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.