How do you say that in Korean?

It's fall again, that time of year to adjust to a new environment. Just a year ago I had begun my séjour in Dijon, and now it’s time to do it all over again in Jeju-do: Learning a more difficult language, meeting new teachers, trying to learn the names of my 600 new students, adjusting to the spicy Korean food and making new friends. Getting settled has taken considerably longer than it did in France or Spain. In completing a simple task as operating a microwave or calling to register for Internet access, I am completely helpless without the help of an English speaking Korean at my side. The list of questions I had during my first few days included, but wasn't limited to:

How must you separate garbage?
How do you know which bus to take into town and back if they don't have numbers?
Where do you get a bus schedule?
What? There are no printed bus schedules?
I have no light in my room, so who do I call to fix my electricity?
Can I receive incoming phone calls in my apartment?
How does the washing machine work?
Where do we pick up mail?
How can I get a cell phone?
What's my address?
What if I need to see a doctor?
Can someone help me open a bank account?
Can someone help me with alien registration?
How do you say that in Korean?

Patience tested, I have managed to slowly find the answers while receiving incorrect information, mostly as a result of the language barrier. There are still many left to be answered and more continue to pop up. Fortunately, many of my Korean English teachers have helped answer most of them for me.

Here's what I do know. I live about 20 minutes by car from Jeju's largest city, Jeju-si in a studio apartment. ("si" means city in Korean, and is pronounced like the English word "she.") The area is very rural, so having a spacious apartment with peace and quiet compensate for living far from the city center and having to kill mosquitoes all night. Each apartment comes furnished with every modern convenience except an oven. Only foreign language teachers reside in these studio apartments, which are located on campus of Jeju Foreign Language High School. EPIK provides accommodation the teachers, but the utilities are the teachers' responsibility.

Writing about my school life in a nutshell would be next to impossible, so I’ll have to cover it one topic at a time. First off, the English proficiency of the students needs a lot of work. It's also often very difficult to communicate with the Korean English teachers, and much less, any of the students. If I want to avoid repeating myself to no end, even with my best students, I must speak very slowly, in broken and simple sentences, often omitting articles and occasionally replacing verbs with hand gestures wherever possible. Even when speaking like this, repetition on my part isn’t unheard of. Obviously, I don’t blame the Koreans for this, as Korean is considerably more distant from English than say, French or Spanish. Likewise, English speakers learning Korean progress at about one third the speed as they would in French, Spanish or Italian.

If you take for example, the English sentence “Do you speak English?” Translating from Spanish requires very little rearrangement: “Habla Ud. inglés?” Literally translated means: “Speak you English?” In French, “Parlez-vous français?” follows the identical structure. In Korean, however, translation is a bit more complicated and would probably go something like this: “English, as for, speech would be possible?” There are probably about five other ways to write the literal translation, and even if I had them in front of me, I wouldn’t know which one was most correct. Word order, omission of articles, word markers, and multiple deferential speech levels make progress in the Korean language difficult for English speakers, not to mention reading and writing in the Korean alphabet (Hangeul).

Despite the language barrier, my relationships with the Korean English teachers are great. Many of them have taken me out for dinner or coffee, or even to hike Jeju’s Mount Halla, which is actually South Korea’s highest peak. While I get a little frustrated when I can’t communicate, I can’t complain at all. Other EPIK teachers have spoken of some rather unpleasant experiences already with the Korean English teachers they work with.

I have devoted a lot of time to lesson plans in these first weeks, so I have had very little time to explore the island. I will post pictures and information on the island, once I know more about it.