오랫 많아! (Long time, no see)

Yes, it has been ages since I’ve posted.  It’s not that I’ve forgotten about you…I actually did think about writing a couple posts, but then I decided that I didn’t really have anything interesting to say.  But, I guess I do have a few interesting things to tell you about……

But you won’t hear about all of them in this post!

If you recall, I’ve talked about applying to graduate school before.  Last summer, I visited the campus and sat in on some classes.  It was great.  Portland seems like a wonderful city, and the degree (Master in International Management) is right where I want to be.  The small glimpse I got really felt great, and I got very excited about the possibility of studying there.  But I tend to get really excited about things like that and over invest myself thinking about it before it becomes a reality.  In college, I spent 6 months thinking I was going to join the Navy, before I finally resigned myself to the fact those doors weren’t opening.

Anyway, I got back to Seoul and took the GMAT in October.  I was reasonably pleased with the result… I did really well on the verbal sections, and horrible on the math part!  But it averaged out to a slightly above average 560.  I decided to stick with it, since those tests are pretty reliable and the chances of increasing my math score are probably slim!

So, shortly after the new year, I sent off my application, expecting to hear in early February.  Well, as it turns out, schools are e-mailing applicants these days.  This morning I woke up to an e-mail offering me a place in the upcoming class!!

Cool, huh?!

Actually, I am likely going to defer the application for 1 year.  Accepting a space in this fall’s cohort means I’d have to leave Korea ahead of schedule.  It would also mean that I couldn’t make good on my plan to go study Spanish this fall and winter!   On that note, I’ve bought a ticket to Honduras in mid-September.  My goal is to spend about 4-5 months traveling through and studying in Central America.

I might just be nuts..

I won’t make any apologies about my rather infrequent updates! You’ll just have to deal with it!

The school year is winding down in a couple weeks (sort of) and winter vacation is coming up! I ’say sort’ of because the semester isn’t actually over. School closes December 22nd, and opens again on Jauary 28. Then, closes again from the 6th, reopens on the 11th, only to close yet again on the 14th. The second semester officially begins March 3rd. Part of the craziness is due to the Lunar new year, but I still can’t understand why they close for all of January, only to have 10 more days of nothing (all exams and what not are finished) before students graduate or move up, and then close again for 2 weeks. It defies my Western logic.

Anyway, even though that’s a LOT of vacation time, I still have to work during 3 weeks in January teaching English day camp. Better than doing nothing, I guess, but I wouldn’t turn down vacation!

Some of you may recall that I want to go study Spanish in Latin America after leaving Korea. I’ve toyed with Spanish before, albeit very briefly when I was teaching in Maryland. The school was developing a Spanish immersion program, and I got to learn some Spanish there. Spanish comes pretty easy to me, but I’ve never really studied it formally. I want to. Right now, I’d like to go to Honduras, and maybe Mexico for a few months just to study Spanish. But I’d like to start right now! Leaving Korea right now isn’t really an option, but I can take advantage of the internet and all the new language learning tools available! So, in the midst of my Korean, I’m also going to be working on Spanish.

Adios!

Kicking it up a notch with 漢子 (Chinese Characters)

In some respects, Korean is the easy way out when studying an Asian language. Chinese has those dreaded “tones” which for a non-musical guy like me are really scary. Then there are the thousands of pictograph characters that must be learned. They aren’t letters. Japanese also makes use of the Chinese characters in a major way. Japanese is further complicated by having 2 completely different “alphabets” that are mixed along with the Chinese characters.

To the untrained eye, a Korean sentence like “제가 사과를 좋아해요” (I like apples) looks incredibly daunting, it really isn’t. Chinese and Japanese have a huge barrier to being able to read. Let me betray a secret of Korean: Learning to “read” is really quite easy. Understanding what you read is of course another matter….as it is in any second language. But in Korean, because the reading barrier is so low, one can easy move on to meaning, and the arch nemesis of grammar!

In middle school I studied Latin, which according to Mr. Dare (yes, that is really his name) is responsible for some 65% of English words. So, knowing Latin can really help improve your English vocabulary. Of course Greek also influences English, especially in science and medicine.

The relationship is similar between Korean and Chinese. 70% of Korean is derived from Chinese, and therefore, understanding some basic Chinese characters can really improve your Korean vocabulary. So I’ve bought a new book aimed at helping foreign learners of Korean master 500 of the most common and useful 漢子 in Korean.

You probably aren’t as excited about this as I am, but that’s OK… this is my blog after all.