애슐리
뉴욕비너스
파키스탄
스웨덴
스위스
서울
보츠와나
베네수엘라
과테말라
필리핀
덴마크





















Answers:

computer
sandwich
whiskey
cola
juice
camera
notebook (meaning laptop)
piano
ice cream
tennis
oasis
orange
lemon






New Zealand 
Ashley 
New York
Venus
Pakistan
Sweden
Swiss (meaning Switzerland)
Seoul
Botswana
Venezuela
Guatemala
Philippines
Denmark

I hate The Tree of Life

It took me 3 days to get through The Tree of Life, pausing and taking long breaks. Sometimes I would resign myself to watch half an hour, then find I hadn't the stomach for it. OMG it's so terrible. It's not that I can't sit through mood pieces. I remember liking The Thin Red Line and Baraka when I saw them in high school. I have since seen many difficult films that rewarded patience and which I appreciated. But The Tree of Life is like a parody of a great art film.

One major problem is that Malick is unconcerned with whether the audience knows what's going on. I was paying attention and even checking my progress in the movie with wikipedia's entry on it, when I realized, Maybe that boy that drowned was the other brother! At first, I thought he was just some kid in the neighborhood; most bloggers thought so too. Then I noticed that the third brother just disappeared. The story didn't just focus on the main character and the blond brother; the third brother wasn't even in the car with the family when they moved. Why wasn't he mourned as much as the other brother? He just dropped out and no one ever mentioned him again. When the blond brother dies at 19, it wrecks the father and mother. The blond brother apparently meant a great deal to the main character. What about the drowned brother? No love for the brother who can't swim.

Another narrative gap which troubles me is: what am I supposed to make of the grown-up main character? Why is Sean Penn in this movie at all? The main character boy grows up, becomes an architect, and contributes nothing to the story whatsoever. He doesn't even wear billowing clothes.

Oh, the treetops with the sun shining through them! Ah, the white billowing curtains being moved by the wind! A man touching another man's shoulder--how tender. Can't you feel the magic? In case you can't there's narration and loud Anglican-style choirs to tell you how spiritual it all is.

Malick insults my intelligence with the voiceovers. I would have understood the film was about God without the simplistic prayers. It's like Malick has so little trust in his audience's intellectual ability to divine themes he has to explicitly tell us the film is about nature vs. grace. I feel like the narration and the bits about the Big Bang and the beginning of life are unnecessary. I would have appreciated the weight of the story without these things. Really. Life is important. I get that. 

Let's explore a more troubling byproduct of Malick's dualistic ideas about the world. The portrayal of the mother as a sinless saint makes me mad. Can we please get away from the goddess-of-the-hearth architype? It's sexist. It teaches young women that they should be perfect angels--a harmful, impossible goal to attain. And Chastain's portrayal of the mother--or possibly Malick's direction of her--annoyed me. She's too soft and "graceful" to say boo to her husband when he hurts their son, or to discipline her children when they terrorize her while the dad is away. Her character is weak. Her self-consciously graceful arm movements, filmed like so many beautiful affectations, exist only in film. No one waves their arms like falling leaves as they lay in the grass. Her scenes are more like magazine photo shoots that have been filmed than real scenes. Real scenes would have, you know, acting.

She charms the butterflies! Submissive feminine perfection!

When the credits rolled I heaved a sigh of relief. Only 2 hours and 13 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. I wish I had known how rough this movie was before I began. I can meditate for a few hours at a time. If I had said to myself, "Ashley, you are now going to watch these images and meditate" I could have handled it. As it was, I thought I was watching a movie. I expected to be challenged--Palme d'Or should mean something!--as well as entertained. I was sorely disappointed.

To all the people who think a great art film needs patience and multiple viewings, I say TRUE but that doesn't excuse the director from incoherence or pandering. One or the other is enough to damn a film. This is a difficult film, but not because Malick thinks the audience is bright enough to analyze it like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. It's difficult because he thinks you are too stupid to get the dualism or religious themes unless he hits you over the head with it. It's difficult because it sucks. Malick sucks too. This movie is so bad it's bad.

Suwon

Last weekend the gang decided to head to Suwon. And so we did. 

Suwon is famous for two things: its UNESCO fortress wall and galbi (beef ribs). We tried to eat galbi at a place in the Lonely Planet, but they jacked up their prices after lunchtime and we figured we could do better than 25,000 won per person. We walked through the ancient part of Suwon, where people live in hanok, and found this amazing place. We didn't take a picture of it (d'oh!), and I can't find it on the map, but if you get a taxi to take you to Yeonpo Galbi, begin walking towards Janganmun. When you see a sign that says "Janganmun 400 metres", turn to your right. That's the place. They served us whole crabs as a side dish! The Mr. went to town on those. My favorite was the owner's homemade 쌈장 (the orange spicy paste). I'd never had it homemade before, and it was amazing!

So after you eat yourself silly, there's nothing like a long, uphill hike in the freezing cold. We walked along the fortress wall to an outlook post that's on top of the highest hill.

The view from the Southwest Pavilion

We need lots of couple photos while we're still young and sexy

So we clowned around there for awhile and headed back down. At the base of the hill there's a spring where locals can come get fresh spring water.

Natron getting spring water

Across from the spring are the restrooms. Inside the restrooms we heard a guy singing plaintively a song with the memorable words: Pa chil a gong gong, pa chil a gong gong. YK told us the song was about a guy who loved a woman so much he tied her down so she wouldn't leave. That's about as creepy as hanging out in a bathroom singing. 

YK had heard of a big jjimjilbang in Suwon, so we took a taxi there. (Taxis are ridiculously cheap if you have 4 people in the car.) Both YK and I had been to many a mogyogtang (naked, sex-segregated sauna) before, but the Mr. and Natron never had. They were, however, "ready to get intimate" as they put it.

This was a big, nice mogyogtang. They had different sauna rooms of varying temperatures, cold baths and hot baths, an outdoor bath, water jets for back massages ... just about everything. We soaked for awhile and talked, then put on our jjimjilbang outfit and met the boys in the jjimjilbang.

Natron, the Mr., Linguist Ashley and YK at a jjimjilbang

We relaxed here, getting in different saunas, hot and then cold, and eating corn and mandu when the galbi wore off. I love jjimjilbangs. I can't believe how cheap they are. You can pay about 8000 won and even spend the night. It's a great way to travel cheap. It's much more entertaining than any hotel, and easily one-fourth the price.

We had a great night in Suwon, doing three very Korean things: grilling our own food in a restaurant, hiking up a hill, and chilling in a jjimjilbang. For four 외국인 (foreigners), it was a very Korean excursion. We even capped off the night with a visit to Lotteria.

How to Learn Hangeul Part 2/4

Weren't consonants easy? I bet you mastered all of them after only going through your flashcards twice. Sometimes I used to get ㄴ and ㄱ mixed up, but everything got straightened out pretty fast. Ah, Korean consonants. Those were the days.

Vowels

I'm not gonna lie. Vowels are little tougher, and I blame two things: English's dysfunctional orthographic system and the less-than-intuitive philosophical designs of the Hangeul vowels. I'm spreading the blame around.

Even though English has about 15 vowels, it only has 5 letters to represent these vowels. It's tough to even describe which vowels a Korean letter represents in English. (One of these vowels simply doesn't exist in English.)

Those brilliant linguists who devised a simple way to write consonants--so simple it was called "The Writing You Can Learn in a Morning"--got pretty esoteric when it came to their vowels. I'll try to explain the vowel and the English vowels they correspond to, but this is where real world experience trumps blog-learnin'. Do your best to keep moving and don't get bogged down in details.

Basic vowels

This is a picture of a person: ㅣ

You pronounce that vowel as the ee in beet or the i in bit.

This is a picture of the earth's horizon: ㅡ

This is the vowel that doesn't exist in English. You basically say the u in boot, but pull your lips wide instead of rounding them. Learn more by clicking here. It is Romanized (written in English characters) as eu. If you just say it like the uh in but, you'll be fine.

The vowels in Hangeul are based on these two basic symbols.

ㅣee (as in beet) or i (as in bit)

ㅡ eu 

The person vowels

Based on the vowel that represents a person, ㅣ, we can have a "dark" person and a "bright" person. (I know, it seems weird to me too.)

The bright person has their left hand sticking out (on our right): ㅏ  

This is pronounced like the a in father.

The dark person has their other hand sticking out:ㅓ

This is pronounced like the u in plus. Learn more here. It is Romanized as eo.

ㅏ a

ㅓ eo

The earth vowels

The earth vowel also has a dark and a bright variation.

Bright earth has a line above it: ㅗ 

It is pronounced like the o in boat.

Dark earth has a line below it: ㅜ 

It is pronounced like the oo in boot, or the Spanish u if you know Spanish vowels. It's Romanized as u.

ㅗ o

ㅜ u

Two person vowels

When a neutral person and a bright person get together, it looks like this: ㅐ

See how that has a ㅣand a ㅏ?

This vowel is pronounced like the e in pet or the a in Ashley. It is Romanized as ae.

When a neutral person and a dark person get together, it looks like this: ㅔ

 This vowel is pronounced like the ay in way. It's Romanized as e, and it's also similar to the Spanish e.

ㅐae

ㅔe

(Actually both of these vowels are pronounced as the a in cat or the e in pet. You can pronounce both of these the same and you'll sound like a native speaker of Korean. They were distinctive for centuries, but now they sound the same. It's like in English, how the w in witch used to be distinctive from the wh in which, and now they are the same. Except for Stewie Griffin, of course.)

Your first Korean words

Now you have the eight basic Korean vowels. There are also compound vowels, but that's enough for now. We're going to put the consonants and the vowels we know to the test. 

You don't have to memorize all the vowels completely before beginning this part. In fact, learning these words will help you to figure out those confusing Hangeul vowels.

 I want you to sound out the following loanwords that Korean has borrowed from English and other languages. Remember that ㅇ is silent if it is the first letter in a syllable, and ng if it is the last letter in a syllable:

라디오

토마토

커피

호텔

택시 

햄버거

텔레비전 

후렌치후라이

라지 치즈 피자

스포츠 

마사지 

Now sound out the following names of countries:

멕시코

폴란드

캐나다

나이지리아

네덜란드

아일랜드

인도네시아  

러시아

The answers are below, but don't look until you've sounded all these out. You can do this.

I'm sure you noticed a lot of interesting things. For example, Korean doesn't have an f, so they replace fs with p (in  커피) or h (in 후렌치후라이). Neither is there a Korean v, so you'll see it replaced with ㅂ. Also, Koreans use the letter ㅈ for both j and z. Finally, the dental consonants can't end a syllable, so Korean adds one of the basic vowels to the end of the word. (I used to hear them talk about President Bushy.)

All these differences will become second nature to you after a few weeks of practicing Hangeul.

In addition, you have by now noticed that each syllable exists in its own square. There are a lot of rules as to how these syllables are shaped, but they are easier to just pick up than to memorize the rules one by one. Practice reading, and you won't need to memorize a bunch of rules.

Now make flashcards of the loanwords and countries. Shuffle them into your vowel cards and practice. Also practice any consonants you have been having trouble with.

YOU'RE READING KOREAN!!!

Answers:

radio

tomato

coffee

hotel

taxi 

hamburger

television

French fries

large cheese pizza

sports

massage

Mexico

Poland

Canada

Nigeria

Netherlands

Ireland

Indonesia

Russia

How to learn Hangeul Part 1/4

Learning the Korean alphabet is much easier than you think. It's so easy I'm surprised more people don't do it. It will take you about two hours to completely master the consonants and to gain general knowledge of the vowels. Mastery of the vowel system takes more practice, but you can get around very well without mastery. To learn the Linguist Ashley way, you'll need to buy some index cards to turn into flashcards. 

(Note to linguists: You are not my primary audience. I hope that people untrained in linguistics can use this guide to learn to read Hangeul. I know phonology, and I know these sounds might be explained differently in a phonology class, but these were the classifications apparently used by King Sejong's linguists.)

CONSONANTS

The linguists who invented the Korean alphabet were no dummies. They wanted it to be easy for normal people (at the time, farmers and peasants) to learn. They actually made the consonants stylized pictures of the human mouth making these sounds. As the Guinness commercial said, Brilliant.

I am going to explain the Korean consonants in a way that will help you recognize the way they are written in Hangeul.

The Bilabials (ones you make using mostly your lips)

This is a picture of a closed human mouth viewed from the front: ㅁ

Make an m sound. Your mouth should be closed and the lips pressed together. The square is a stylized picture of your mouth making the m sound.

Now make a b sound. b starts as m, with your lips closed and pressed together. Then you make a puff of air.

This is a picture of a closed human mouth, but with a puff of air: ㅂ

The two lines at the top are the puff of air. Make sense?

Now make a p sound. Does it seem like it has a more powerful puff of air? The Korean linguists who created this system thought so. 

This is a picture of a closed human mouth making a bigger puff of air: ㅍ

It has lines coming from the top and the bottom of the square.

Now take 3 index cards and write these three Hangeul letters on one side and the corresponding English letters on the other side.

ㅁ m

ㅂ b

ㅍ p

The Dental consonants (the ones you make by pushing air between your teeth)

These symbols are also stylized views of the human mouth viewed from the front. This is a picture of the human mouth making an s sound: ㅅ

I like to imagine this as the person's lips slightly raised to show the front teeth as she pushes the air between the teeth to make the s sound. Easy, right? 

Now, make an s sound and allow it to morph into a j. The Korean linguists who invented Hangeul fancied a j as like an s, but with more air. Thus their j is an s with an extra burst of air at the top: ㅈ

 I'm sure you can guess how they make a ch. Yep: even more air coming out than a j. They place the extra burst of air at the top: ㅊ

 Now you are ready to make 3 more flashcards:

ㅅ s

ㅈ j

ㅊ ch

Back of the tongue consonants

These are the consonants you make by bringing the broad, flat back part of your tongue up to the roof of your mouth. (Linguists call these velar consonants. Specifically, they are plosives. Maybe I'll get into it in depth on this blog one day.) Korean linguists called these molar sounds because you made them in the same area as your molars. For these symbols, imagine you are a viewing a human mouth from the side.

Make a g sound. Notice how your tongue comes up to the roof of your mouth at the back? Hangeul makes a stylized drawing of this back-of-the-tongue action: ㄱ

So from left to right, that drawing shows the very most back part of the tongue at the top, then the tip of the tongue coming down. Hey, it's stylized.

Now make a k sound. I bet you know what's coming next. That's right: an extra puff of air: ㅋ

Now it's time to make 2 more flashcards:

ㄱ g

ㅋ k

Lingual consonants (made using mostly your tongue)

The alveolar ridge is this hard part of the roof of your mouth. You'll find it if you put your tongue on your front teeth and pull it backwards. It's a hard bump thing on the roof of your mouth at the front of your mouth. The first three lingual consonants use this alveolar ridge.

For these letters, imagine again that you are viewing the human mouth from the side. Make an n sound. Your tongue should go right to that alveolar ridge. The Korean letter that represents the n sound is a picture of your tongue touching the alveolar ridge: ㄴ

Now make a d sound. Your tongue goes to the same place, but instead of humming like you do with an n, you release a puff of air. The Korean letter for d is like an n but with a line representing a puff of air: ㄷ

Now make a t sound. You guessed it--extra puff of air: ㅌ

You may not think that r and l are very similar to n, d, and t. The Korean language has a different relationship to r and l than English. We distinguish between the two. Korean, not so much. For our purposes--namely, so you can read Hangeul--just think of them as the same sound. You make these sounds with your tongue, so Hangeul groups them together.

Make an r sound. Make an l sound. Do you feel how the tip of your tongue curves down, then up, to make these sounds? The Hangeul symbol for r/l is a little squiggle, which is a stylized picture of your tongue as it makes the sound: ㄹ

Now make your flashcards:

ㄴ n

ㄷd

ㅌ t

ㄹ r/l

Throat consonants

These letters represent the human throat as a circle, which it basically is. Here's a picture of relaxed vocal cords.

Here's the stylized picture of your throat in Hangeul: ㅇ

This letter can either be silence, when it is the first letter in a syllable, or it can mean ng if it is at the end of a syllable. We'll memorize both uses and sort them out later.

Make an h sound. Predictably, Hangeul pictures this sound as silence with two puffs of air: ㅎ

(You may be asking, What happened to the single puff of air? It used to be a letter representing a glottal stop. It is no longer used, but it looked like this: ㆆ)

Stop. Flashcard time. 

ㅇ silence/ng

ㅎ h

Double consonants

That's all the consonants you really need to memorize. The rest are double consonants. They are just made by doubling one of the basic symbols. They're so easy you might not want to waste your index cards even making these flashcards. These are called "tense consonants" and you are supposed to make your mouth more tense when you make these sounds. I don't but Koreans always understand me. I wouldn't worry about pronouncing these differently than the single consonants until you've already mastered reading Korean. Even if you live in Korea many years, you probably won't ever need to distinguish between regular and tense consonants; Koreans can understand you.

ㄲ gg

 ㄸ dd

 ㅃ bb

 ㅆ ss

 ㅉ jj

*  *  *

That's it! That's all the consonants. Take a few minutes and go through the 14 (or 19, if you made flashcards for the double consonants) flashcards you made. I like to put them in my purse and study them when I'm waiting in line or for an elevator. You should master them in about an hour. 

When you've memorized the Hangeul consonants, we'll move on to vowels.

Navigating Dongtan

After Gangnam, the Mr. and I moved into our new home in Dongtan. Dongtan is technically a district in the city of Hwaseong, but it operates as its own city. It was designed by some architects who claim to have considered the natural features of the land and laid Dongtan out almost by feng shui. Read about the planning of Dongtan here.

Dongtan City is too new to be in guidebooks (thanks for nothing, Lonely Planet. Just kidding. Really I love you). Just about the only useful information on it is from the vlogger Qi Ranger. Here is some information that I have learned through trial and error about navigating Dongtan. I hope this helps other Anglophone ex-pats who find themselves in a city so new that until about a month ago, Google satellite just showed a construction site.

This is a Google map of Dongtan. I added pins of important places.

View Dongtan, South Korea in a larger map

(To make the most of this map, you should learn to read Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. It's much easier than it sounds! Blog post about it coming up.)

Dongtan was designed around a mall, Metapolis, which has four towers. You can see the towers from anywhere in town; they are a most useful landmark. They even have their own wikipedia entry. You'll go to Metapolis to go to Home Plus (sort of Korea's Wal-Mart where you can find anything you need) or the movie theatre, CGV. Metapolis in Korean is 메타폴리스. See it on the map? 

Central Park runs through Metapolis and bisects the town. See 동탄센트럴 파크 on the map?The blue pin just north of Central Park is our apartment. (The GS25 is actually a FamilyMart.) We live above a restaurant that specializes in Jeju black pork. This is our apartment building:

It's much nicer on the inside. North of our home on the map you can see a big gray square block. That is the Samsung factory, which is also a very good landmark although it's not quite as tall as Metapolis:

On the map, east of the Samsung factory I placed a marker for the post office (우체국). You have to walk though a thin park-like walkway and over a highway to get to the post office, but at least you won't wander around following bad directions for two hours in -9 degrees Celsius to find it, like I did. You're welcome. In this picture the post office has an orange sign and is below a Nanometrics office.

In the center of the map, to the east, I put a pin where the downtown area is. If you are in the market for a noraebang (Korean karaoke) or pub-crawling, you want to head to this area. That's where the gang (the Mr., Natron, YK, and yours truly) hangs out when we're in Dongtan.

Last but certainly not least, check out the blue line in the southwest corner of Dongtan. That blue line is Dongtan's train-tracks, which connect to Suwon and Seoul's Line 1 eventually. The train station is called 서동탄 역 (West Dongtan Station). The train is about a 30-minute walk from Central Park, or a 10-minute 3300 won cab ride. This is 서동탄역 and the Mr.:

 The train connects to Osan, Suwon, and Seoul. It's more English-friendly than the buses. 

I hope this information is useful to my future Dongtan neighbors. Until next time, ^^

Kindergarten homework

A lot of people ask me how I am learning Korean. Well, the Pimsleur CDs help me with my pronunciation, and I learned the alphabet using flashcards, but one of my secrets of language learning is to do homework for kindergartners.

When I was Daegu four years ago a Korean friend gave me some old workbooks that a little cousin never finished. These are published by Samsung. The one I most recently finished looks like this:

It is a book to help 5-year-olds learn to read Hangeul. Inside, it has pictures of things that I assume all Korean children know, like hippos, pumpkins, and harmonicas:

You are supposed to write the vocabulary words over and over. The repetition helps you to remember the vocabulary items. (I remember a high school Spanish teacher employing this method when students didn't do their homework.) This helps me not only learn new vocabulary items, but also their educational system. What Westerners call "rote memorization" has been a feature of education probably since humanity first began: poets memorized stories like the Iliad and Beowulf, and griots memorized genealogical lines. Repetition is still a feature of the Korean educational system, although that is slowly changing.

I've worked through three of these books now, and in addition to learning the Korean words for hippo and pumpkin, I've gained an appreciation for the amount of effort and time that Korean 5-year-olds are expected to do homework. The book pictured above is 64 pages long. It took me over 3 hours to complete. My hand cramped and my mind wandered. I remember in kindergarten and 1st grade doing about one page of homework a night, and none of it was repetitious. Koreans work hard, and they start at an early age.

Working through a kindergartner's homework gave me an appreciation for the Korean work ethic, and it also taught me the word for hippo. Now I'm off to buy a moisture absorber hippo. Good thing I learned the vocab.

Conan

This blog post is not really about Korea, but about a book I read before I came here: Conan.

The Mr.'s brother gave him three volumes of collections of Conan stories from a used book store. The mass market paperbacks don't seem to have been read before--they were in much better condition than the one in this photo--but the glue is disintegrating. The books smell like decaying plant matter, and every page we turn gently falls away from its spine.

Because they are deteriorating from age, these books are hard to read, but they are worth the effort. The Mr. and I took turns reading the Conan stories in this volume, known as Conan #1, aloud to each other as we drove through the depressingly dead strip-mined parts of Kentucky to my mother's house.

The author of the original Conan stories, Robert E. Howard, was a penpal of HP Lovecraft and a future suicide. He created Conan as his idealized alter ego. Conan did not understand civilization; in one story he gives up riches because they would weigh him down. He seeks some balance between stability--enough gold for wine and women--and adventure. He is a thief, a murderer, and Howard's ideal man. Maybe you've seen one of the movie adaptations. None of them are true to the stories.

The stories in this collection are escapist gems. Conan braves wolves, sorcery, and ancient gods to bring down great evil, steal a bunch of treasure, or both. The most grandly epic one, for me, was "The City of Skulls." Conan actually went to Tibet. Wrap your head around that one. The best stories, though, are the ones Howard completed in his own lifetime: "The Tower of the Elephant", "Rogues in the House", and "The God in the Bowl", which owes more to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' stories than any of the Weird Tales.The first tale though establishes who Conan is and makes him a far more complex character than the Schwarzenegger movies. Howard's Conan was no dumb beast of burden.

If you noticed from the last book I half-ass reviewed, I like short stories. They are less of a commitment than novels. I can finish one in an hour or two and actually have accomplished something. With novels, it's more like a long trudge than a walk around the block. Maybe I just like short stories because I'm lazy. Maybe I have OCD. At any rate, squirrel!

Linguist Ashley and the Mr. arrive in Korea!

The first week of January, the Mr. and I landed in Korea. He was going to begin training to teach English for Chungdahm (a chain of private schools, or hagwons, in Korea). We stayed in a business-y part of Seoul known as Gangnam. We were at Coatel Chereville Residence.

The first weekend we didn't have anything to do except hang out with the Mr.'s best friend from childhood, Natron, and his Chinese girlfriend, YK. On the sidewalk in Gangnam there are machines that take your picture and email it to you. Fun! Here we are. You can tell from this picture how finicky I am about how I look. :P  The Mr. is in the middle.

So we hung with the gang all weekend, but on Monday the Mr. had to start his training. That left me in a hotel room alone from 8am-6pm every day, while he learned the Chungdahm way of teaching EFL. I can entertain myself pretty well. In addition to things I had to do to ensure I have a job in March, like mail documents and request documents and such, and besides sort of housekeeping things like buying myself gloves, I gave myself a list of things to do every day: exercise, study Korean, and freeread.

To exercise, every day I found an online no-equipment-necessary workout and did it while I watched CNN International in the hotel room. Most of these workouts put a lot of emphasis on push-ups, so my chest was sore by the second day. I switched from strength exercises to cardio in the room (a minute of jumping jacks, then a minute of burpees, stuff like that) to a yoga video. I like to do a different workout every day. I get bored very very easily.

To study Korean I am taking an eclectic, mixed approach. I have multiple books and CDs that I use. For this first week, I listened to one half-hour lesson from Pimsleur Korean. My alma mater had Lessons 1-30 and the Pimsleur Reading series, so I copied them to my laptop and saved a ton of money. I love getting stuff for free. I'm not a shopper. So I made sure I did some Pimsleur every day in the hotel while the Mr. was gone at training.

I just finished a PhD in Linguistics, so I'm happy to have some free time to read novels and short stories and such. One of the suitcases I brought to Korea is just full of books to read. If you are like me, you have an entire bookshelf--or bookcase--of books you bought to read. One of the first ones I tackled after my dissertation was accepted was this one:

I bought it on eBay in like 2006. It took me 6 years to get around to reading it, but I enjoyed it. It has medieval folktales ("The Rabbi Who Was Turned Into a Werewolf"), high literature that I didn't understand ("The Messiah of the House of Ephraim"), and pulp fiction ("The Golem"). I like reading classics from outside the accepted canon. I once had an ancestor who was Jewish, and it was also cool to read about one aspect of my heritage, although the way the authors in this collection discussed converts to Christianity informed me that my ancestor was, to them, worse than dead. I would definitely recommend this book to fans of fantasy who want to expand beyond the Tolkien-esque. So I was able to get most of the way through this book during the Mr.'s training period.

So, that's basically what my days were like my first week in Korea. The Mr. then passed training and we were bussed to our new home: Dongtan.