Education Series, Part 4: First Semester Struggles
At my Korean school, we never learned grammar in Korean class. We would read literature, write papers, and discuss the reading in a seminar-style format. I had never taken a seminar-style class in America so doing this sort of work in 7th grade in Korean was quite a challenge.
During my first semester, it would take hours to do the reading in both Korean and English. It would take a longer time to write in English and translate to Korean. Eventually, I would write try in Korean without translating my entire paper in English, although I would still need the assistance of Google Translate to look up many words in the process.
Writing reports for homework was not the worst thing about Korean class. It was without a doubt very challenging, but helped me improve my reading and writing skills tenfold. The part of the class that I dreaded most was in-class writing time. We had two classes a week, each 1.5 hours long. The first day we would do discussion and listen to the assigned presentation team. The second day, we would do writing in class and do peer review on the spot by passing our papers down to another student. I could barely understand the prompt, and would always have to ask my neighbors or guess what I needed to write about.
In America, student numbers aren’t used much in the classroom. But in Korean school, we would write our numbers on every assignment we submitted and in this particular class, we would always sit in alphabetical order. Each week, the number of students we would pass our writing down would increase by one. I was the second last girl in my class. Thankfully, the last girl and I were good friends so I wasn’t very worried about her reading my horrible Korean. But after the second week, my paper would always go to a boy. I wasn’t thrilled about anyone reading my paper, but the girls seemed more sympathetic so I would always prefer that a girl read my paper. I was not in luck. It is very difficult to write Korean characters neatly if you have not practiced for a long time. My Korean handwriting was like an elementary school student’s writing or I would not be surprised if anyone thought that it was even worse. I was extremely embarrassed by my handwriting. To make matters worse, I did not know any spelling or grammar rules.
I would mostly spell words the way that they sounded. For the most part, I would spell words incorrectly. I would also not know when to put spaces between phrases. My handwriting was not my greatest concern. I didn’t want anybody to know that I didn’t know my spelling and grammar. So I would make my handwriting messier on purpose when I did not know how to spell a word. I could sacrifice my handwriting for avoiding the humiliation my poor grammar. To hide the fact that I was making my handwriting worse on purpose to hide my grammatical errors, I would try to keep a consistent messiness throughout my entire report. I would not sharpen pencils on purpose.
In Korean, there are two ways to write the “eh” sound. They are 에 and 애. I could not tell when to use the former and when to use the latter. My solution was to create a letter that looked like a little bit of both so that nobody could judge me for writing the wrong letter; if they did, I could just act like I had written the wrong one. My cross of these two characters looked like this. It was extremely ambiguous, especially when I wrote with a fuzzy pencil tip.
Thankfully, I was able to acquire spelling and grammar rules over time and was confident enough during my second year to write as neatly as I could. I knew all of my spelling and grammar, and could write in Korean on the spot. My handwriting remained a problem the entire first year though that my Korean teacher gave me a handwriting workbook to trace letters my second year. I thought it was funny but thanked him and tried to improve my writing. I must say that my handwriting has changed several times since then, but it has improved nonetheless.
I look back on this now, and to be honest, I don’t think that anyone actually cared whether I made mistakes or not. I remember maybe one or two times when my mistakes would get a chuckle out of someone, but they were laughing at my grammar, not my intelligence as a person.