By Yi Woo-won
I was learning English for the first time when I was in middle school. My English teacher was a Japanese national named Tachiki. The first ever sentence he taught us was, "It is a map of Japan," a sentence that made an indelible impression on me because it was the language that I had waited for so long to learn.
He asked the class to repeat the sentence correctly after him many times and we did. But months after he had left the country, we learned that his English pronunciation was terrible. We realized that he was wrong when he read the sentence like, "Iddo iju ah mabbu obu Jabbang," with a strong Japanese accent. That was in 1945, the last year of the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945). Learning my dream language was a disaster from the beginning.
With liberation from the forced annexation, we took back our Korean names, discarding our given Japanese names, the symbol of our allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Above everything else, we retrieved in school our Korean language and other curricula that had been virtually obliterated for decades.
A few years went by and I was now a freshman in high school, still enthusiastic to learn English but with greater determination. The hardest parts were pronunciation and listening comprehension. One day I chanced upon an American in the street and talked to him to try out my English. The result was an absolute failure. Neither of us understood fully what the other wanted to say. I was bitterly disappointed and ashamed of myself. That was the first time I ever talked to a native English speaker in my life.
The shameful and embarrassing episode with a native English-speaking foreigner left me in a deep quandary and I didn't appear to have a solution. Back in my high school days, there were still no English "hagwons" (private academies with native teachers) that are found everywhere nowadays. Therefore, it was practically impossible for me to improve my oral proficiency without a native English teacher.
However, eventually and fortuitously, I found a way to do it by myself. How? I listened to the news of the AFKN (American Forces Korea Network) every day on my little radio after school. Also late in the evening, I almost enjoyed "Dragnet," my favorite crime drama series. And months later, I thought I could grasp half of the narration of the programs. I was elated by the prospect of further improvement ahead.
When I was beginning to learn English at an advanced level, I was badly in need of some reference books and bought a few copies written in Japanese. In other words, I was studying both English and Japanese at the same time, comparing the two languages. It was my customized method because I had a smattering of Japanese and Chinese. Chinese was tough to learn, but it is a fascinating language and I'm still learning it.
A few years later, the Korean War broke out and I was shocked and thoroughly disturbed because I was right in the middle of learning the three languages. I hid in the basement for a month to flee from the war, but I came out to apply for an interpreter officer position. Thanks to my hard work and dogged perseverance, I was appointed a Liaison (Interpreter) Officer. My three languages, still incompetent then, were incredibly useful in performing my duty.
In 1957, after the war, I found a job as an English instructor, teaching a senior class at a night high school in Daegu. I was the lucky and proud breadwinner of my family during the difficult times created by the war. I was a junior in college. In the fall of that auspicious year, there was another gratifying event for me and my school. There was an English speech contest in Daegu under the sponsorship of the U.S. Information Center. Among dozens of contestants from 12 high schools, the student that I was teaching won first place in the contest. The manuscript of the speech that I had written for him was about the Korean War and refugees. The name of my proud student whom I still remember was Hong Shin-myeong. He should be in his 80s now.
Yi Woo-won (yiwoowon1988@gmail.com) lives in Waegwan, North Gyeongsang Province, and has been writing since 1986.
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He asked the class to repeat the sentence correctly after him many times and we did. But months after he had left the country, we learned that his English pronunciation was terrible. We realized that he was wrong when he read the sentence like, "Iddo iju ah mabbu obu Jabbang," with a strong Japanese accent. That was in 1945, the last year of the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula (1910-1945). Learning my dream language was a disaster from the beginning.
With liberation from the forced annexation, we took back our Korean names, discarding our given Japanese names, the symbol of our allegiance to the Japanese emperor. Above everything else, we retrieved in school our Korean language and other curricula that had been virtually obliterated for decades.
A few years went by and I was now a freshman in high school, still enthusiastic to learn English but with greater determination. The hardest parts were pronunciation and listening comprehension. One day I chanced upon an American in the street and talked to him to try out my English. The result was an absolute failure. Neither of us understood fully what the other wanted to say. I was bitterly disappointed and ashamed of myself. That was the first time I ever talked to a native English speaker in my life.
The shameful and embarrassing episode with a native English-speaking foreigner left me in a deep quandary and I didn't appear to have a solution. Back in my high school days, there were still no English "hagwons" (private academies with native teachers) that are found everywhere nowadays. Therefore, it was practically impossible for me to improve my oral proficiency without a native English teacher.
However, eventually and fortuitously, I found a way to do it by myself. How? I listened to the news of the AFKN (American Forces Korea Network) every day on my little radio after school. Also late in the evening, I almost enjoyed "Dragnet," my favorite crime drama series. And months later, I thought I could grasp half of the narration of the programs. I was elated by the prospect of further improvement ahead.
When I was beginning to learn English at an advanced level, I was badly in need of some reference books and bought a few copies written in Japanese. In other words, I was studying both English and Japanese at the same time, comparing the two languages. It was my customized method because I had a smattering of Japanese and Chinese. Chinese was tough to learn, but it is a fascinating language and I'm still learning it.
A few years later, the Korean War broke out and I was shocked and thoroughly disturbed because I was right in the middle of learning the three languages. I hid in the basement for a month to flee from the war, but I came out to apply for an interpreter officer position. Thanks to my hard work and dogged perseverance, I was appointed a Liaison (Interpreter) Officer. My three languages, still incompetent then, were incredibly useful in performing my duty.
In 1957, after the war, I found a job as an English instructor, teaching a senior class at a night high school in Daegu. I was the lucky and proud breadwinner of my family during the difficult times created by the war. I was a junior in college. In the fall of that auspicious year, there was another gratifying event for me and my school. There was an English speech contest in Daegu under the sponsorship of the U.S. Information Center. Among dozens of contestants from 12 high schools, the student that I was teaching won first place in the contest. The manuscript of the speech that I had written for him was about the Korean War and refugees. The name of my proud student whom I still remember was Hong Shin-myeong. He should be in his 80s now.
Yi Woo-won (yiwoowon1988@gmail.com) lives in Waegwan, North Gyeongsang Province, and has been writing since 1986.
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