• Do not get too excited at an offer -- if you have a pulse and degree, you'll get an offer.
• Do apply for several jobs that look interesting.
• Do ask for contact information for previous or current foreign teachers at the school. If it's refused, walk away.
• 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.
• 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.

Koreans are fighters, certainly, but no more than anyone else, I don't think, and it's not like it's a cherished part of Korean culture or anything. What is a part of Korean culture is to ignore people who are outside your circle of personal friends/acquaintances/family. If someone's not in your circle, they are an unperson, so a) their feelings are not considered b) you can be unembarrassed about airing your dirty laundry, in whatever form.

So if these folks are indeed Korean, making friendly overtures so that you impinge on their humanradar (depending on how old-skool Korean they are (ie if they hew fairly closely to the usual Korea-Korean norms, it'll work)) might just make you a person to them, in which case they'll be too ashamed to make all that noise.

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.

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.

There is one reason for this, and one only, despite the acrimony and scattershot accusations that fly around in waves whenever the Korean media decides once again -- something happening at the moment, but I've promised myself that I won't let this site go topical and start talking about news ephemera, so I'll leave the able chest-beating to others -- that some more ad units can be sold if they haul out the dead horse 'foreign teacher as parasite' strawman to give it another few whacks. The root of the problems is obvious, and it's fixable, but the gordian knot of money and politics and attitudes towards education in Korea continues to keep it from being fixed.

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 alphabet.

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.

Here, you watch it, and decide what you think.

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.

As usual, it took a lot longer than I'd expected to get things to a point where I was ready to pull back the curtain. I'm almost there, though, and ready, I think, to go public. You may have seen the post at Metafilter Projects, or on my personal weblog, or one of the bookmarking sites. Or if things go well, one of the tens of thousands of weblogs that linked here after the word got out, because the buzz went memetic or bloggorhea set in, or something.

Not everything is 100% finished yet, and I'm gearing up (and laying in supplies of coffee) to write a whole bunch of new content, but most of the flesh is on the bones, and the features I plan to add are coming together.

This site is about Korea. About me in Korea, yes, but the focus, at least in future, I hope, will move closer to Korea than it is to me. That'll be a challenge, given the size of my ego and the joyful abandon of my self-regard. I hope it will be both entertaining and practically useful for anyone who visits with specific questions about or just vague interest in life in Korea. The title is a minor play on words. First, as waeguk-in (foreign persons) in Korea, we are perpetually outside. This, like so many things, is changing. Korea is no longer the hermitage it once was. I will write much about this in future.

Second is the idea of the world looking in at Korea, and, as near as I can tell, just not getting it at all. And, bless 'em and all that, but the Koreans just don't seem to be that good at telling stories about themselves to the rest of the world that don't make people wince and raise an eyebrow. Or two. There is a groundswell of interest in Korea overseas these days thanks to that so-famous-in-Korea 'Korean Wave', of people on the outside looking in. At the same time, interest and knowledge of the rest of the world grows within Korea, as people on the inside look outwards. It's an exciting time to be here, and I hope I can share a little of that excitement with visitors to this site.

Recently my wife and I went to the nearby E-Mart to do some shopping, get out of the house, engage in the soothing Retail Ritual. The Retail Ritual calms me, these days, if it's in one of these huge ultramodern, brightly lit stores. Odd, for an old hippiepunk like me, who has little good to say about our marketing-driven civilization, and often.

Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely... most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed ('rule of law' not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the 'Whorfian Hypothesis,' 'linguistic relativism,' and 'linguistic determinism' (a description of the strong formulation meant by implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language perceive and understand the external world. This formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain world-view.