Double bonus: he mentions Korea twice as much as he mentions Japan!
It seems that “Korea” is a large part of President Barack Obama’s vocabulary and frequently used as a synonym as a prime example for success.
Korea has appeared in more than one in 10 key speeches that he has delivered since taking office in January 2009, much more frequently than many of his country’s key allies.
Obama has talked about Korea in 36 of his 342 public speeches, whereas he has only mentioned Japan and France in 17 of them, according to The Korea Times’s analysis of his past speeches collected on the website of the Washington Post.
And one for the English teachers:
When he talks about education reform, Obama enjoys sharing an anecdote regarding a conversation with President Lee Myung-bak.
“When I visited South Korea last year – and I’ve told this story before – I had lunch with President Lee. And I asked him, ‘What’s your biggest education challenge?’” Obama said in a speech delivered at the job training center.
“And he said, ‘My biggest issue, my toughest fight, is that Korean parents are too demanding. They want their children to learn English in first grade, and so I’ve had to ship in a whole bunch of foreign-speaking teachers to meet the demand.’”
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
> “And he said, ‘My biggest issue, my toughest fight, is that Korean parents are too demanding. They want their children to learn English in first grade, and so I’ve had to ship in a whole bunch of foreign-speaking teachers to meet the demand.’”
Which is, of course, the best time (young) to learn a foreign language. Conclusion? Lee either doesn’t know much about linguistics, or doesn’t care about people learning it.
foreign-speaking teachers.
Where does one go to learn ‘foreign’ or indeed to find ‘foreign speakers’?
What a fucked-up system it is, though. They get the kids in first grade, and still very, very few of them can string together a sentence after 10 or 15 years of “study”.
Makes it sound as if the phenomenon just started with his administration.
Wait until Chinese start claiming Obama is actually a Korean.
re# 3 (and still very, very few of them can string together a sentence after 10 or 15 years of “study”.)
I never knew a lawyer took such a keen interest in the English ability of Korean students.
Thats because although the foreign English teachers came and were placed in all the Public schools – they ONLY teach grade 3~6 and most of the time the “Korean co-teachers” interfere in the class and the kids end up learning broken-Konglish.
The second reason is because the students are NEVER forced to study English. If they choose not to study or listen and choose instead to read books under their desk or just sleep or spend the time drawing pictures on the desk – they are allowed to. Nobody can tell them “Hey, listen and study” – that would be against the rights of the students.
The truly scary thing is that there are people whose job consist in analysing systematically hundreds of Barry speeches, all day dissecting the absolute void, shit some people have it pretty hard up
#6 I kinda work in the English teaching field in Taiwan too.
The key problem isn’t that, because the same can be said for almost any subject, yet the average korean / east asian can still do math a million times better than the average Aermican youth.
Also, in the older days, you WERE forced to listen, of course the FORCE part was kinda a problem in itself.
The REAL problem is because pretty much across East Asia, the incentive is not to learn ENGLISH as a language, it’s to learn ENGLISH as a exam subject. which isn’t the same thing.
There are more than a few true stories of Chinese / Korean / Taiwanese / Japanese entering Ivy league schools on scholarships with insane GRE / TOEFL scores but can’t speak a single sentence in English. why? because all they ever study is how to actually score well on the test, which often doesn’t actually involve you knowing how to use the language itself. they started changing these tests in recent years precisely because of that.
Remembering a ton of vocabularies and then remembering complex grammar structures (that ironically, the majority of native speakers probably don’t even know that well in a systematic sense). can usually allow you to do reasonably well on most tests in east asia, but it doesn’t mean you learned any real English.
The biggest problem of all is that as a whole, East Asians are teaching their kids English as if they were adults. which is just totally wrong. it was the unfortunately comprimise of the past when people lacked actual resource and enviornments to teach in a more reasonable method, but have basically been taken as a norm and continued despite the obvious change of circumstances.
Why not? I’m an employer, who needs lawyers and staff to help me solve problems for our English-speaking clients. It’s still really, really hard to find Korean lawyers who are good with English.
Our firm’s hiring committee does a great job of getting young English-speaking lawyers, so we’re probably better set than most (about 25% of our total numbers can work in English), but still — at many Korean law firms most of the lawyers, especially the juniors, are quite language-impaired and it’s a problem in servicing the work. Other Hole readers who work at other law firms can probably confirm.
One very large firm at which I used to work has in the intervening years reverted to having the associates prepare all their advice in Korean first and then having others translate it to Konglish. Yuck. Slow, expensive, and often poorly-targeted.
Since I’ve been here the situation has improved considerably, to the point of simply being dire. All I know is that if my truly bilingual/bicultural daughters (they laugh endlessly at Muhan Dojeon) decide to go into business with Daddy when they’re old enough, we’re going to clean up.
@ Brendan,
I can understand your frustration. But remember, the “10 years” some people claim to have studied is just English as a school subject/course, just as Rolling Wave (#8) pointed out. I took Spanish in school for 6 years, but I still consider myself far from conversant as I don’t immerse myself into the language and culture. Studying language without the immersion is just like studying any other subject without the practical use. They basically just go to class, practice a few sentences and then load up on vocabulary and grammar rules….but once the tests are done, you think they retain most of that vocabulary? Of course not.
1. It is unlikely that such students really, truly cannot speak a single sentence in English. Generally they can, however incorrectly and haltingly to our ears. And because they know they don’t sound very good, they usually pretend they don’t speak at all.
2. Why is speaking more important than anything else? Of course speaking should be learned, but why is the (apparent) inability to speak the gauge for language proficiency?
Same. What is “real English”? These students will be able to read books, websites and emails in English. That’s not real?
Not if they can’t have a rational discussion with their profs. Passing tests is not all there is to getting your MA or Ph.D
Darth, but that’s not my question. On what basis can one assert that learning vocabulary and grammar does not amount to learning “real English”?
The Korean is wrong, as usual.
Language is about communication. Vocabulary and arcane rules of grammar are valuable, yes, if they foster communication. But with Koreans, such learning does not foster communication. Korea’s best students might be proficient in artificial test-score English, but that is not real English; and their inability to respond to a simple Good morning! after 10 years of study is pathetic and an indictment of Korea’s schools.
P.S.
The Korean’s question seems to presume that Korea’s top students can at least read and write (though not speak and listen) proficiently. But that is not the case, from my experience at least. Test-score English is truly an artificial academic subject with no use or benefit in the real world.
Reading and writing is not communication?
Serious question, WeikuBoy — how much exposure do you have to Korea’s top students? Who are the top students that you speak of? Because I went to top high school and have numerous friends at top colleges now. In fact right now, I have a side project with a Korean lawyer translating an English law textbook into Korean. This guy never stepped foot outside of Korea, but went to my HS and then SNU. Straight product of Korean education. His spoken English might be terrible, but his translation is impeccable.
But you’ll accept that I have sufficient exposure to Korea’s top students, right, thekorean? I’m telling you, Korea’s top students — as represented by those who have successfully become lawyers — very frequently have profound difficulties using English to communicate.
Besides, an education system that only educates its very tip-top students is not praiseworthy. Get into any taxicab in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavian countries (hell, even France) and see the level of English that European cab drivers have. Or any retail establishment. Unless you’re telling us that Parisian cab drivers and shopgirls are products of grandes écoles, there may be something there for Korea to benchmark.
I’m with you on WeikuBoy being one of the all-time morons, but I think you may be defending an indefensible position here.
It’s real enough, I guess, as long as you don’t have to leave your computer and you’re not expected to interact face-to-face.
A lot of Korea’s “worst” students speak English really well, actually. There are plenty of kids who failed to achieve much in Korean schools and so were shipped off by their rich parents to high schools and universities in America. It’s a smart move, because the kids will likely have a better chance getting a job in Korea with a foreign degree than with one from a Korean university out in the boonies.
One of the all-time morons responds thusly:
Actually, I concede to TK that I was wrong to say that even well-educated Koreans cannot read OR write (much less speak or listen) well in English. Of course they must be able to read test questions, as shading in the correct circles on answer cards is what Test-Score English is all about.
Your lawyer friend, meanwhile, is “translating” from English to Korean (with your help on U.S./English legal terms, I should hope), and not from Korean to English. You admit his spoken English is “terrible”, and I’d bet his writing in English is no picnic, either. That his writing in Korean is “impeccable” doesn’t really help your argument.
I should think writing well is the hardest language skill to master. That was certainly true for the Korean teachers I worked with, every one of whom could more (younger women) or less (older men) communicate through speaking and listening, but whose writing, despite their supposed mastery of grammar and vocabulary, was uniformly wretched. To write well depends on having a feel for the spoken language; and none of them had any real feel for the English language.
I had “access” to several (~50) of the top engineering graduate students in Korea while a post-doc in a national lab several years ago. While I concede that the “top students” don’t pile into engineering in Korea the way they do in The States, I must say, the English of these “top students,” on average, was true shit. The homeless-looking guy offering me drugs in Switzerland several years back could have run circles around these guys’ miserable Konglish. I doubt he had a Canadian ESL teacher.
Note – my Korean is quite shit too.
cmm:
From this description, he may well have been a Canadian ESL teacher.
“[H]e may well have been a Canadian ESL teacher.”
LOL
Brendon overall you’re right, i’m the one who’s always ranting about the stupidity and the ineffectiveness of the Hagwon folly, said so i don’t know if a comparison between Koreans and citizens of the countries you mention really make lots of sense as the languages spoken in those nations are not too different from English. Not to mention the geographical proximity of the UK with her flow of tourists, students, entertainment products etc.
Even a Latin language speaker like me found acquiring so-so English skills a relatively easy task, on the other hand i find extremely painful to retain Korean words in my brain, making expanding my limited vocabulary a slow and difficult process.
(the exception being the word kanhagi which for some reason has a very similar equivalent in Italian)
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