"Waah... Not Waah"

Anneong Hasayo, Brett-ssi here.

Prior to arriving in Korea we were very keen to start learning the language. We purchased an array of Korean books, dictionaries and CD's and began partaking in the "do it yourself" coursework.


We have now begun Korean lessons at the YMCA in Daegu every Saturday morning. The 2 hour lessons remind us how hard it is to sit in a class and focus on a teacher rambling on and if nothing else, we are learning a lot about teaching through our experience as students.

After about an hour and a half I throw my hands up in the air in defeat. It makes me sympathetic of the students that I am teaching who have been at school all day and then come to English academy for another four hours at night. When I get them at nine O'clock they have been in school for between 8 and ten hours! Not to mention that they also go to school on Saturdays. No wonder they look at me blankly and fall asleep in class.

Anyway, back to Korean class. We each had to choose our own Korean name. My name in Gun Ho (which means enthusiastic and over zealous) and Cindy's is Min Sun. The class is made up of about 20 foreign English teachers from Scotland, England, Spain, U.S.A, New Zealand, Canada and Australia.


The Korean's prefer a very old-fashioned, wrote-style learning in their schools and our language class is no different. The teacher points to the Korean letters on the board, says the name, and then we repeat as a chorus of strange accents.

Typically it goes like this. Teacher says "Waah" and we say "Waah", then she will say "NO! not waah.... waah!" and then we say "Waah..... stupid language" and so on.

We can now quite comfortably say "hello, goodbye and thankyou", it is surprising how far you can get on those three words.