Santa, do you like red clothes or rainbow clothes?

So I know I just posted an entry last night, but I wanted to share these. Here is some of the cutest/best writing I've had so far. I haven't edited at all - this is exactly how these pieces were written.

Cutest santa letter so far:

Hello, Santa. I'm Sally. I'm 15 years old. I am NoByeun middle school student. I am quiet. I can't shout loudly. So I want loud voice and brave. I cannot talk to everyone. My dream is elementary school teacher so I need to brave and loud noise. Santa, please help me. ^-^ Santa, I believe you live Santa country. Come back my house again and give me brave and loud voice.

Santa, Merry Christmas

Also adorable - from a little girl who used to grab my arm every lesson and say 'My teacher arm is always big':

Merry Christmas Santa.

My name is Sarah

What is your real name?

Do you like red clothes or rainbow clothes?

I want see your Rudolph.

And Santa I want a magic lamp, i-phone and money.

Santa Clause please give them.

Because I want have that.

Santa one years. I'm fight my drother, mom, father, children and my friend. Santa I promise a not fight and good next year.

Merry Christmas!! Oh! and I want a pet~

bye~ Santa

Sarah

An old story from one of my favourite elementary students, Jenny. This girl is pretty much always this funny:

Long time ago, there is very strong girl. Her is Jenny. She fight with cow and elephant and rhinoceros, but one elephant is her friends. She was cut the hair, so elephant don't know who are Jenny! Oh my god! She fight with him, but........... She went to the sky with elephant.

And possibly the best, most original piece I've had from a middle-school student I only taught 3 times. I asked them to pretend that their father had brought a dinosaur egg back as a gift from a business trip, and the assignment was to write about how to look after it.

It's impossible present for 21C people, except almighty god. Anyway, you want to have a Tyrannosaurus for your huge pet or fierce emergency food. First, you should change temperature hotter and hotter. The dinosaur egg is bigger than your body. So you must protect his warmth with big fire and blanket like a hen hold her eggs. Then you should make friends in the neighborhood of him. Once upon a time, dinosaurs' mom arranged their eggs like circle. So you had better make circle with your egg and toy eggs. Your egg feel comfortable. At last, you have to talk to him. It's very important point for you. If you don't tame him, he punches your notse when he hatches. Everyday you touch his egg shell, talk about politics, economy, literature, etc. Finally you greet him with a good-night-kiss. Few months later, you can meet your huge friend.

This is prolly my awesomes shirt

An entry on Korean is well overdue. Last Saturday the weekly class at the YMCA finished, and while I'm far from being able to hold even basic conversations, I have picked up enough to understand why my students struggle so much with basic grammar, spelling and pronunciation: Korean is a wee bit different from English. Obviously I'm a big geek, with a big love for phonology, but I will try to keep this light and non-techincal. Well, I'll settle for 'decipherable'.

Let's start with the pronunciation. Of course this is my favourite thing. In brief, syllables can have at most consonant-vowel-consonant. The final consonant can only be l, m, n, ng, p, t or k. To put this in perspective, English allows up to three consonant sounds at the beginning AND end of a syllable (e.g. 'strengths'). Also, they don't have any fricatives (long consonants) except s – so that's no z, f, v, or th sounds – or diphthongs.

In case you're thinking this means Korean is easy to pronounce, you are very wrong. They have a 'j' sound that is not voiced (making it sound more like a 'ch' to us), plus a geminate (double) 'j/ch' sound AND an aspirated 'ch' sound. The same pattern exists for the 'b/p' sound. I could happily study the differences between these sounds, but I find it extremely hard to hear, or produce, correctly. Many of the vowels are also nightmarishly similar to each other for English speakers.

Hopefully you can now see a little why when they write 'Matrix' in Korean, it comes out as 'Ma-tuh-rik-suh'. The 's' sound is also sort of between the English 's' and 'sh' sounds, so sometimes things sound a little lispy to an English ear. All of this leads to the peak of accidentally offensive Konglish: the 'shitty joo' instead of 'city zoo'. It also explains why I experience ridiculous levels of mishearing on a daily basis – snake vs. snack being a common, and often amusing, example. Getting the kids to say 'watched' (instead of 'watch-i-duh') is one of my favourite activities: my little ones are even starting to get it.

The grammar is also very very different, though my understanding of it is much more basic. I know that the verb comes last, even though I always forget that when I try to speak. And I know that most adjectives are actually verbs, in terms of grammar. So their word for 'tall' is actually a verb meaning 'is tall'. Realising this was so helpful for understanding my students' writing. Beyond that, I don't know much at all, but I'm sure the fundamental differences only get bigger with more study, given the sentences produced by even advanced-level English learners.

After trying to get my head round this stuff enough to actually make a few Korean sentences, and understand people, I have concluded that language is all about lines. In my head, Language looks like a colourful, messy blob, consisting of the full spectrum of what is possible. Each language carves up this space into meaningful units; and learning a new language means redrawing those lines.* When you learn another European language, the lines match up relatively often – with Korean it sometimes feels like they never do. You have to approach every new piece of information with as blank a slate as you can, and try to remember that the shape of your own language is far from the only way. I know this idea isn't ground-breaking, but even Arabic wasn't as challenging to my poor mono-lingual brain as Korean, and I feel like I am just now gaining a full appreciation for what my professors were on about when they talked about defining the boundaries of 'possible Language'.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the title is prolly the awesomes slogan I've seen on a t-shirt. More on Konglish another time.

* Vowels are probably the most concrete example: you can produce an infinite range of vowels phonetically, but to make any of them meaningful in speech, you have to define the boundaries that separate one vowel from another. Word meaning is also pretty easy to understand in this way if you imagine 'meaning' as space that is divided by words. Sentence meaning and syntax always hurt my head with their messiness, which makes both seem extra blobby in a vague and ill-defined sort of way.

Going native...

I've started to notice recently that I am, somewhat unsurprisingly, changing to fit Korea better. A few things I really didn't think would happen:

1. I like drinking hot water - I used to think this was the weirdest thing, but it just makes more sense to drink a glass of hot water when its cold outside.
2. I suck my teeth when I'm thinking – They do this all the time. I've started doing it too. It's not attractive. I also do the whiny nasal 'aa-aa-aaaaaah' sound and nod my head vigourously when I understand something. Again, not exactly fetching.
3. I'm obsessed with cute things – My (always faulty) cheese filter is gone. No trace is left. I love the cute-ness. The kids, the socks, the stationery: I love all of it.
4. I like heated toilet seats – I was vehemently opposed to this at first, but then its like 'Damn this bathroom is cold, and this seat is so toasty. Nice.'
5. I don't have a heart attack when scooters try to mow me down – They zoom about and everyone ignores them. Especially my heroes: the ajummas.
6. I may not be able to live without kimchi – I'm not alone in this: last Saturday, after hours of dancing, four of us waygook girls managed to polish off a plate of the delectable fermented cabbage in approximately 45 seconds.

Thought I'd also share one of the funniest classroom moments so far:

Me – Have you heard of Lady Gaga?
Lizzie – Teacher wait.
(Looks up a word in her phone dictionary)
Lizzie – Teacher, she is my idol.

Damn that kid – that might have been the only fully grammatical sentence she ever produced in my class.