Today, I had my very fist day of class, and that after I spent all of last night clubbing with Soyoon (a friend of mine) in Kangnam (the rich part of town, in case you didn’t know – the Beverly Hills of Seoul) and when I came home at 7 AM (had to wait until the subway was running again to make it home), my hair and clothes were reeking of smoke. A quick shower later I was on my way to class, feeling all excited and like I wanted to accomplish great things that day.

Once I arrived at my university, I was initially dismayed to find out that my class seemed to consist of mostly Westerners. Don’t misunderstand me,  I have nothing against them, but they do tend to learn slower than Asians and seeing as how I am a very advanced level 1 student, I was afraid they’d bog down the class and make it unbearably draggy. Once in my classroom, I met some of my classmates for the 9AM writing class. I sat down opposite a Western guy who I later found out was an English teacher named Charles who’d been in Korea for 4 years and whose Korean was similarly good as mine was. A Western girl, Tara joined us. I was surprised to find out she was half-Korean – she looks all white to me, personally. Rounding out our table (at Sogang, you sit together around tables with your classmates instead of in a circle around the teacher like I think they do at Yonsei), a 29-year old Singaporean woman joined us. Class could begin!

My teacher for the first period is named Kim Ji Eun, and she looks a lot like the actress Jeon Ji Hyun – though, of course, she is slightly less prettier and older than her, but the resemblance is definitely quite striking. I immediately liked this teacher – what I liked slightly less, however, was the content of the first class.

The horror, the horror! Basic hangeul classes! We spent about 20 minutes reading and pronouncing ah, eo, oh, uh, eu and i! How very annoying – what was even worse was the fact that eveyone in the class clearly already could read and understand some basic Korean! I was pleased with the fact that my classmate do appear to be on a similar level as me, but as a result all of us and not just me were severly bored the first period.

Second period started and the other students who aren’t taking the extra writing class from 9-9:50 arrived, completing my class. All in all, in my class there are:

- 4 Japanese students (2 older (to me, older is everything above 25 ) females, 1 young female, 1 young male)

- 2 Singaporean women, one 29, one in her 30s

- a pretty and young Vietnamese girl

- an American woman, Tara (22)

- A Canadian guy, Charles (30)

- two young white guys, one from England, the other from I don’t know where

Too many white people for my taste. But I do know that beyond level 1 there are barely any white people left so this might be a level 1 thing for now.

Anyways, the teacher for our second period entered – and I don’t mean to be sexist, but I was slightly surprised that the teacher was a man. I consider a language teacher to be a highly feminine job, so I’m pretty sure there are very few male Korean language teachers at these institutes, yet I had the pleasure to be assigned one. He taught us reading for another hour (more hangeul – how mind-numbingly boring!) and the class was over soon. Next, our main teacher, our conversation teacher who has us for 2 hours a day, entered the classroom.

Like all my teachers, I also had a good impression of her. Her name is Seo Yoo Kyung and she seems like a good and competent teacher with a nice sense of humor. However, we did not do any talking at all in our so-called conversation class and instead finished up learning hangeul, actually managing to cover the whole alphabet in one day. I’m glad that that’s over with, freeing us up for other areas, and I do have to admit that though it was very boring for all of us, if any of us hadn’t been able to read Korean already, it would have been very fast-paced and probably difficult to keep up with, so I think I’ll forgive them for boring us with hangeul classes. But just for this first day.

Now about the teaching methods themselves: I’m not sure how I feel about them, yet. Basically, the teaching style at Sogang is like this: the teacher explains a concept (in this case, hangeul) and the students do tasks to re-inforce what they just learned in groups of 3 or 4 (in our case, ordering, reading and quizzing each other on word cards with hangeul on them). That’s how it was done, over and over again. While I do appreciate the practice time, I do have to say that speaking Korean with other foreigners and practicing it with them is a rather useless skill – they don’t have proper pronunciation (although mine isn’t perfect, either, I can hear and it does bother me to listen to badly accented Korean) and you run the risk of imitating their accent (something I tend to do – I used to speak English with a Brazilian friend, and would sport a Portuguese accent myself when talking to her!). The games were also rather monotonoues, but that’s more the schedule’s fault rather than the teaching system’s – there’s just a very limited number of variations of how you can practice reading with your classmates, and reading was all we did today. One other thing I’m not too happy about is the age of my classmates – except for 22-year-old Tara and a Japanese man who I think is in his early 20’s as well (and has an anime hairstyle like I’ve never seen before! I’m so going to post pictures of him!), all the other student are quite a lot older than me. I was warned that the average age of students was higher at Sogang than it is at Yonsei and that seems to be true.

Oh, and a drama references for my readers from Korean drama boards: when we learned the Korean word for coffee, I spontaneously blurted out, “Coffee Prince!” (the name of a popular Korean drama) which made all the Japanese students laugh. Heh.

Anyway, class was not too bad and I have to say that, overall, despite being dead-tired from clubbing all night, I was probably the most active and motivated student (go me!) and right now I feel an immense desire to go study Korean! I think when I finish this entry, I’m going to study ahead.

Overall, a very interesting day! I’ll report more on Sogang tomorrow.