Like every government everywhere, the Korean government has a long and storied tradition of getting things exactly wrong, of creating policies by fiat and without consultation that worsen the problem they were intended to address, and result in unintended consequences down the line. The newest proposed change to regulations for the single largest group of foreign temporary residents — holders of 1-year E2 English teacher visas — neatly fits the bill.

There have been some recent and welcome improvements to immigration regulations in Korea recently, with holders of spousal F-class visas, for example, being granted more freedoms and rights, and these have been very welcome for long-term foreign residents. The changes, it must be said, have not come as a result of any consideration towards (the mostly male) foreign professionals with Korean spouses resident here, they’ve come from the changing requirements of male Korean citizens with foreign wives, a pairing once almost unheard-of. It’s a response to the rapidly shifting demographics in the farming communities of Korea, where last year saw a rise of mixed-nationality marriages to more than 40% of total marriages in the countryside, from near-zero as recently as five years ago. The story behind this sea-change is a fascinating one, and one that will have revolutionary effects on Korean society in the decades to come. The short version: there are thousands of male farmers of marriageable age in the small towns and villages of Korea entirely unable to find Korean wives, because of both demographics (the rock-bottom birth rate, the preference (actionable in recent decades through banned but not unusual sex-selective abortion) for male children, and the flight of young women and men both to the cities) and economics (no city girl wants to move into the countryside, which is for the most part like moving half a century into the poverty-sticken past). So women are being imported from China and south-east Asia, and what was once a nearly-total ethnic uniformity has exploded into something very different. It’s going to make for interesting times.

But that’s not what I want to write about today.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND

Recent years have seen a rise both in the frequency and intensity of media hand-wringing over some of the less savory people showing up in Korea to teach English. There have been fear-mongering exposés (nothing new, it must be said) of foreign teachers using and selling drugs, and recent discoveries of expat teachers with records of sexual abuse of children in their home countries have (justifiably) terrified many.

Now, I’ve long argued that the responsibility for the execrable overall quality of English ‘teachers’ in Korea can be laid squarely at the foot of the Korean government. Because of the overwhelming demand for teachers, they have, since the early days, allowed anyone with a) a pulse, b) English as a native tongue, and c) a degree in any discipline to come to Korea to teach English to children, adults, university students, whoever.

It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to realize that merely being able to speak a language does not magically grant one the skills to teach it in a classroom situation to others. To speak it with others, certainly. And I will grant that given the paradoxial pedagogical laxity with which most language schools and education departments are organized and run — an artifact, to a large extent, of a focus on the business rather than the educational needs of the ‘customers’ — many tens of thousands of ‘teachers’ from foreign countries have been able to fake it. Make with the idle chat, collect a paycheck. Some of those even had some natural ability or interest, and became, without the benefit of any kind of formal training in educational principles, to become effective teachers. A very very few (a handful of the hundreds I’ve met over the years) actually had some kind of certification to teach that wasn’t laser-printed in the back room of a 2-week TESL Certification mill in Bangkok or Bangor.

But the vast majority of arrivals over the past couple of decades have come and gone to make some easy cash, party, travel and have an overseas experience, because, thanks to the open policies of immigration here, it’s been cowboy country.

If the Korean government had required or allowed (and we could choose any or all of these) a) teaching experience, b) certification in teaching or in ESL from an accredited institution, c) any kind of vetting process before the candidate boarded a plane, d) the establishment of some kind of standards agency or organization, e) even the most cursory of regulation of the legendarily corrupt and massive hagwon (private school) industry, f) professional foreign consultants/interviewers (because, in all honesty, it seems almost impossible for many Koreans to distinguish seriously odd or hinky behaviour or personality traits from what they perceive to be the overall oddness of foreign attitudes), the consequences would have been better teachers, better quality of education provided, less conflict between foreign employees and Korean employers, and a more stable, professional workforce. Of course, making it more difficult for the less desirable candidates to show up and get in front of a class would increase demand and salaries for the ones who were professional and qualified. I can’t say that that would upset me much.

But nothing was done, and ‘teachers’ good, bad, and ugly poured into Korea. And some of them, almost inevitably, were kid-fondlers, some of them were idiotic enough to not be able to resist getting high, and most were less interested in teaching than they were paying off their student loans. (I’ve nothing in principle against drug use, but when one lives in a country where the laws and cultural norms are different from where one was raised, one makes allowances. When in Rome.) But naturally, it is the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, and the bad news that gets the breathless xenophobic media coverage.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

So the government has just announced it is planning to institute the following changes, beginning in December 2007, according to the Korea Herald. In less than 7 weeks time from when I write this, at the outside.

According to a Ministry of Justice press release, foreigners who apply for teaching visas will have to submit a criminal background check, a medical check, and must undergo an interview with the closest Korean consulate to their home town. Visa runs to Japan will also be scrapped. Teachers must now receive and renew visas their home country.

Now I find little to argue with in terms of health checks. It seems a reasonable hurdle, one that other countries in which I’ve worked have required in order for me to receive a visa. A criminal background check, ditto. These are quite reasonable, and sensible, even if they do not really address the problems that they are ostensibly intended to address, which is dangerous or criminal behaviour once candidates arrive in Korea, nor do they address the real problem, which is that an open door employment policy opens the door to everyone, desirable or not.

But the last two stipulations, let alone causing grief for people who might be interested in coming to Korea (and it can be depended on that there are very few who really want to come Korea, but again, that’s another story), but it will cause a change in the English education industry here that will result in chaos and difficulties for the very people — business owners, students, and parents of children who are students — that the new legislation is meant to protect.

First, in a country the size of Canada, for example, from which the vast majority of English teachers in Korea these days come, the nearest place that a potential candidate from Nova Scotia or PEI would be able to have an interview would be Montreal. For someone from the Territories, or Northern BC, or Saskatchewan, it would be Vancouver. These are journeys of more than 1000 kilometers in most cases, and expensive. Given that most foreign teachers give as their primary reason for coming to Korea the need to make and save money, this is going to choke off a significant percentage of potential teachers. School owners in Korea, notorious for their stinginess, almost certainly won’t be footing the bills, even if the interview in Canada is a success. The notion of requiring face-to-face interviews is a reasonable and good one, but this is a counterproductive way to do it.

Second, the requirement for return to one’s home country in order to renew a visa is a death knell. Previously, E2 visa holders, if changing employers (or, in years past, merely extending their contract at the same employer), could hop over to Japan for a weekend with their paperwork, and return with a new visa. The requirement to spend, at a minimum, $2000-$3000 dollars to return to Canada, America, Australia (or wherever) to renew a visa will mean that an even larger proportion of teachers will spend no more than one year in Korea. There would simply be too little remunerative incentive to do so.

Which means that continuity for students is lost. Which means that rather than having teachers who have over a few years had the time to develop some sensitivity to Korean culture, some understanding of the people, some language skills, and some armour against the culture shock that hits everyone in their first 6 months — well, you’ll see a continuous carousel of shell-shocked newbies, their heads ringing with alienation, complaining, carousing, and, most importantly, given that there will be no new requirements for professional experience or qualification, not having the time to learn how to actually be effective teachers.

The result will, of course, be fewer teachers, but not better ones. This makes long-term pros like me, unaffected by these visa changes, all that much more a valuable commodity. I’m OK with that.

But I do hate to see the Korean government shoot themselves in the foot yet again, especially when the net result will be fewer teachers, another low ebb for quality and availability of education, no improvement in the actual quality or professionalism of people who jump through the new hoops, and the system once again failing the very people its meant to serve — students of English and their families.

I applaud the Korean government for taking the long overdue iniative in making an attempt to clean up the mess that the industry is in, but I can’t help but condemn them for not addressing the real problems, and enacting ‘reforms’ that will only make the situation worse.

Unintended consequences.

Here’s a braindump of some tips and tricks for getting a job in Korea, and keeping it once you’re here. I’ll add to it periodically as I think of more. If you have any specific do or don’t questions, or you disagree with any of my advice, feel free to leave a comment. Don’t forget to check out my Teaching In Korea — The Skinny as well, if you missed it the first time.

1. Do not get too excited at an offer — if you have a pulse and degree, you’ll get an offer.
2. Do apply for several jobs that look interesting.
3. Do ask for contact information for previous or current foreign teachers at the school. If it’s refused, walk away.
4. Do understand that most hagwons (private schools) are run in what you may perceive to be an unprofessional, haphazard manner. Part of it is cultural — leaving things to the last minute and then PANICing is a time-honoured Korean tradition. How much of this you think you can endure is up to you.
5. Do be wary of agents and recruiters. They don’t have their spotty reputation for nothing. You will be better off in many (if not most) cases by being in contact with your potential employers directly.
6. Do make sure you get a contract to look over before you agree to anything.
7. Do ask old hands to look over your contract at Eslcafe or Koreabridge.
8. Do your research. Forums like Eslcafe and Koreabridge can help you prepare and answer a lot of your questions.
9. Do read the forums and try and triangulate what a standard contract looks like.
10. Do be aware that forums like the ones linked above are chock full of negativity and resentment.
11. Do be aware that many of the other foreigner short-timers you meet are also full of negativity and resentment.
12. Do be professional and firm in your dealings with your potential employer. Know what you want, but know also what is standard
13. Do not get involved with drugs. Just don’t. Develop a love for booze.
14. Don’t show up at work drunk or disheveled.
15. Do dress the part of a teacher, even if you don’t feel like one. It will be noticed and appreciated.
16. Do get a feeling for some of the concepts that underpin Korean culture and you’ll be miles ahead of most new arrivals.
17. Do make sure that your employer is meeting regulations in terms of pension and national health deductions.
18. Don’t worry about teaching. If it’s kids you’ll be wrangling, you’ll be doing more wrangling that teaching.
19. Do teach as much as you can, even if you feel like a babysitter.
20. Don’t make the rest of us look bad.
21. Don’t worry about getting food and stuff from home. These days there are box stores in most places where you can buy imports even if you’re outside the mjor cities, and websites where you can order them.
22. Do bring shoes if you have big feet. Outside of the major centres it can still be hard to find size 11s or 12s, and any bigger is effectively impossible.
23. Do plan ahead for the possibility that things don’t work out. Do be aware of the consequences of a midnight run. If you can’t bear it, give notice, get a release letter (you can find one at Koreabridge to print out), and keep your options for the future open.
24. Do make sure you are willing to accept the terms of the contract as written. Be aware that you will be held to them, even if your boss may feel that he or she is not similarly beholden. Be aware that emphasis on personal relationship as overriding contract paper is a part of Korean culture, but that this can be used against you in a Catch-22.
25. Do not teach private lessons on an E2 (teaching) visa. It’s against immigration law.
26. Don’t try to sneak a fake degree past the authorities. It’s a major cause celebre these days with both famous Koreans being outed and scam-artist ‘teachers’ being deported. You will almost certainly get caught.
27. Do make sure you have multiple original copies of your documents when possible.
28. Don’t go out and get drunk and disorderly in Itaewon. Don’t be that guy.
29. If your primary reasons for coming to Korea are any two of women, beer, and money: go somewhere else. The expat community has too many of you already.
30. Do make an effort to learn some Korean, even a few phrases at the beginning. Koreans have problems with nonstandard pronunciation of their language (there have traditionally been very few non-native speakers), so work hard on that.
31. Do learn to read the alphabet. It’s only a matter of a few hours, and is quite elegant both orthographically and philosophically.
32. Do be aware that when people laugh at you, it’s almost always out of embarassment on their part, not maliciousness.
33. Don’t get overly offended at what seems like excessively blunt comments (‘It must be hard to be fat’) or personal questions (‘Why aren’t you married?’). Despite the way it seems, they are actually efforts to become closer, rather than the opposite.
34. Don’t overpack. Especially if you’re in any of the cities, you’ll be able to buy most everything you need (bar clothes, perhaps, if you’re XX-large).
35. Don’t take promises that you will receive training on arrival too seriously. Chances are it will involve a tour of the classrooms and then a drinking session (if you’re lucky).
36. Be aware that Korea, even with its burgeoning Protestant Christian communities, is a drinking culture. If you are asked to socialize with your coworkers (and there is every chance that you won’t, but if you’re lucky) it will almost certainly involve food and drink. If you are puritanical in this regard, you may not be asked out again.
37. Don’t criticize Korea in front of Koreans, at least until you are certain that you are friends, and probably not even then. It achieves nothing but bad blood, and Korean people are fiercely proud, even as they are as aware as you are of all the problems. Do as they do — if you can’t say anything nice, say ‘well…’ and change the subject, and say something positive. If you feel compelled, match your criticism with some similar failing of your home country. I can’t emphasize this enough: be gracious and civilized, even if you don’t think the people around you are.
38. Don’t argue in public with your boss. If you disagree, fine, but be firm and professional, and take any disagreement to a private location. Do not make him or her look bad in front of others, or they will bear you a grudge.
39. Do be aware that no matter what you’re going through, other people have lived through it too. Reach out, either online or off-, to other expats if you feel like you’re going to lose it. Everybody feels that way sometime.
40. Don’t give in to culture-shock inspired despair. If it’s your first time overseas, it’s going to bite you hard after a few months. It passes, but never goes entirely away.
41. Do learn a little history of Korea — a little goes a very long way with Koreans, who will be pleased and surprised at any effort in that direction.
42. Do some reading around the Korean expat blogosphere. Personally, I come away angry and depressed every time I do it, but if you’re still keen on coming to Korea after a few hours of reading the K-blogs, you’ll be just fine.
43. Do travel around Korea a little — it’s not easy, but outside of the cities, it’s really quite a lovely place.
44. Korea’s still a pretty hard place for expats, but it’s nothing like it was a decade ago, so don’t whine. Seriously. Just don’t.

I’ve known literally hundreds of people here in Korea over the years from stressed-out newbies to multi-year old hands whose distress and grief could have been avoided by following some of these simple tips.

Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

I teach adults for a living, and I’ve been doing it (interspersed with periods of product R&D work in IT) for longer than I care to remember. I conduct business skills workshops these days, as well, but my bread and butter is language teaching.

A bane of the ESL teacher’s existence is the undeniable fact that there are, to put it bluntly, a lot of textbooks for adult learners that are, to varying degrees, crap. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and varied, of course. Many of them are weighed down under more than one layer of the old language guano. You’re waist-deep before you even get started, digging through the stink to find something useful. But I’m here to help.

A few of the most common problems:

• You Vill Follow Zee Instructions: scrupulous adherence to outmoded ‘methods’
• The Horrors of Clipart: design that is user-unfriendly, or just plain ugly. (Much could be learned from good web site design, here)
• Siloed Syllabi: chunks of grammar (or language functions) are attacked (I choose that word with care), worried at like a terrier with a rat, then forgotten in the next section
• The Random Walk Theory of Textbook Structure: throw slips of paper labelled with verb tenses and grammar patterns into hat, shake it and turn it out on your desk. Voila! There is your outline for your textbook. (Korean-language textbooks for English speakers are the purest example of this kind of thing, for the most part)
• Formulaic Fundamentalism: Begin with stilted dialogue, then vocabulary list, follow up with humiliatingly banal ‘activity’, ancient, inauthentic reading and comprehension questions: lather, rinse, repeat.
• More Words, More Better: Business English is all about reading interminable articles, parsing spreadsheets and boring the tits off anybody in the blast radius.
• Be Free, Little Butterflies: Speaking skill is what the students want, amirite? Structural knowledge is soooo 10 minutes ago, dude. They can’t form the present tense yet? No worries — toss ‘em into the pool, get ‘em babbling away with this randomly constructed list of fascinating questions about eating noodles! Right.

These are, of course, just a sampling of the sins against the teacher and insults to the student committed by textbook publishers, of course.

The three biggest producers of lines of ESL textbooks for adults are Oxford and Cambridge University Presses, and Pearson/Longman (Oxford and Cambridge Presses both have poorly organized, confusing, slow websites. Prepare to be frustrated if you visit them). There are others, of course, but most of the series I’ve encountered in decades of teaching have been from these publishers, for better (sometimes) or worse (often).

Variation in quality between different titles, even within a single publisher’s catalogue, is a bit shocking, even to an unshockable old duffer like me. They range from superb (American Headway) to merely adequate (like New Person to Person, by Jack Richards, whose essay ‘30 Years of TEFL/TESL: A Personal Reflection‘ is a must-read if you’re in the field) to slightly embarrassing (New Interchange sucks in more ways than I care to think about).

The same problems and the same wild variation in quality exists in the Business English space as well. Cambridge’s New International Business English is one of the worst books I’ve ever seen along several of the axes of awful I mentioned above. A real stinker. Global Links from Longman is slightly better (while making the idiotic and all-too-common (and bewilderingly stupid) mistake of using readings that start with things like ‘Carly Fiorina is CEO of HP…’), and Communicating In Business, also from Cambridge, is actually pretty damn good, if demandingly difficult.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably looking for a recommendation or two.

These are mine: if you’re teaching English to adults (and you can group them more or less into levels from False Beginner to Advanced), you can’t do better (as of this year) than the American Headway series. They are well-designed and engaging, and structured in such a way that it is clear that they were written from a deep understanding of the way people approach and learn language. They have great depth for the dedicated teacher, and plenty of material that will make the novice look good, merely by following along. They eschew most of the cliche content that makes so many ESL textbooks tedious exercises in repetition. They have excellent companion teachers’ guides. I can find very little to complain about (other than Oxford’s tendency to use the same small stable of voice actors for all the recordings in a book, and even across different books) — I’ve used them for a few years now, and am happy to revisit them with each new class. Each time through, I find new ways in which links between concepts and structures have been embedded in the books’ structures, and ways to extend and enrich the material.

If you’re teaching Business English, I recommend Cambridge’s Communicating in Business. It’s intended for Intermediate to Advanced students, and demands business knowledge on the part of the teacher, but it rewards effort, and is directly applicable to the requirements of students wanting to increase their skills in and understanding of the language of international business.

Got some recommendations of your own? Post them in the comments, below, with my thanks. There are a lot of books I haven’t seen (for which, if experience is any guide, I can count my blessings).

Are you new to Korea (or planning to come) and want to know how to order food at one of the local eateries, or just know what it is? Do you live somewhere else and want to impress that beautiful waitress (or waiter, I guess) at your local Korean restaurant?

Well, despair no more, friends, because I’m going to give you the beginnings of a Rosetta Stone for ordering Korean food with style and aplomb and hopefully not too much embarrassed-for-you giggling.

It might help a little to peruse Learning to Read Korean Part 1 and Part 2 (Parts 3 and 4 are upcoming) before you jump in, but I’ll try and provide some phonetic cues in this article which will make it unnecessary to actually be able read Korean (that said, it’s really easy, so I encourage you to give it a go!)

Throughout this article, I’ll use the Korean, then the revised romanization, then a phonetic approximation for those who are not familiar with the sounds of Korean (regrettably, a prerequisite for proper pronunciation of the revised romanization scheme), then the translation.

An example: 밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)

Dining Customs

In Korea, you order your main dish, which is frequently some kind of soup or stew, often served individually in a heated stone or clay bowl to each diner, or in a larger pot or pan in the center of the table over a gas fire, which is shared amongst everyone at the table. Also shared are the constellation of 반찬 (banchan, ‘bahnchahn’, side dishes) — the more there are, the more sumptous the meal is perceived to be. It is perfectly fine to ask for more of a given side-dish if it’s all eaten (and is provided without charge), and it is unnecessary to eat all of the each of the side dishes (and in fact might give a bit of an impression of gluttony).

Everyone also gets a small individual lidded stainless (or sometimes ceramic) bowl of short-grain, glutinous rice, which you are generally expected to finish. Long-grain, ‘fluffy’ rice is almost unheard of — if that’s what you get in an overseas Korean restaurant, it’s just not the Real Thing. The rice bowl is customary kept to the diner’s left, and the soup or stew to the right. Stainless steel chopsticks and long-handled shallow steel spoons are customary, although Korean folks (overseas or in touristed areas of Korea) may try and be ‘helpful’ and give you a fork. Be gracious, thank them, and put it aside in favour of the chopsticks. Many restaurants (but by no means all) have areas with floor seating and table-and-chair seating; the former is, of course, the traditional style.

Food is very regional, and every little village and town has its own specialties, for which, according to the locals of that hamlet, it is justifiably famous. Regions also tend to have their own takes on standard dishes like 김치 (kimchi) or 김밥 (kimbap) or 비빔밥 (bibimbap).

Some etiquette no-nos if eating with Koreans (or just trying to be polite a la mode Koreane): don’t

• blow your nose at the table
• pick up your utensils and start eating before the eldest person at the table does so
• stick your chopsticks upright in your rice and leave them (edit: this is done with the rice offering during annual graveside ceremonies to honour ancestors, and so is inappropriate to do at a convivial dinner)
• pour your own liquor — watch what others are doing (the matter of drinking etiquette deserves its own essay, which I’ll tackle sometime later

Answers.com mentions a few other things as constituting bad table manners

Bad manners include [...] chewing with an open mouth, talking with food in one’s mouth, [...] stabbing foods with chopsticks, mixing rice and soup, and picking up food with one’s hands…

As far as I’ve seen in 10 years here, those are pretty much nonsense, at least in any but the most absolutely formal of situations.

The Language Of Food

Here are some vocabulary elements that show up in the names of various foods, and will help you to guess what category, at least, the dish might fit into.

밥 – bap, ‘bahp’, rice (cooked)
장 – jang, ‘jahng’, paste
자장 – jajang, ‘jahjang’, black bean paste
된 – doen, ‘dwehn’, fermented soy beans
고추 – gochu, ‘gohchoo’, hot pepper

김 – gim, ‘k/gim’, dried laver seaweed (the initial sound is partway between ‘k’ and ‘g’, usually romanized in the past as ‘k’) (note also, that it’s not the same 김 and the one in 김치 (kimchi).
떡 – deok, ‘dduhk’, chewy rice cake (the inital ‘d’ is highly aspirated)
두부 = dubu, ‘dooboo’, tofu
고기 – gogi, ‘gogee’, meat
닭 – ‘dak’, ‘dahk’, chicken
돼지 – ‘doeji’, ‘dwehjee’, pork
감자 – ‘kamcha’, ‘kahmcha’, potato
회 – hoe, ‘hweh’, raw fish or other raw seafood
찌개 – jjigae, ‘jeegay’, soup or stew

탕 – tang, ‘tahng’, soup or stew
국 – guk, ‘gook’, soup or stew
면 – myeon, ‘myuhn’, noodles
주 – ju, ‘joo’, alcoholic beverage (소주, 맥주, 동동주, etc)
차 – cha, ‘chah’, tea
물 – mul, ‘mool’, water
불 – bul, ‘bool’, fire

비빔 – bibim, ‘beebeem’, mixed
냉 – neng, ‘nehng’, cool or cold

Those syllables (there are many many more, of course) are enough to get you well down the path of figuring out the most common Korean menu items! Let’s start putting them together and see what we get. (

된+장 = fermented soy bean + paste: one of the most common bases for soups and stews.
고추+장 = hot pepper + paste: the other most common flavouring, after 마늘 maneul, ‘mahneuhl’, garlic)

See how easy it is?

How about the everyday light meal or snack, 김밥?

Well, 김+밥 = seaweed rice, which is what it is. Rice with goodies, wrapped in a seaweed roll. Sushi roll ahoy!

How about that old dinner standby, 불고기?

불 + 고기 = fire meat. Sounds painful, but it’s the grilled marinated beef that is iconic of Korean BBQ. Variations are 닭 불고기 (chicken + fire + meat) and 돼지 불고기 (pork + fire + meat).

Now, let’s put together some even longer dish names, why don’t we?

된장찌개 = 된+장+찌개 = soybean + paste + stew.
김치찌개 = 김치+찌개 = kimchi + stew.
두부 찌개 = 두부+ 찌개 = tofu stew. Woohoo!

What about that other everyday Korean food that everybody knows and loves, 비빔밥?

비빔+밥= mixed + rice, which is exactly what it is (except you do the mixing, which adds to the Power of the Delicious, if you do it right). And, of course, it’s what you mix in with the rice and the 고추장 that makes it sing. A sunnyside-up fried egg on top is mandatory, in my humble.

Let’s try that again with another noun. How about

비빔면 = 비빔+면 = mixed noodles, the noodle equivalent of 비빔밥.

A standard Koreanized Chinese food is 자장면. What’s that?

자장 + 면 = black bean paste + noodles.

One of my all-time favorite Korean foods is 냉면. What does that mean?

It’s easy: 냉+면 = cold + noodles.

We can get even fancier, because there are two kinds of 냉면.

물 냉면 = water + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles in a cool broth)
비빔 냉면 = mixed + cold + noodles (cold buckwheat noodles with veggies and seasoned pepper sauce, that you mix in the bowl in much the same way you mix 비빔밥, of course!)

Fantastic stuff in the summer time.

And, last but not least, we can now read the label on that old favorite from university days, ramyeon (ramen in Anglified Japanese).

ramyeon = 라면 = 라 + 면 = ra + noodles. I dunno what ‘ra’ means, but it’s darn tasty.

Cool, huh?

Now, I won’t pretend that this list is exhaustive, and there are synonyms and other words for some of these things, as well as many, many more ingredients and combinations Just a few tastes from the groaning buffet table. But after studying these building blocks, you should be able to navigate your way through that Korean-language menu on the wall with a little bit more authority.

Good luck!

(If you have any additions or corrections, feel free to leave a comment, below.)

This is Part Two in a multipart series of articles covering the basics of reading and writing in Korean. By the end, you should be merrily sounding out anything you run across
(and doing it with better pronunciation than most foreigners I’ve met who’ve been here for years).

Last time I talked about some of the philosophical and design principles underlying the Korean alpabet — hangeul — and introduced the vowels.

This time, we’ll have a look at the consonants, starting with a little background on the elegant design principles behind them. Recall that the Korean alphabet was consciously designed rather than just having evolved, so linguistic elements and relationships were deliberately built into the alphabet.

Design

(If you’re not familiar with the linguistic terms above, velars (variations of k and “hard g”) are formed when the back of the tongue meets the upper back of the throat. Alveolar consonants (n, d, t, “flap r,” l) are formed when the tip of the tongue meets the alveolar ridge, on the roof of the mouth toward the front. Dental consonants (s, sh, j, ch, and similar consonants) involve friction between the tongue and the upper part of the top teeth. Bilabial (p, b, m) means two-lipped; the lips come together and are released. Vowels and glottal consonants (h and ‘ng’ in modern Korean) are formed in the throat.)

Korean consonants can be arranged into five groups based on depending on how the sound is produced within the mouth. Amazingly (to me, at least), each of these representative consonants is a simplified diagram showing the position of the organs of the mouth in forming those consonants. How cool is that?

Looking at the diagram, you should be able to see that there is an element common to all the consonants in a particular row.

The first consonant in each row is the simplest; this is a representative consonant for each group, and is the building block for the other characters in that group. These changes are largely systematic: adding a horizontal line to a simple stop consonant (sounds like the t/d or p/b pairs in English) forms the aspirated consonants (those made with extra air), doubling simple consonants gives us the “tense” consonants (pronounced with glottal tension, for which there is no real equivalent in English).

So, looking at the top row of the diagram, ㄱ( called ‘kiuk’) is a basic consonant. It sounds most like a hard ‘g’ in English (but has long been romanized as both ‘g’, ‘k’ and ‘c’, and so we have kimchi and gimchi, for example).

ㅋ(called ‘kiut’) adds an extra horizontal line, and gives us a more aspirated ‘k’ sound.
ㄲ (called ‘ssang kiuk’ where ‘ssang’ means double), the doubling of the basic consonant, gives us a slightly strangled (glottal tension added) ‘k’ sound, sometimes romanized ‘kk’.

Looking at the diagram, you might notice that there are other triplets as well — ㄷ ㅌ ㄸ (roughly and usually romanized d, t and dd), ㅂ ㅍ ㅃ (b, p and bb), ㅈ ㅊ ㅉ (j, ch and jj) — and one doublet ㅅ ㅆ (s, ss), the regular and aspirated ‘s’ sound.

It is important to notice, if you’re serious about all of this, that there is no consistent differentiation between voiced and unvoiced consonants in Korea, as there is in English. Most English consonants appear in unvoiced/voiced pairs — t/d, p/b, k/g, s/z, sh/zh, f/v and so on — but in Korean, we have triplets — basic, aspirated, and tense. Voicing does appear in Korean, but as a function of location — for example, when a consonant appears between two vowel sounds in a syllable. This is, in my opinion at least, one of the root difficulties, almost universally ignored or misunderstood, in pronunciation interference for both Koreans learning English and English-speakers learning Korean. If you are a teacher, having a good understanding of this fact — that aspiration and glottal tension are the fundamental differentiator in Korean consonants, with voicing not contributing to meaning, while the exact opposite is true in English (and voicing has a strong effect in English on syllable length) — can be invaluable in helping your students understand how to clarify their pronunciation in a systematic way.

One thing that we have to note before going on: I mentioned that Korean vowels are invariant in the last article, but that is not true for consonants. The good news, though, is that the changes, based on position within syllables, are quite consistent.

A Note On Romanization

Romanization is a somewhat complicated issue, unfortunately, and the revised romanization instituted by the Korean government in 2000 (not without criticism) to replace the McCune-Reischauer system of 1984 has not percolated in any systematic way through the country yet. The new system eschews use of diacritics and other non-alphabetic symbols (other than the hyphen, occasionally), and was intended in part to make it easier to type romanized Korean on computers. It is far from perfect, but is, in my opinion at least, an improvement. The major strike against it is that it essentially requires one to be familiar with the sounds and conventions of spoken Korean, and so, though useful for Korean speakers, is of limited use ‘out of the box’ to those who don’t speak Korean.

The Korean government site has this to say about that

It is true that most Westerners hear “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” as “k, t, p, and ch” when these consonants appear as the first letter in a word. But the problem is that “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” also seem like “k, t, p, and ch” to the average Western ear as well, and the differences between each of these vowels are important in Korean. The Korean phonological opposition must be given first priority in a Romanization system designed for Korean, even if to foreign ears these differences are not easily recognized. In addition, when the differences between “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” and “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” are written with consistency, it makes non-native pronunciation of Korean more distinguishable to native speakers.

and I tend to agree with them.

English Equivalents

Here, then is a table showing rough equivalents for the consonant sounds in English,which you can compare with the diagram earlier:

Putting It Together

OK, let’s look at a couple of examples of putting together letters to make a syllable. There are consistent rules for making syllables, which we’ll look at in Part 3, but for now, a few sounds to flex our Korean muscles.

Let’s take ㄱ + ㅏ = 가.

ㄱsounds like a hard ‘g’. ㅏ sounds (always) like ‘ah’ (this is not romanization, but phonetic rendering for clarity). So

ㄱ + ㅏ = ‘ga’ (which has in the past often been written ‘ka’). It’s the root of the verb ‘to go’.

How about another?

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손

ㅅ sounds like a soft, lightly aspirated ‘s’, ㅗ is always the monophthong ‘oh’ and ㄴ is exactly equivalent to ‘n’.

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손 = ‘sohn’, romanized ‘son’. It’s the noun ‘hand’.

At this point, I will leave you once again with this link to give you some audio help. Try the first few lessons again to get try and nail down your sounds. Don’t worry if there are things you don’t get yet, like the logic behind the position of characters within syllables — I’ll be covering them in future. At this point, though, with some practice, you should be able to sound out most (but not all, because we haven’t talked about consonant positional variation yet) syllables you see.

As an exercise, try to sound out this:

안녕하세요?

When you’ve got it, you’re able to greet someone, to say hello in mid-level formality, in Korean, the first thing everybody learns.

(Spoiler: it sounds like an yeong ha sae yo, with the syllables run together, following closely on one another.)

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’re going to start pulling everything together, and the real power of hangeul starts to shine.

This is Part One in a multipart series of articles covering the basics of reading and writing in Korean. By the end, you should be merrily sounding out anything you run across
(and doing it with better pronunciation than most foreigners I’ve met who’ve been here for years).

Korean is a very different language, structurally, from English and many European languages. For Korean students of English, and for speakers of other languages trying to learn Korean, it’s a hard slog getting beyond the basics. To my continuing shame, although I can read and write the language with some facility, after nearly 10 years of exposure to it (and, I’ll admit, study of it that has been at best haphazard and desultory), I’m very far indeed from fluency.

The good news, though, is that reading it is literally a snap. A few hours with the basics, and almost anyone can be up and running. Or walking, at least. The writing system is about 14,000 times simpler to learn (scientifically speaking!) than Chinese or Japanese, and truly elegant in its design, philosophy, and suitability for capturing the sounds of the spoken language.

Before we begin with the basics, you’ll need to be able to actually see the Korean text in this page. Tutorials on how to install East Asian fonts (if you don’t have them already) can be found at Wikipedia, for a variety of common operating systems.

If you can’t see this — 안녕하세요! — then go and install the fonts, and come back. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

History

Right, let’s begin with some background.

King Sejong was the 4th King of the Choson Dynasty. In 1446 (dates vary, as do details of the story), scholars of the government office chip’yon’jon, or the Pavilion of the Assembly of Sages, were appointed by the King to invent a new writing system for Korean. Until that time, Chinese characters had been used to represent the sounds of the syllables of spoken Korean (The characters are called hanja, and still sometimes used to this day in print. Learning a basic set of 1800 of them was until recently a compulsory part of the education of all South Koreans, and they still play an important part in place names and personal names).

Writing had for centuries been the province of the educated elites, and this new system (although scorned in early days as writing for ‘women and children’) was created with the aim of spreading literacy. It was a success — Korea now has a literacy rate of 97.9 percent, one of the highest in Asia.

A book of instruction for the new writing system was published, called Hunmin Chongum: “The proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People”. The script it introduced later became known as 한글 (in the new romanization, hangeul).

If there is sound natural to Heaven and Earth, then there should certainly be writing natural to Heaven and Earth. Thus the men of antiquity relied on sounds and designed characters, thereby to convey the circumstances of the Myriad Things and to register the Way of the Three Germinants, we of later generations cannot change them. However, the winds and soils of the Four Quarters diverge, one from the other and sounds and breaths, following them, are likewise different. Presumably because the outer kingdoms have their sounds but lack characters for them, they have borrowed the characters of Chinese to take care of their needs. This has been like a handle that ill fits the hole; how could they have been applied with out obstructions?
-Hunmin Chongum

The Vowels

Besides its simplicity and elegance, one of the most fascinating things about the Korean alphabet is its grounding in the philosophical principles of the time, and its deliberate connections to the physical configurations of the organs of speech.

There are ten vowels (and eleven diphthong vowel combinations) and fourteen consonants (and five doubled consonants) for a total of 40 phonemes. Characters are shaped with symbols (dots and circles, horizontal lines, and vertical lines) that represent the fundamental elements of the cosmology: respectively heaven, earth and humanity. Heaven is a round dot, Earth is a horizontal line and the symbol of mankind is a vertical line. All the vowels in the Korean language are combinations of dots, horizontal and vertical lines. These signs are further balanced into the the opposing energies of yang (bright) sounds and yin (dark) sounds.

Here are the vowels:

The ten basic vowels are those with only one long straight vertical or horizontal line (earth and human): ㅏ and ㅑ, ㅗand ㅛ, ㅓand ㅕ, ㅜ and ㅠ, ㅣ and ㅡ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the right of the vertical, we get some of the “bright” vowels: ㅏ ㅑ ㅐ ㅒ. If it’s above the horizontal, we get the last two brights: ㅗ ㅛ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the left of the vertical line, we get the “dark” vowels: ㅓㅕ ㅔ ㅖ. If it’s below the horizontal, we get the other two darks: ㅜ ㅠ.

If there is no dot, the vowel is neutral:ㅣ and ㅡ

Adding a second dot (short perpendicular) to a vowel adds a “y” before the basic vowel sound(“ah” becomes “yah”, for example): ㅑ, ㅒ, ㅕ, ㅖ, ㅛ and ㅠ.

A horizontal vowel (ㅗ or ㅜ) can be paired with a vertical vowel to form a diphthong. The horizontal vowel always comes first in the pairing, and this results in a “w-” sound in front of the pure vowel to give us sounds like “wah,” “weh,” “wi,” and so on: ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ and ㅢ.

So far, we haven’t matched any of the characters to their actual sounds, so don’t worry if it’s not coming together for you yet.

For that, I’m going to give you this link for basic vowels, and this one for dipthongs. Open it in a new tab or window, and mouse-over to listen to the vowel sounds as you look over what I’ve said about the vowels. If you repeat the sounds, think about the shape of your mouth as you make them, and how that relates to the bright/dark/neutral labels.

Coming Soon

If you want to skip ahead and listen to the consonants as well on those pages, they will be the focus of Part 2, where we’ll see how the design of the consonants (which are created in all languages by the modification and interruption of the flow of air by the physical parts of the mouth) are cleverly modelled on the physical movements needed to create them.

Part 3 will deal with how syllables and words are put together, the relatively simple rules for reading and writing them, and the few but consistent exceptions.

Part 4 will talk about the difficulties and challenges of the romanization of Korean, why it’s such a mess, why Koreans have so much trouble with English pronunciation (though they need not) and what you can do to make the situation better as a teacher (if you are one).

For now, one parting piece of essential advice to keep in mind: unlike English, the sounds of Korean vowels are (essentially) immutable. No matter where they are in a syllable, they make the same sound. This is one of the pure joys of learning to read Korean, and something that many (if not most) new learners of Korean miss, in part because of the confusion that reigns in romanization.

Have fun. You’re about a third of the way to being able to read Korean!

I am planning a series of articles on the practicalities of visiting, living and working in Korea. Here’s the first: visa information for people who may be planning to come to Korea.

If you’re a national of any of a wide variety of countries, you can enter Korea for up to 90 days without a visa, simply by showing up. If you’re Canadian, you can enter visa-free for up to a six month stay. Longer stays require that you get a visa before you arrive, and of course, working while on a tourist visa is illegal.

For the vast majority of people entering Korea to work as teachers, the E-2 is what they will be applying for. If you are offered a job, you can either apply for and get the E-2 before you leave your home country, or come to Korea without a visa and do The Visa Run later. The most common destinations for visa runs are Fukuoka and Osaka, in Japan. Both Korean embassies are well-used to the constant, endless stream of E-2 applicants trooping through, and are quite efficient. Like most embassies and consulates, they do tend to have odd opening hours, but if you time things right, you can leave Korea one day and be back the next, E-2 in hand.

Working during that period after you arrive under the visa waiver program and before you do your visa run (if necessary) is illegal, no matter what your new boss might tell you. Many people do it anyway.

The E-2 is tied to your workplace — if you quit your job or are fired, you lose your visa, and must exit (and re-enter, if you wish) within a relatively short time. Other restrictions include a prohibition from working anywhere besides the company or institution who hired you, without permission from your employer, or teaching privately. This restriction is widely ignored, but can potentially get you deported if you break it. I’ve never personally known this to happen to anyone, though.

There are a wide array of other visas, but the only other ones that potential fresh meat (that’d be you, if you’re reading this) might be interested in are probably the H1, the F-2 (and F-2-1, which is, as far as I can tell, identical to the F-2), and the C4.

The F-2 (which I hold) is a spousal visa, for those married to a Korean national. It allows you to work where you like, at as many jobs as you like, and to enter and leave Korea freely, among other things. Recent changes to the visa (I believe as a result of the massive increase in international marriages, to a great extent driven by the unwillingness of young Korean women to marry farmers and their consequent importation of brides, mainly from SE Asian countries (a topic I will do some talking about at a later date, I promise)) have given us foreign spouses some great new latitude, including a provision that allows you to apply for permanent residency in Korea after 5 years holding an F-2.

The H1 is the working holiday visa, for young citizens of countries with which Korea has reciprocal arrangements. I don’t know if teaching is a job permitted under this visa — there’s very little else in the way of work if you don’t speak Korean — but I worked under similar visas in New Zealand and Australia back in the day, and they are great for the young, poor traveller.

The C4 is a temporary employment visa. I suspect that the chainsmoking, emaciated, leotard-clad Russian girls I invariably used to see at immigration offices back in the day — entertainers, don’t you know — were applying for these visas, or the E-6 entertainter visa.

On the fringe are the cowboys. I’ve personally met a few people over the years — usually Canadians, thanks to that 6 months entry visa-free — who had spent several years in Korea, teaching private lessons, always on a tourist visa, always working illegally. They’d simply hop out for a holiday in Thailand or somewhere twice a year, then come back and get another tourist visa on entry, and carry on. All of the ones I’ve met have claimed to make anywhere from five to eight thousand dollars a month doing this, tax-free cash in hand. I don’t recommend it, of course, because I do not advocate breaking immigration law, but I include it for completeness.

If anyone has questions, feel free to add a comment below.

There’ve been a few questions on Ask Metafilter that I’ve answered with some variation ‘why not teach in Korea?’, and I realized that there was no place of which I was aware that served as a comprehensive introduction to the Honourable Slave Trade. So, this, originally written for my private site, and lightly revised for OutsideIn.

Truth : I have been working on (OK, thinking about) writing a book, one digging into the topics whose merest surface I scratch here, and one that also answers some of the million questions of general survival (“Oh sweet lord, where do I get real cheese?” “When my male adult student just told me he loves me, what did he mean, exactly?”) that loom large in the minds of new arrivals to Korea. A few thousand people a year show up here to teach, at a minimum — there’s gotta be a market for a book like that.

So here’s a taste, hot off the keyboard, so that in the future I can answer questions about teaching in Korea with a hyperlink rather than repeating myself all the damn time :

The Skinny

It’s pretty often the case that Teaching English in Korea involves very little teaching and not a whole lot of English. This is perhaps the most important thing about all this that nobody ever tells the newbies. In other words, for a very large proportion of people coming to Korea thinking they’ll be teaching the English language, the reality is that they probably won’t, really. If they have been hired by a kiddie hakwon (variously romanized, a ‘hakwon’ is a private cram school, and every city, town, village, hamlet and roadside rest stop has 2 or more in any given building), they may well end up in reality as a babysitter, thrown like human chum into the toothy screeching kindy shark pool with no guidance whatsoever from management and no means of self-defense. The actual English teaching that gets done in this situation may be minimal, while the neophyte teacher is busy struggling for survival. These teachers, with no training and no idea of what’s expected, end up relegated to the position of entertainers. Many, having had no experience teaching, are completely OK with this.

Some do end up actually teaching, and teaching older children, or university students (who, in Korea, have for the most part an emotional age of about 13, from the western perspective, except that the boys are required to interrupt their schooling to do military service for more than two years, which bumps them up to the level of, say, extremely sullen abused 16 year olds, perhaps, on their return), or even adults. Whatever the age, these students are for the most part veterans of the hakwon churn, and if they’ve studied English for any length of time, have seen a rotating cast of wide-eyed foreigners go through the Korea Newbie Cycle :

1. Wide-eyed wonder
2. Blissful confusion, pleasant buzzy disorientation
3. The three-month barrier : missing home, missing food, missing easy conversation
4. Unblissful confusion, culture shock, isolation
5. Resentment of Korea as personified by one’s boss, xenophobia, alcohol abuse, ranting
6. …

The next stages depend on the person.

Not a few freak out entirely, experience a psychotic break, and go wobbly. This is sometimes a permanent condition. Many of those who flip their noodles leave Korea, either suddenly or at the end of their contract, broken and dull-eyed or raving and newly-racist. Of that group, many nonetheless return, finding themselves unable to function properly back home. A self-perpetuating cycle of odd activity (which finds little to no censure in Korea, as most Koreans expect foreign devils to behave in inexplicable and aberrant ways anyway, and most expats tend to have a degree of quirkiness already, and are unwilling to criticize others in their small groups as there are so few around) begins, the end result of which is Freaky Waeguk-in (”way-goog-in” – Korean for “foreigner”) Syndrome. This is epidemic.

Some, after going a bit loopy temporarily, settle down, get a grip, and fall into one of two general patterns. They go native, learn the language, marry a Korean, and in a range of different ways further their isolation (or not, and try to maintain a balance) from their countrymen and mothertongue siblings, or they shrug, accept, and learn to enjoy the chaos, ferment, stares and prejudices and insults, and take it all with a sense of humour. Some of these stay for a while, some go elsewhere, or back home, after a year, or two, or three. If they’ve been cautious, they’ve been able to pay off their student loans, if they had them, and more. It is commonplace, although illegal (if caught, you will be at least fined and at most fined and deported), to teach private lessons at rates ranging from $30 an hour on up. I do not personally do this, but most people I know do, and you can double your income quite easily this way. I’ve known some people who have left Korea after 5 years with enough cash to buy a house back home. How they dealt with issues of taxation on their return was their business.

But that may not be what most people are reading this for, especially if they’ve arrived on the wings of Google. You probably want to know what the deal is with working in Korea, in one handy, pre-packaged essay. The dirt, the skinny, the Good Oil. You’re probably in your 20′s, and you probably have student loans to pay off. You might be looking a first adventure overseas, or you may be an old hand at the backpacker trail, and need some ready cash.

OK, here’s the story, in a very very small nutshell.

You will be offered the following, with some variations.

Anywhere from a bottom end of 2,000,000 won per month to a high end of 2,500,000 or more (this being winter 2008), usually for a contact-time workload of 25-35 hours per week. If you have any teaching qualifications, you should be able to negotiate your way towards the upper end of that salary range, but there is no guarantee. Some people make more than this without qualifications, and some less, I am aware. University positions, for which the required qualifications are sometimes MA degrees, but more frequently BA/BSc degrees with 3 or more years experience (in Korea), usually pay at the low end of the scale, but often have very generous holidays (12-16 weeks per year) and low contact hours (12 – 18 hours) per week. There are growing numbers of exceptions to this rule of thumb as Korean universities become ‘hakwonized’ and cash-flow oriented. Many university teachers are asked to ‘teach’ children these days, and are working as hard for their salaries as hakwon teachers.

Although some teachers will fly into a foaming frenzy of resentment if it is suggested, it is nonetheless true (again as a generalization) that there is a hierarchy of job desireability in Korea, which may be different for different individuals, depending on factors like how much they like children, how important free time is to them, how much money they want to make, or how professional a teacher they consider themselves. It does exist, in general terms, nonetheless. Remember, success and relationships in Korea are all about hierarchy, and assessing hierarchy requires assignment of status. You may not like it, but it is the reality of the situation.

At the bottom of the scrum are the kiddie hakwons, and the elementary/middle-schooler hakwons. These make up the vast bulk of teaching opportunities in Korea, and as a newbie, chances are this will be the kind of job you are offered. There are good schools and bad, and good bosses and (very, very) bad. Whether you get a good one or a bad one is often a matter of sheer, dumb luck. If you get a personal recommendation about a school, that makes all the difference, although it is not unknown for people to talk up a school in order to find their own replacement, nor is it unknown for people to keep the names of good schools to themselves and their circle of friends incountry. The best jobs are frequently not advertised, as in many industries.

Next up are the more reputable chain schools (which often have individual branches that are hellholes, so being part of a chain is no guarantee of quality), where you may teach kids, university students, and/or adults. Adult classes almost invariably mean an early start (before they go to work) or a late finish (after they finish work) or, in the most horripilating of cases, both. Split shifts — where you work from, say, 6:30 am to 9 am and then again from 6 pm to 9 pm — are less common than they once were, but still almost the rule in adult hakwons. This kind of schedule may well drive you insane, even if you are allowed to go home and sleep during the day, if you do it for any length of time. Some of these hakwon jobs are good, and some lucky new srrivals find great bosses or great salaries, or truly love teaching kids, and stay at the hakwons for many years. Some.

For many, the next step up the food chain is getting a university position. The workload is easy, the students are, if not motivated, at least generally quite pleasant, and although the money isn’t great, such a position leaves plenty of time for travel, writing, study, drinking, or whatever. At my last university position I worked four hour days four days a week, with four months paid holiday (plus national holidays etc), and made in the lower mid-range of the salaries quoted above.

Top of the heap for many is corporate jobs, teaching, editing, proofreading, developing curricula, and so on. These positions are few and far between, and unless you’ve been incountry for a number of years and have a great deal of experience with teaching Koreans and knowledge of Korean cultural norms, you might not even get an interview. There are exceptions, but they are few. Your alma mater means almost as much in this situation, as it does for Koreans, as anything else.

You will pay tax, healthcare and pension from this. For Americans and Canadians, it is law that your employer must deduct 4.5% of your salary for pension, and kick in an additional 4.5%. This money will be refunded (but you must apply) on departure from Korea. After a year, it will be somewhat more than a month’s salary. Antipodeans may not be able to reclaim their pension — the law may be changing there. Some universities use a private pension plan, so your contribution may vary.

Income tax will be deducted, at a rate that should not exceed 5%. Healthcare should be provided through the employer, and deductions will be on the order of 50,000 won per month, perhaps less. You will receive a paper healthcare booklet with a plastic sheath that you must take to clinics and hospitals to receive coverage.

You will often be promised training when you are offered a hakwon job, but there is a 90-100% chance you will not receive any. This is a cruel joke, but every time someone new to Korea complains about it, I am compelled to laugh nastily, mostly because I’m a complete bastard. Buy a book or two before you come, is my best advice, if you’ve never taught.

You will be offered accommodation, and you will in almost all situations be required to pay utilities for your apartment. Gas, water and electricity can be very expensive here. If you consume them to the same degree you’re used to in North America or Australia (or…) you will probably be paying between 100,000 and 200,000 won per month. Your accommodation may be single or shared, and this is something you should verify up-front. Many schools, understanding the preference of many for single housing, are offering it these days. Asking for pictures of your housing may be a good idea – it will in many cases be incredibly tiny, old and dingy. This is by no means always the case – it is increasingly common for good schools and universities to offer quite attractive, modern housing – but it is something to look out for. Nothing will depress you faster than a dim, mildewy closet to go back home to after an exhausting day of teaching.

Most schools offer airfare, either upfront or on a reimbursement basis. None will pay your return airfare if you break your contract, and if you notify them that you are quitting early, rather than just disappearing (as many do, which makes the level of trust for the rest of us grind down another notch), the school may well try to deduct the inbound airfare from your salary. Some school have begun withholding a portion of the first few months’ pay as a kind of insurance policy, usually because they’ve had teachers to a Midnight Run before. This is technically illegal, but if you sign a contract that mentions it, you really can’t complain too much. Read your contract carefully before you sign it, is the lesson here.

Most schools offer a contract completion bonus, usually equivalent to one month’s salary. This is sometimes finessed by claiming that the bonus was built in to the salary, and paid in installments. This is a scam, but a common one, and needs to be verified up front.

Bosses

Korean hakwon owners are almost universally reviled, and with good reason. The vast majority are entirely unconcerned with education per se, and obsessed with making (and scrimping to save) money. That’s why they got into the business, in almost all cases, and it is a lucrative one, if they play their cards right. There are horror-stories galore available around the net, and many of them are true, so I won’t bother getting lurid here, but a warning : caution is advisable. Treat your boss with deference and respect, and never disagree with him (chances approach 100% that it will be a ‘him’) in public. Don’t trust him until you’re sure you can, but not in a negative way, until you’re given reason. Just be sensibly cautious. Buy a book like ‘Ugly Americans, Ugly Koreans’ to learn about some norms of behaviour and how accidental offense happens in both directions, before you come. It is better to err on the side of overcaution and over-solicitiousness than to give offense, because once you do it, you may well be cast into the ‘waeguk-in who will never understand Korea’ bin, never to be recycled. Koreans love to label others, as do most folks, but their labels can be very sticky indeed.

That said, your Korean boss may just be a total psycho. It really isn’t that uncommon.

Do not assume that your director is cheating you by default, but have a clear understanding of what your mutual responsibilities are, and be vigilant (in a polite and professional way) to ensure that if you are upholding yours, he is similarly upholding his. Never accuse him of anything to the contrary in public, unless you have gotten to the bridge-burning stage. Try and remain calm in the face of apoplectic bluster, rather than giving back as good as you get. Korean men are brought up to believe that temper tantrums are an effective and acceptable means of dealing with confrontation and frustration, particularly with those who they perceive to be beneath them in the social, Confucian strata.

Confucian ideas are an important substrate to dealing with people here, particularly older males. Understand (even if you don’t agree), and try to leverage the fact that your only hook into the hierarchy (especially if you are young, female, and foreign, or any combination of the three) is that you are a teacher, and teachers are to be given respect. At least when they behave in a manner deserving of respect, where people can see ‘em.

Paperwork

You will be asked for originals of your qualifications and other paperwork, if you get to the contract signing stage. This paperwork is sometimes lost. Korean immigration recently lost my original university diploma. Yeah, I know. It happens, but these things can be replaced, although it generally does cost. Once immigration approves you and you have signed a contract, one of two things will happen — you will either be sent a document which authorizes the local Korean consulate to issue you an E-2 Teacher visa, good for one year, or you will be told to fly to Korea (no visa is required for most nationalities to enter as a tourist) and, once here, be sent to Japan to get the visa. The school should pay for both trips, although many schools try to refuse, often successfully. Be aware that if you teach after arrival in Korea and before you have that E-2 in your passport, you are breaking the law, and can be fined or deported.

To start a job at a new employer, you must receive your E-2 outside of Korea. Signing a new contract with the same employer only requires a trip to the local immigration office.

Recruiters

The Dave’s ESL Cafe Korean Jobs list, which is probably the single best resource for finding a job for people both outside Korea and already incountry, has been swamped in the last year or so with recruiter ads. “We have best jobs! All wonderful happy time fun! Beautiful city most good living in Korea!” and so on. The community is divided on recruiters – some have had positive experiences, and experienced no problems in finding jobs through them. My first job in Korea was through a recruiter, although I did not realize it at the time, and in many ways the job was a good one. But there are many who will tell you to never, ever use a recruiter, just because of the sheer number of unscrupulous, unprofessional agencies out there. I tend to agree, but if you take care, you may get lucky.

I recommend dealing with a school directly. The fewer intermediaries there are between you and the person you’re actually going to be working for, the better. Recruiters receive a payout for every warm body they deliver to a school, and sometimes a cut of the salary paid, which inclines them to push candidates toward positions regardless of the quality of that position, which is not a situation that should inspire trust. Using a recruiter may make your job search easier, but that is not necessarily a good thing.

Contracts and their importance (or lack thereof)

Contracts are a mixed bag in Korea. Some are stuffed with pages and pages of badly-written minutiae, all inserted, in most cases, because some previous employee behaved badly or performed poorly or drank too much or something of the kind, and the school is trying to close loopholes that might allow such things. Some contracts will have clauses that are outright illegal in Canada or America (or…), and these can be argued against but will rarely be changed. They are for the most part left unenforced, anyway, but when it is in the school’s interest, your director will not hesitate to point out the letter of the contract, and demand compliance. In no uncertain terms.

The other side of this is that with most Korean employers, the relationship between the parties to a contract is more important than the agreement on paper. This happens not only at the level we’re talking about, but manifests itself in the frustration that many western business people experience when negotiating with their Korean counterparts – Koreans frequently want to revisit language and conditions of an agreement long after, from the perspective of the westerner, all pertinent discussion has been finished, and the agreement has been ‘put to bed’.

This puts the employee into a difficult situation : when making a complaint about conditions of employment that appear to breach the agreement signed, many Korean directors will explain that ‘that’s not way do in Korea,’ and attempt to get out of their responsibilities, which the teacher assumes, rightly, are legally binding. On the other hand, when a teacher does or requests something that is outside the contract language, the director may turn around and say that ‘sorry, not in contract’ as a reason to refuse the request or censure the activity. It can be maddening.

The EFL-law website is a good resource of last resort in this situation, but it must be said that in 9 cases out of 10 pushing a dispute to the point where legal or human rights recourse is necessary will mean that the foreigner loses. Not that you can’t win, but that you probably won’t. You should be aware that the system is strongly weighted in favour of your boss, and chances of prevailing are not good.

Which means that you should do everything possible to avoid getting to the point where conflict is inevitable. Flexibility, sensitivity to the concept of ‘face’, reasonable and professional behaviour in the workplace, and care to develop a positive relationship with your employer, on their terms, will help this. It’s a cultural minefield, but if you learn the rules of the game upfront, almost all conflict can be avoided before it occurs.

Your job

The failings of the Korean education system are manifold, but with regard to language teaching, they are quite specific. In the past, and to a large degree in the present as well, many people studied English with people who couldn’t speak it. They studied in the ‘traditional’ Korean style, which is firmly in the model of ‘teacher as source of knowledge and wisdom’, lecturing. They studied grammar, translated passages with dictionaries, were taught incorrect pronunciation and in many cases incorrect idioms and grammatical constructs (older Koreans without fail use ‘as possible as’ when they mean ‘as much as possible’ as a result of the former being nominated as the correct formation and taught as such in the all-important university entrance exams for years, for example), by Korean teachers of English.

As a result, most students, at most levels, need practice speaking, and listening to a lesser degree. Getting Koreans to speak in class, though, is frequently an exercise in frustration, as the learning style they have had beaten into them over years or decades is in complete opposition to the idea of speaking up in class. Asking questions of one’s teacher is considered, traditionally, as a challenge and a sign of disrespect.

New teachers believe their students to be taciturn and sullen — in fact, in most cases, they’re just showing respect in the only way they’ve been taught to do so in the educational context, by attentive silence.

So strategies must be devised to overcome the pedagogical catch-22. Each teacher approaches it different ways, and those ways vary with different student ages, but providing structure and clear examples to model expectations so that the student’s chances of failure are minimized is a good start, and is a wise strategy at all levels of language teaching. It’s all the more important in the Korean context.

People

Although many teachers in Korea — most, perhaps — make an avocation of complaining bitterly about the country and the people, and some leave with anger and a sense of relief at having ‘escaped’, a lot of those same people miss the Korean people and their nation, and inevitably return. Some others just settle in, bitching all the while, broken expat records, and they can be annoying to have a beer with, and are best avoided. Others choose their targets a bit better.

It seems to be the lot of foreigners living here to have a love-hate relationship with Korea, and with Korean people, who can be so xenophobic and yet so hospitable and kind, so abrasive and impolite yet so conscious and careful of the niceties and minutiae of feeling and mood, so puritanical but so boozy and sexy and free, so group-focussed yet so individualistic, so backwards but so modern. The contradictions never cease to fascinate, and for a foreigner who makes even a cursory attempt to understand the old, odd, and ornate monoculture he or she is leaping into, and to read and understand a modicum of the nation’s history, and to make an attempt to learn a little of the language, the rewards are great.

I won’t lie — it’s hard as hell to live in Korea, perhaps harder than anywhere else in the world with a similarly high standard of living, for the westerner. But it’s equally hard, once you’ve gotten under the surface a bit, to leave it behind. And if you’re young, and looking at a Nametag Nation job back home, the money, once you’ve added in all the benefits, is undeniably great.