1) Location - The tenth story of the highest building on the Sogang University campus. I'm not technically a student of Sogang, since I'm attending the affiliated language program, but I do have a student card and have access to the various facilities there, including the gym and the library.
2) Schedule - I take classes four hours a day, five days a week, making it a pretty intense schedule. This doesn't take into account the homework, of which there's a considerable amount. There are also additional classes available to those who are interested and ambitious (I suppose I may fall into category) like a pronunciation class that I took today.
3) Material - The first hour of the day is a writing class. We review the material covered in the other classes and implement it in our own free writing assignments. Next is a video class, which focuses on improving our listening skills. Right now we're watching a movie called "Christmas in August." Finally is two hours of reading and speaking, which is where we get most of the new material, including vocab and grammar. Perhaps needless to say, all these classes are taught in Korean. Since I'm in level 5 out of 6, this isn't surprising, but even level 1 is taught entirely in Korean. I really can't imagine how that works...!
I'll add some more topics when they occur to me. For now, another picture - pretty good looking, huh?
4 comments:
David, when you're done with level six, can you take a test and become a certified "Native" speaker of Korean? I know my cousin is a certified speaker of Italian, so I was wondering if there was something similar in S. Korea.
Well, I'm not sure that I'll be ready for any test of native proficiency by the time I finish level 6. ^^;; but there IS a Korean proficiency exam that I intend to take soon. As long as I can get a fairly high level I'll be happy. Becoming completely fluent in Korean would take a decade of concerted effort, I suspect...
Are the S. Koreans more sympathetic to the N. Koreans than we are? Less?
Josh~
By the way, which Josh am I responding to? Josh White? Josh Hoffman? Josh King? There's really a lot of ambiguity here, buster.
In response to the question, however, I'd say that S. Koreans are much more sympathetic to N. Koreans, though I hesitate to make sweeping generalizations. For example, one older Korean gentleman I talked to got really piping mad at me for simply visiting North Korea on a short tour - he berated me for pumping money into that monster Kim Jong-Il's regime.
But by and large most Koreans consider their Northern brethren just that - brothers and sisters, separated by politics but united by a common culture and ethnicity. In fact some Koreans are more sympathetic to the North than they are to the US. Further, both sides, North and South, have embraced the goal of unification - though their different visions of what that unification would entail suggest that it is still a long distance in the future.
David
Post a Comment