::A Geek in Korea::

Today was a craft day in my kindergarten class. We were doing "families", so I had the students cut out different pieces of clothes and "draw" their families into the clothes they colored. The idea was to practice family words as well as introduce clothing words, which we will study later in the year. Since the students were busy coloring, the talkative students were chatting.

I allow the occasional chatter in Korean in the kindergarten class if it is related to the topic at hand. Since students don’t have the vocabulary to actually talk about anything substantial, if I didn’t let them talk at all it would be silent as we prepared the papers we were working on. I tried asking students questions like, "What’s this, a shoe or a boot?" or, "What color is this?" sort of thing to keep them speaking and practicing their English.

The two most talkative students simply grab any crayon and color wildly with no regard to lines. This means they finish in two minutes what it takes everyone else the rest of class. Then they proceed to talk the rest of class about completely random things or annoy the other students. Today, I told them that they had to speak in English if they were going to speak in class.

The both looked at me. Then they started speaking in Korean very slowly, as if you would talk to a very young child or someone you think it too stupid to understand what you actually are saying.

I told them that I didn’t want them to speak slowly in Korean, but in English entirely. They both looked at men again and said, "Na English mo-te-yo". (I can’t speak English.)

Exactly.

Later, I was teaching various kinds of onomatopoeia to my students. We started talking about animal sounds in Korean and English. Animals don’t sound the same when expressed in Korean. For example, a horse’s neigh is more of a "ee-hee-hing" sound in Korean (when written back into Roman characters for extra confusion, of course). We stopped the entire lesson and started naming animals and the sounds attributed to them. I’d write and imitate a sound and the students would try to guess the animal. Then, they would reply with the Korean animal sound. It was like a weird international game of telephone. (I didn’t try a baby ox.)

Anyway, much like the scene in Flander’s fall out shelter, the students started arguing with me about the sounds the animals make. I’m not trying to tell them that a frog really says, "ribbit ribbit," but that when we write it in English, that’s how we express it. Students would tell me, "No! Frogs clearly say ‘Kae-gul, Kae-gul"," which is how it is expressed when written in Korean. They were adamant that I was making the sounds up completely randomly and I had never seen or heard any animal before in my life. I just asked them to indulge me in the favor of believing me when I said that animal sounds were written differently in English.