this is my 11th update.

This saturday there will be no CLS Korean class due to a national holiday – and the new Mannam class starts only next week. I am not yet sure if I will have to visit the class in Guro or can attend in Isu, which would be better for me, as in more time-efficient.

Unfortunately I didn’t meet my language exchange partner for several weeks now, as she was always busy or had to meet other friends. While I was busy on my own, this is still sad, as I hope I won’t lose my reliable language exchange partner. Because it is hard to come by reliable study partners! But on the other hand it might also be fun to study with new people.

Asides from that I noticed that my “HaruKorean” subscription will expire soon. Which is quite embarrassing, considering how little I studied on there. But as I constantly had tasks and deadlines going on, I sadly rarely felt the peace of mind to study deeply on the website. Still I recently used KhanAcademy (see my profile here) and it is quite addicting to say the least! Obviously also because it’s easier to do than HaruKorean. Yet I hope to intensify my studies on HaruKorean as soon as I can afford the subscription again. I am convinced that “revolutionary” tools like quizlet, memrise and HaruKorean are the (!) best way to learn anything like math, vocabs or even grammar.

Minutia: The last two days my laptop was in repair, which was quite annoying, but at least repair was free! Wow! I guess this time I got the foreigner bonus. Still, I had to go there twice today, as actually neither they nor me (FAIL) checked on the repair result on site. Which happened to be that the laptop was in a worse state than before, i.e. it shut down as soon as Windows started to load. I had to urge them again to finally replace the CPU heat paste, which indeed fixed the overheating / shutdown issue as anticipated by me. I learned a lesson though, which is: Never buy a warranty extension for your laptop, unless you know you’ll reside in the country of purchase for the time of warranty! Because now I know that the purchased Sony warranty is entirely useless abroad, an expensive disappointment.

Technical blog updates:

I added a PayPal donation widget, to which you can donate some change in case you like to support my studies here. Especially studying in the coffee shop with language exchange partners is a costly thing, as one can’t bring and I don’t know of many public places to meet and study together that are not cafes, so it’s hard to save on such expenses if I want to (effectively) study with a native Korean at least once a week for more than one hour. I could also use your donations to pay for my “HaruKorean” subscription.

I finally removed the annoying “Shareaholic” widget and deactivated the “countdown” widget for now, as for now the next TOPIK test is unfortunately a far away priority.

Cheers,

필립

this is my 10th update.

These days I stopped restricting myself to a specific “blog post” day, as I there is not so much to post every week, but also the weekend is more convenient to me to blog.

Today I participated in the CLS (Conversational Learning Seoul) class for the 3rd time.

Actually I changed the level from “level 3″ to “level 4″, as “level 3″ was too easy and overflowing with students. While the “level 4″ location is a bit hard to reach, the time (12 pm) is good and the lesson is good. Unfortunately, it is indeed a bit difficult (it was not my initial intention to change the class but that was the only option) due to the amount  vocabulary that I don’t know yet. But then again it is not much difficult compared to my TOPIK class, which is much more demanding and fast-paced. The CLS class instruction is mostly in English (yet not as much as in “level 3″). A luxury I don’t have in my TOPIK class, in which Korean is the only spoken language. This is (a) because the teacher actually can’t speak English (I only noticed this quite late LOL) and because most participants are from South-East Asia or Eastern Europe and can’t speak English.

Thoughts on Korea:
This is an interesting topic and could fill a separate blog post, but all I can say so far is that this is the standard case here. White people here – especially students like me! – are actually still quite the exception. This is kind of counterintuitive, as on the street and at parties you mostly see “white” faces. But there are only a some 20.000 English teachers in Korea, of which many are Korean-Americans! The rest of the circa one million foreigners are mostly Asian. Yet the majority of Asian workers and housewives is  ”invisible” due to their economic circumstances. The same is true for older Koreans, which you only see in the subway, but never in a hip 커피숍 (any coffee shop chain).

I say this because it is crazy that while the statistics show the growth of old, retired citizens in Korea is be inexorable, if you don’t look closely, you almost don’t notice the presence of older people in the city of Seoul. At least compared to the visibly wealthy older generation we’re used to in Europe – that spend their large state-funded pensions conspicuously. Yet due to the lack of a solid public pension system in Korea, older people experience what some would call “gentrification“. But then again, “entrepreneurship” is visible within those of age, running all kinds of street food shops, as that is their only way to get along. Which leads me to the sober conclusion that there in fact is no such thing like an obligatory ”inter-generational contract” even in Korea.

Rather capitalistic individualism naturally makes the world go ’round also here – in the country with the highest degree of luxury good spending, i.e. typical conspicuous consumption. Now image what happens if Korea would reunify…while North-Koreans refugees here definitely get (in my humble opinion) pampered compared to both foreigners (like me) and even South-Koreans themselves, this is only due to the miniscule number of them. As soon as the unification will happen, I doubt there will be free apartments, food and education for all North-Koreans anymore.

On a side-note: While I don’t use facebook for the usual friend chatter, I heavily rely on groups to find gigs or part-time job and events that I want to and can participate in. These days I come around a lot of “Vegetarian”-related events and I appreciate that.
Even if I don’t have the time and money to participate in all of them sadly, it is still a happy sight for me to see that there are people here caring about their own health and the environment. Plus, I think everyone must agree on the fact that a “Vegan Bake Sale” just has to be plain delicious -and is helping “them animalz” with the proceeds.

So far, cheers!

필립

you and I can’t believe I didn’t update my blog for a total of seven weeks!

I didn’t forget the blog, but the time was running and a lot to do.
Guess it was a rough time…

To clarify, I just want to give an update on my current activities!
More specifically what I do all week, which is not little. Basically I just want to list the activities I participate in around Korean and English each week:

Monday – 07:00 – 09:00 pm, 파포구: GCC “Free Talking Session” –
Being an English conversation leader at this private adult language school

Tuesday – 06:00 – 08:00 pm, 강남구:
Meetup Korea Language Exchange  – Talking in English and Korean

Wednesday – 06:00 – 08:00 pm, 강남구:
Korea English Network Meeting  – English and Korean discussion

Thursday – 07:30 – 09:30 pm, 파포구:
Doran Doran  – Korean speaking and listening practice

Friday – Freitag:
Free. I plan to go to „Yeouido Toastmasters” again maybe.

Saturday – 02:00 – 04:00 pm, 구로디지털단지:
Mannam Korean Language class – language learning. Starting in two weeks from now, I’ll also visit the “CLS – Conversational Learning Seoul” (free Korean language class) in the morning in 강남. 05:00 – 09:00 pm, 강남:
Language exchange – Homework and asking questions to a Korean friend

Sunday – 10:00 am – 12:00 pm, 광화문:
Seoul Global Center Korean Language class (TOPIK Preparation)

So far my update for this week! Some of these events (especially the stuff on the weekend) was my routine now for six weeks indeed.

I hope I’ll find some new things to blog about in April!

Cheers,

필립

a brief weekly update from me. A lot of interesting things happened and my wish is it – at least personally – to keep going and expand my efforts in Korean and a lot more formal education (which is what is so important here in Korea). Now for my classes:

I visited my Mannam class as usual and also decided to go to the CLS class from next week on, even if the class might end up being too low for my Korean level. But this only pertains to the grammar part anyways, as I still lag behind on the vocabulary side, unfortunately.

Now other than that, I probably will not participate in the 26th TOEFL, but extend the whole period until I actually get my progress formally accreditted until Fall. I will also finally retake the TOEFL, as since 2007 there is a lot of time gone down the river!
This means that I am also studying complicated English vocabulary these days!

Specifically I do so here and upload vocabularies that I want to memorize independently of the aforementioned website here (synonyms) and here (definitions).

So far for this week from Seoul, 23:59 GMT+9.

필립

it is already tuesday here and I almost forgot to blog.

Last week was both busy and uneventful in regards to Korean. Now this week will be an interesting one, all while I’ll meet a lot of old friends and new people!

For Korean language, for this week I can say that I’ll continue to participate in the “Mannam” language class. Unfortunately the government-paid ( = free) “Seoul Global Center” program didn’t accept me for the “Upper Intermediate” level, as I lacked the necessary vocabulary. I unfortunately saw that coming, but I’m not particularly sad. If I see how mostly flexible the non-government, non-profit courses from Mannam and others are, I have to say that puts the government SGC-program to shame! Especially if seven out of eight levels always have a waiting list, while there were only two days for applying (offline, in person!), while the second day was obviously already too late.

But I already found another program “Conversational Learning Seoul” (CLS). Unfortunately they managed to – at least for my level – have the class not only at the same day (saturday) but also at the exact same time as my other Korean lesson from Mannam!! This means that I unfortunately can’t attend the CLS lessons, unless I chose a higher level (the lower levels also conflict), which probably is – unfortunately – not the best idea. Still I will think about it until Friday – I should probably ask my Korean friends.

On the teaching front, I now indeed absolutely clearly know that teaching English even part-time is illegal to do for me, from the governments perspective. Absolutely silly. To add insult to injury, students (university, school) are not allowed to work more than 20 hours / week legally. Of course this makes sense, but I find this an interesting detail.

Further on the teaching front, I got to know a Korean student and his teacher. We’ll probably study together or I’ll try to complement the teacher, for now for free. As just said,  it’s illegal – officially. Concerning German or in general I wasn’t really active on the acquisition front, as I unfortunately have bigger problems right now that don’t get solved by focusing on finding a private tutoring job.

I hope I will be able to continue my journey here in South-Korea. Only time will tell.

Life here is hard, but it is worth it! Hard to believe maybe, but this it what my intuition says. And these days I listen to my gut again.

Cheers,
필립

now I actually have a brief relevant update on my Korean studies:

First of all it should be clear that I won’t attend the 25th TOPIK test this January due to my lack of time for proper preparation due to the complications implied in my last post.
Still, I might as well try to aim for the 26th TOPIK test in April 2012.

For Korean classes, I am now participating in the 2B class of “Mannam Korean Language Class” (see this Korea Herald article) in 구로 for 12 weeks and in the Seoul Global Center Language Class in the ”Upper Beginner” level (there was no other free slot ) from the 6th of February 2012 on for also 12 weeks. The good thing about the “Mannam” class is that we are only four (!) people in one class – and it is still free (except coffee), excellent!

In total those lessons are only six hours per week, but at least this way I can stay flexible.
These hours for me are just question and repetition hours, while I study and practice outside the classroom.

So far, all the best,

필립

due to personal reason I did not publish my weekly progress in calendar week 50-52, as initially intended. Until I have removed certain “roadblocks”, I will not publish any further progress here.

It should be noted though that I participate in a free Korean language class offer from a group called “Mannam” from next week on. I also want to note that I intended this weblog as a means of tracking my progress in Korean language study, nothing more, nothing less.

Cheers,

Philipp

a brief update one day late from my usual Monday post!

Life: This week was and still is quite busy and unfortunately at the moment I can’t talk about much due to the state and nature of the things I’m working on!
But don’t worry, many of you outside of Korea will soon hear from me anyways.

Colophon: I just updated to WordPress 3.3 and also updated my plugins and theme.
Not really important for this small blog, but it’s a good habit I have.

So far already for this week, next week I’ll be in Japan, see you around!

Philipp

and here comes the third weekly update: This time I will keep it brief.

Work: Because in terms of tangible results this week did not happen much, as the last five days I did actually a lot of research and reading. My goal: to acquire skills and knowledge (in an informal way) I consider essential to make a buck on the side here and there.

Life: I will have to follow-up another time with my former landlord (2008-2010) and subtenant who owe me a total of 1.000 EUR combined! Of course you always have to run after the money because they show absolutely no initiative to pay me back in time.

Korean: Nothing to report on this front as I am quite busy otherwise at the moment. I should be free to focus a 100% on this part again from Friday on, at the moment my mid- and long-term success has a higher priority, because the TOPIK meanwhile is actually a purely personal goal to keep me on track and under pressure concerning Korean! This means that presently the TOPIK is no academic or professional requirement, but it is more of a control possibility for me, considering that the test fee is less than 30 Euros.

So far for calendar week 48.

Cheers,

Philipp

here comes my second Weekly update! Seven days already gone, wow, the time is running!

Work: This week was mostly covered by my own efforts to not only find a well-paying part-time job (of which there is only English teaching I guess) and more so the gathering and executing of ideas about other, more unconventional part-time job ideas! Thus also my profiles on eLance and oDesk, even though I didn’t invest much time in them yet.

Japan: Due to my lack of a D-4 or other certificate from an institution or company, I will have to do a visa-run actually. Luckily, my friend was smart and bumming around on coupang finding this deal for a ferry for 35.900 KRW. And then there is the free shuttle bus from Seoul to Busan. And then, as we will be in Japan (the currently Japanese island between Korea and Japan, to be precise ^^), we will couchsurf with some fellas in Busan.
All in all this saves me 197.500 KRW plus lodging in Tokyo (couchsurfing or not) if compared to the second cheapest option (flying to NRT with a discount airline)!

Life: Nothing spectacular happened, except that I finally found the Vegan “Loving Hut” restaraunt of the eponymous chain. I also found an excellent “Western Style” pasta restaurant (Spaghettini Factory), where pasta actually tastes like high quality pasta in an elegant interior design setting – and all that for a normal price! I was impressed.

Korean: A promising new resource I found is the “Easy Korean” series from Chad Meyer and Moon-Jung Kim, that is not actually easy or stops there, but provides the vocabulary and sentences in a rich, context-oriented setting that sure makes learning much easier!

Birthday: And ah yes, it is my birthday today, but I couldn’t care less.

So far for this last week!

Phil