When I lived in Korea, I found it necessary to adopt an artificial sense of reality about the state of relations between the two Koreas. In order to live well, it was better to forget that the two nations were still technically at war. The 1994 nuclear crisis became a blip on my radar only because of calls from parents concerned about their adult children teaching at the language institutes. There was little to say, beyond assuring them that the American embassy would issue instructions for civilians in the event of attack (not that all of our teachers were Americans, but I can’t remember any other sort of parents contacting us. And I wasn’t personally too confident in the American embassy).
That unreality (which I still maintain, although it’s at a much lower level) always gets punctured whenever talk turns to family members separated by the war. Death is bad, but not knowing whether your brother or sister or mother and father lived or died is worse. Knowing that they lived, but that you can’t see or communicate with them is something else.
I’m a sucker for those reunion scenes that pop up in documentaries now and then, which is why I liked the History Channel documentary Inside North Korea (broadcast last night…thanks to Joshua for the heads up). I wept and cheered for the elderly sisters who discovered their brother living in the north and got to see him again during one of those family reunion programs.
Inside North Korea was followed by The Real Dr. Evil. On the whole, there wasn’t much new to me in either documentary…plenty of the usual “The Kims are bad and here’s why: cult of personality/famine/multiple human rights abuses/energy problems/privileges for Pyongyangers” but “aren’t those stadium card displays cool?” (well, they are, but thinking about the logistics required for successful displays boggles my mind.) The pieces of interviews with defectors were fascinating, but of course focused only on their life in North Korea.
All this North Korea talk made me do a quick re-read of Bruce Cumings’ North Korea: Another Country. I read it during summer vacation and found it to be a new (to me) perspective on North Korea.
I found Cumings to be somewhat irreverent, as well as overly fond of Kim Jong Il. He blasts the American government for their lack of insight into the Korean mind. (On a side note, the book needs an index…I frequently found myself wishing to recheck parts and having to dig to find them.)
In his preface, he writes:
I have no sympathy for the North, which is the author of most of its own troubles, specializes in self-defeating behavior, treats like children the masses of its own population unlucky enough to be excluded from the elite, and indulges in such stereotypical hero worship, grandiose exaggeration, and wretched excess as to make even a scholar of East Asia reach for dusty old tomes with titles like “Oriental Despotism.” (xi)
He’s consistent in his criticism of American government and media in their refusal to learn about North Korea:
Predicting the behavior of crazy people is by definition impossible, and American officials constantly harp on Pyongyang’s unpredictability. I would argue, to the contrary, that North Korean behavior has been quite predictable and that an irresponsible American media, almost bereft of good investigative reporters, often (but by no means always) egged on by government officials, obscures the real nature of the United States-Korean conflict. The media has had the wrong stories in the wrong place at the wrong time; the absurd result is that often one has to read North Korea’s tightly controlled press to figure out what is actually going on between Washington and Pyongyang. (47-48)
Napalm’s use in the Vietnam War is well-known in America, but it was also widely used in the Korean War (this was the book’s biggest shocker for me, as I was completely ignorant of this. But how did else did I imagine that Korea was essentially deforested by the end of the war?). He says (without giving total figures, an unforgivable lapse) that:
Far more napalm was dropped on Korea, however, with much more devastating effect, since the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) had many more populous cities and urban industrial installations than did North Vietnam. (17)
Daily Life in North Korea (chapter 4) is my first look at this topic and would have been worth the price I didn’t pay for this book (library). I was especially interested in his examination of the changes that communism brought to the Korean class system.
But his attempts to humanize Kim Jong Il in chapter 5 left a bad taste:
What can he possibly be thinking, standing there in his pear-shaped polyester pantsuit, pointy-toed elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses of malevolent tint [ooooohhh, I’m afraid of his sunglasses?], an arrogant curl to his feminine lips, an immodest potbelly, a perpetual bad hair day? He is thinking, get me out of here. It is a cruel fate to have but one country to give for your family; even crueler is to be born into that wrong family, in the wrong country, in the wrong century. (155)
And:
Kim Jong Il is not the playboy, womanizer, drunk, and mentally deranged fanatic “Dr. Evil” of our press. He is a homebody who doesn’t socialize much, doesn’t drink much, and works at home in his pajamas, scribbling marginal comments on the endless reams of documents brought to him in gray briefcases by his aides. He most enjoys tinkering with his many music boxes, sitting on the floor and opening them up with screwdrivers; at other times he would sit with Jong Nam [his son] and play Super Mario video games. He is prudish and shy, and like most Korean fathers, hopelessly devoted to his son and the other children in his household—vastly preferring to sequester himself with them, rather than preside over the public extravaganzas that amaze visitors to the DPRK. (163)
I tried, but I still don’t feel sorry for Kim Jong Il.
Posted by kangmi on August 25, 2004 at 3:00 PM0 comments
Alert readers may have noticed that I figured out how to display post time and date in 한글.
Posted by kangmi on August 19, 2004 at 3:00 PM3 comments
Just finished a whole week of almost nothing but 아름다운 유혹. I got distracted by Flashcard Exchange and the Leitner cardfile system.
When I started studying Korean again last fall, I looked for flashcard software. I found nothing suitable online, so I started using paper flashcards. That soon fell by the wayside, as I found the method too cumbersome to maintain.
The vocabulary list I’ve maintained here has been of limited use and doesn’t begin to catalog all of the vocabulary I know.
So when I stumbled upon Flashcard Exchange last week, I thought I’d found a great resource. The whole idea of regular, scheduled review of items with which I’d had trouble in the past seemed like a great system. I started doing some research on the Leitner system, and almost immediately discovered Memorization Software Reviewed, a site that reviews over two hundred flashcard programs (guess I didn’t look in the right places last fall).
Not surprisingly, the one program that receives the site’s Best rating is VTrain was created by the same fellow reviewing all the other software. He does make an ”ethical note” that “the author of this review made some contributions to the new version of this product.” “Some contributions” appears to be an understatement, as the author is the only person listed on their development team. VTrain uses the Leitner system.
My non-exhaustive research quickly led me to a program called Supermemo. Supermemo has not been the easiest system to understand. All the hype on the front page (the design isn’t much help either) was almost enough to turn me away, but there was something about it that encouraged me to try to cut through it. The General principles page admits that it’s complicated:
Are you getting lost? Do not despair.
I was lost, but not quite despairing, when I discovered Len Budney’s Supermemo page. His Pros and Cons of Supermemo helped me to understand it better. This Supermemo manual also provides easy-to-read explanations.
My one-line simplified Supermemo explanation is this: It’s like the Leitner cardfile system, but uses an algorithm to optimize repetitions.
So for now, I’ve abandoned Flashcard Exchange in favor of Supermemo. It’s important to note that some people will probably be more comfortable with a program like FE. Len Budney says:
Dr. Wozniak has compiled some statistics on Supermemo users, and apparently Supermemo requires a certain kind of personality. Women, artists, and humanities majors tend to hate it; men, scientists and engineers tend to love it. The idea behind Supermemo, just like Ben Graham’s ``Value Investing’’, apparently either hooks you in five minutes--or never hooks you at all.
As a woman and a former humanities major, I shouldn’t like Supermemo, and perhaps time will prove that to be true. But its systemic approach appeals to me.
If you think Flashcard Exchange (specifically) is more your style, I can testify that they have great customer service and were speedily helpful in accommodating my request to have Korean added to their list of languages.
Now for a few of my own cons. The intro to the online version says:
With the SuperMemo method, you can memorize the contents of supermemo.net courses in record time. By spending just half an hour a day on learning, you can memorize the basic vocabulary of a foreign language (3000 words, fixed phrases, and grammatical forms) in less than a month!
That could well be true. However, that assumes that you have already entered these 3,000 items into Supermemo. I have twenty-some right now (I’ll be adding daily), so I’m not going to hit that magic language number in four weeks’ time.
Another con is that it’s more difficult to make my vocabulary file public. The only way I could do it would be to regularly export it to a .qa file and post it here. I’ll probably start doing that within the next couple of weeks.
There’s not a lot of Supermemo Korean out there. I’ve been able to find only one other publicly available Korean Supermemo file, and it’s only available in .pdb format.
Another debatable con is that the method behind Supermemo is not easily understood. I tend to be skeptical of practical ideas that are difficult to explain, because part of my definition of practicality is simplicity. The idea is not simple, and neither is learning how to use the software. Help files are either not complete, or I just haven’t found it all on the labyrinthine Supermemo web site.
This page lists all of the available Supermemo versions. I’m starting with the free beta online version (it’s been in beta since 2001).
If you elect to use Supermemo, I’d love to hear your feedback.
Posted by kangmi on August 19, 2004 at 9:00 AM11 comments
Found a nifty new resource this weekend. Flashcard Exchange permits you to create your own flashcards, as well as to access others.
I’m in the process of creating my own flashcard sets, and as soon as they add Korean to their language list (they’ve told me it will be available tomorrow), you’ll be able to access them as well. The basic account is free, and the upgrade is a one-time fee of $14.95, which permits you to print, use the Leitner system (which sounds like it could be worth the fee), and export your flashcards.
My immediate plan is to create some time flash cards. 인선 may have given me an A- last week, but I need a lot of work.
Posted by kangmi on August 16, 2004 at 3:00 PM1 comments
Yesterday morning I finished reading The Koreans: Who They Are, What They Want, Where Their Future Lies (revised and updated) by Michael Breen.
Hands down, the funniest line in the book:
...I had a revelation: Americans are from Mars, Koreans are from Venus. After years of trying to figure Korea out, I realized that my approach had been wrong. These two countries need a therapist, not policy wonks. (pages 253-254)
Posted by kangmi on August 16, 2004 at 9:00 AM1 comments
I’d forgotten how emotionally satisfying it can be to speak Korean to a Korean. All that “You speak Korean so well!” can go to your head like cheap champagne (not that I’ve ever had any, but I read it in a book somewhere). If you’re not careful (and many expats I know weren’t), you can get stuck in a kind of 안녕하세요? Hotel California limbo: You can check out anytime you like but it gets to be so comfortable you never leave.
Thus went last night’s lesson with 인선. She gave me an A- for the evening. There are tests, and she expects me to study, a result of a previous unhappy experience with a student she tutored. Getting me to study is her smallest problem. Getting me to speak is the bigger one.
Posted by kangmi on August 12, 2004 at 9:00 AM2 comments
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강미 | learning korean