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.
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.
Continue reading "44 Tips For Getting A Job In Korea (and Keeping It)" »
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.
Continue reading "Textbooks That Suck And Textbooks That Don't" »
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.
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 alphabet.
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.
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.
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 :
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.