ok, I just read that last post, and I'm not editing it, but I do sound like a pouty sucky-baby. I should be endeavouring to communicate with everyone in this country (co-workers included!) in Korean. I'm in Korea after all. That's where the weird conflict comes in though... I've been told by my principal, co-teacher, etc. that I should be speaking only English at the school. They requested specifically a teacher who speaks no Korean, so that everyone's English must improve. Unfortunately I don't know that they took into account that people would just decide not to communicate at all. It's certainly not fair for me to expect people to communicate in a second language just to deal with me, when I barely speak a few words of their first langauge, the language of the country I happen to be working in. It's such a pickle of a situation, I think. I'd be interested to know what anyone else thinks on this one.
What would be fantastic, is if everyone who was in our teaching program had to go through language training when they landed in Korea, or a few months after arriving.
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I think you're certainly in a pickle of a situation. You're just trying to meet your co-workers halfway so that you can have SOME sort of rapport with them. But I do know that English is such a 'hot' language to know and that they'd really like to be able to use you to try and improve their English. I've been used on a number of occasions for my English. But people aren't showing any interest from what you're saying.
Those are my jumbled thoughts on the subject. :)
what's really funny is that the girl that sits beside me at work, the two of us have spent the last two days with earphones in, doing our work on computer... she is doing english language cd-rom tapes, and I've been working with a korean program...
we pause every so often to ask each other about pronunciation or speaking in each other's language. So very funny and so very very strange. English is a hot commodity, she's learning it so she can teach her kids... but at the same time, what she's getting from the tapes is something that I'd have trouble giving, structure and phrases. I can do that, but it's so hard to know where to begin, and people are the same with teaching me korean.
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