Teaching English in Korea — How to Learn Korean?
A friend of mine recently told me that he had decided to go to South Korea to teach English. He doesn’t know a single word of Korean and I thought about the kind of advice I would give to someone in this situation since I know there are probably quite a few people out there considering teaching English in a foreign country without knowing a word of the native language.
For someone who doesn’t know much of the language, let’s say, Korean, in this case, and who doesn’t have time or money to take classes or get a tutor in their home country, I would give the following advice. First, go to your local bookstore and get a small phrasebook. Flip through the phrasebook and pick out any phrases that you think you will likely be using. Phrases like “thank you”, “do you speak English?”, “please”, etc. are all good starters. A good way to study these phrases is to put them on notecards and then carry around those notecards wherever you go, studying the phrases whenever a bit of time pops up like when you are standing in line at the supermarket, for example.
Note that you don’t have to learn every phrase in the phrasebook. In fact, most of the phrases in the phrasebook are likely not worth studying at the moment since the situations that they describe are so rare they are unlikely to come up. Instead, try to imagine what your life will be like in Korea and then decide which phrases will be most useful to you.
Now, if you have a little extra money, I would also suggest buying an audio course. The reason for this is that it will get you used to hearing the sounds of Korean and it will have you speaking the basic phrases. This way, the natives will be able to understand you and you will be able to understand them. Especially for a language so different from English, it may be hard to get a good grasp of the spoken language from just a phrasebook. There are many audio courses out there but if I had to recommend one, I would say Pimsleur is a good bet. Pimsleur makes nicely packaged courses that are pretty enjoyable and cover the most commonly used phrases that you will need. If you are technically inclined, you can rip the CDs into MP3s and put them on your MP3 player for the plane ride over to Korea.
So, what I’ve recommended is the bare minimum to get you started in the language right before going over. Of course, when you get to your future country, you’ll want to continue your studies and I have some advice on that, too, which I’ve put into a nice book that covers all aspects of learning any language so that you will be learning as quickly and fluently as possible with the least amount of effort. You can find more information about my book and read more free articles on language learning at my website, Learn That Language Now. Good luck in your language studies and if you have any questions, feel free to contact me!