By Jon Huer
Korea Times Columnist
More bad news from the English front, and I am at the word-processor again writing about the cursed subject in Korea. The news this time is from England, which says Korea ranked bottom in a British English test. Actually, second from last in the General Training Module for the International English Language Testing System, in which 27,000 Koreans took part. The United Arab Emirates saved Korea from being last. This is so even with all the hours spent, all the money invested, and all the effort made in the learning of English. Korea's dead-last humiliation goes on.
There are all sorts of answers: The problem is technical, some say, like pronunciation differences between Korean and English. It is the way English is taught in the classroom. Some say that it is the lack of a pedagogical system. They may all have some points. But all these may just be the symptoms of a deeper cause, and I am going to start my discourse, again, with Korea's ``cultural stubbornness" against English as the deeper cause that ruins Korea's English aspirations.
Koreans are nothing if they are not stubborn. They are stubborn about everything that involves Korean culture. It is this stubbornness, coupled with pride, that is another common factor to explain why Korea is English inept.
In short, Koreans are too stubbornly proud to admit that their English is wrong and accept the correct English that is offered by native users. So much wrong English is used in Korea, in corporate offices, at airports and train stations, in government documents and road signs, in textbooks and dictionaries, on TV and on the streets, even in the English newspapers, all unnecessarily, simply because so many Koreans are too proud to ask for help or refuse to accept when help is offered. From high government officials to lowly local clerks and little kids in the classroom, this stubborn pride is simply impossible to overcome.
The Korean mind that refuses to accept help in English is legendary. I have heard it so often from those who advise Koreans on English ― as copy editors for newspapers, as English personnel at corporations, and as classroom teachers, and so on. Their difficulty is nothing technical, but all cultural. They say the Koreans who hire them to correct their English refuse to accept their recommended corrections.
Korea's English writers are so stubborn and so proud that they refuse their own English advisors' corrections. I had a long conversation once with the copy-editor at a major English-language newspaper in Korea. His on-the-job tale of woes was the very embodiment of English advice in Korea. He related that the Korean writers and editors so often refused his recommendations for change that he finally gave up on advising and let them go ahead with their inferior, if not wrong, English. This may explain why so much poor English is printed in the major English-language newspapers in Korea.
Korea's proud mindset is one of the worst culprits of the English ineptitude that is the subject of constant public lamentation. National pride and learning a foreign language are natural enemies of each other only in Korea. Here, they are in constant conflict, as learners refuse to humble themselves while learning it.
The only cause for a nation to voluntarily devote itself to learning another country's language is rational-practical. The learning country calculates that it is beneficial for them, militarily, economically, administratively, whatever, to learn the foreign tongue. It is for this rational-practical benefit ― economic above all ― that Korea tries to learn the English language at all. But, the trouble is, Korea is not a very rational-practical society, and Koreans are not very rational-practical people. Korea's society is very closed and its culture quite feudalistic, and its people emotional and irrational. Simply witness the aftermath of Roh's suicide. As far as learning English is concerned, Korea is the ``Hermit Kingdom" once again.
Experts are never tired of telling us that, to learn a foreign tongue, the learner must convert to (or more popularly, ``immerse" in) the whole culture where the tongue is spoken. My anthropologist colleagues unanimously testify that three things lead to the most effective learning of another culture: First, eat their food; second, marry one of the natives; third, learn their language.
What these experts mean by immersion is the calculated abandoning of one's own culture and frame of reference. When an American anthropologist goes to Nepal to study the Sherpas, he has to completely abandon the American way of thinking and living in order to immerse in Sherpa culture and to understand the Sherpa people. How well the student learns another culture depends on how effectively one learns to think in the new culture's terms. That is, to forget one's own background and ways of life, at least for a while, to accommodate the new culture to be mastered.
This is one thing most Koreans find difficult or impossible to do. As is widely known, even when Koreans go to America to study or to live, they tend to stay ``Korean" for most of their stay. They talk to other Koreans; they eat Korean food most of the time; they deal with Korean shoppers and shopkeepers; they read Korean newspapers and watch Korean TV. No serious immersion in the host culture ever takes place and they return to Korea just as Korean as ever, as if they never left. No abandonment of Korean culture, calculated or not, ever occurs. (Recall the highest Isolation Index of Koreans among all Asian immigrants in America.)
Inside Korea, this immersion in English thinking is even more difficult to materialize. Korea's culture and life are just so overwhelming that one hour of Korean-ness is strong enough to destroy five hours of English immersion. Korea's language is a strong, overpowering tool of mind control that leaves so little of the individual to his cultural imagination or freedom.
This difficulty is largely absent when Koreans learn another language. Korean food, literature, history, interaction, morality, emotional substance, and so on, are also so all-consuming that few Koreans ever manage to escape their orbit of influence. Koreans, more than any other nation in the world, find it so difficult to be anything other than Korean. Even for learning a foreign language, Korea's entire culture and precepts loom very large and dominate the heart, mind and soul, as if speaking English well is a betrayal to their motherland.
Thus, most Koreans remain Korean in most ways for most of their lives, even when they profess to be learning another tongue. They wish to learn the language without abandoning their Korean-ness to immerse in and to comprehend the other culture. They want English to come to Korea's culture instead, to fit Korea's way of thinking, not the other way around. Hence, that stubborn pride gets in the way of Korea's learning, but that almost never happens in non-cultural learning, such as science or computer technology.
Oddly, we don't hear that from other foreigners about languages such as French or Russian. It is only when they learn English. Is it their anti-Americanism working against English learning in any subconscious but significant way?
I have nothing against Korea's stubborn national pride. If they never changed a thing, Korea would be a fine nation and Koreans would be fine people as they are. The only trouble is, they would have to endure many more humiliating reports that they are dead last, again and again, in English aptitude.
The writer can be reached at