He asked the mother for sex? Did he speak Korean well enough to do that and in what context was this brought up? Or did she speak English? Call me naive, but unless this guy has already been doing this and has developed a “knack” for insinuating alternative forms of payment, something seems missing here.

Just to clear something up here, the first part of the post regarding the teacher who touched the mom and asked her to be his lover, was a Korean High school teacher, not a Canadian English teacher.Hence the “stupid local tricks” statement.

The second piece on the Canadian English teacher humping moms. Yes, it does state a Canadian was caught and black listed, but the article is about all foreigners, not just Canadian English teachers.

Easy on the stereotyping people.

A lot of people out there are not terribly well qualified it could be argued, but there are thousands who have E-1, E-2, F-2, F-4, F-5, etc visas that allow them to teach legally. Don’t see the connection between moralality and legality in this case, but it makes for a typically sensational Korean news story though - waves of horny, savage, foreign, law-breakers, rooting virtuous local girls - and is taken at face value by a lot of people I’m would guess.

The US Defense Language Institute has ranked world languages according to the level of difficulty for an American English speaker to master:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/.....whard.html

Most Western European languages fall into the easiest category, requiring the fewest hours. The most difficult are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Would this ranking be the same for Hungarian or Hebrew speakers? I doubt it.

My own personal experience of learning Spanish, German, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese in that order is that while some languages are simpler by nature (Spanish is easier than German even though English is a Germanic language), L1 similarities do help, especially in syntax. I excelled my Korean classmates in Chinese conversation classes because it was easier for me to change English thoughts into Chinese utterances. In Japanese, I was always the slowest to respond. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the concept of particles or verb inflexes - been there, done that with Korean. It was that changing an English thought into a Japanese utterance required more mental work. Now that I’m back in the States, I’ve been brushing off my rusty college Spanish. The Latin cognates REALLY help when I have to translate at conferences. Likewise, I relied on Korean-Chinese cognates when I first arrived in China with less than a year of Chinese study in Korea.

@Seoulout,

While I was living in China, it was dead-easy to pick out a Korean national speaking Chinese. The Korean language is relatively flat, so it is hard for Korean speakers, especially adults, to use tones naturally.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method

…it’s no secret that majority of the teachers in Hagwon are quite frankly unqualified to teach.

They speak English don’t they?
And who is qualified for anything anymore? Most people in the world get on-the-job training.

Most of the time hagwans involve babysitting anyway.

1) USFK’s presence here has little, if anything, to do with the demand for English.

2) If Chinese were added to the university entrance exam (and perhaps it ought to be) then it would achieve parity with English. About a decade ago I urged my sister-in-law to look at Chinese lessons for her son, and fortunately she could afford both English and Chinese. But as he now enters high-school the language emphasis is exclusively English. Chinese won’t get him into a middling university, let alone a top one, and it won’t be of much help when conversing with those who aren’t Chinese or those who have studied the language.

3) Though structurely Chinese differs from Korean, there are more loan words and the cultural similarity is far greater than that of Korea and its Anglophone trading partners. It just isn’t as alien as English. Contorting ones’s tongue, lips and throat to get the correct tone is difficult, but I’m sure some quack doctor will devise an operation to provide the competitive edge. That being said, a high level of motivation in any endeavor often reaps rewards.

If the US forces were to leave, do you think the demand for English instruction would decline?

Perhaps to be replaced by demand for Chinese instruction? After all, China recently replaced the US as ROK’s leading trade partner.

In this case — “problem solved”.

I’m curious — for those of you who are bi-lingual (or tri-, or even quad-) –
presuming a high level of academic skill and motivation, would it be easier for an aspiring young Korean student to learn Chinese, instead of the totally alien English?