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Okay, I am finally writing something again. I have many adventures to write, but they will have to come as I feel like posting them, because I am plumb worn out from practicing my korean alphabet and want to go to bed early. I promised I would write about my first day of classes, so I will post that now.

To recap, it is now monday night. I got here last tuesday, had a big old orientation all day wednesday, thursday through saturday set off on a field trip to various parts of the country, spent sunday climbing around Suwon, and today was the first day of classes.

My first class is modern korean history. It should be pretty interesting, I think. It is about modern korean history, and since Korea is rather old, modern means 1392-present. I think we're to focus on the nineteenth century and later, though, with most of the time on the Japanese occupation of the country and the post-WWII division. The teacher is a lady from the Korea institute at Harvard. She is a nice Korean lady who speaks English well but with a pretty heavy accent and who came to class pleasant and well-organized, just like I reckoned she'd be. There were some amazing comments flying around over the weekend, with people whispering in hushed awe that there would be a Harvard Professor! teaching one of the classes, speculating about what kind of strict old gentleman with a posh Oxbridge accent this would be. I think some of the students are disappointed that a Harvard Professor! would turn out to be a regular human being. I like her. She got us all excited by putting on the syllabus, below the required two books, "All required reading materials will be available in a packet at the copy center." We reckoned that meant we didn't have to buy the two books, but it actually turns out to mean we have an enormous packet of photocopied excerpts to get along with the books. We had two reading assignments tonight, both of which were pretty interesting. Tonight I learned about what made the Yi dynasty hold together so well for 500 years (everybody was watching everybody else like a hawk, basically, so nobody got too corrupt), and what ancient Korean people thought was important in the education of women (how to serve their husbands, mostly, and how to behave well).

Then I had the first day of Korean language. This was a bit of an adventure getting started, for there were too many of us taking the class to put us in one room together, so they divided it into an A section and a B section. During the online registration, naturally everyone who wanted beginner level signed up for the A section, to make sure we really really got the beginner's basic stuff in case there was a difference between the two sections. So they said they'd put us all in one room the first day and then split us into sections, so at the appointed hour we all got into one room and waited to be divided. A teacher came in, wrote some names on the board, and then said that everyone whose name was not on the board should go to the other room. Since none of our names were on the board, every single one of us went to the other room. There, another teacher started to call roll. Getting no response to the first several names, the teacher worried that we couldn't understand her accent and started to write the names on the board. Well, they were the same names as the one on the last board, and half of them were people we knew weren't taking language at all (a surprising number of these students are not taking any language). So it turned out they had an incorrect roster of some sort, and they quickly split us in half and will separate us for our real sections tomorrow.

I thought that I would leave the first lesson with phrases like hello, please and thank you, my name is Sarah, et cetera. Nope. Instead we learned the alphabet for two hours, and now I know ten vowels and fifteen consonants. That may not sound like very much, since for everyone reading this it has probably been a long time since they learned the alphabet and it's easy, right?, but it just about made my brain melt. It took intense concentration for that time to keep up with which new strokes stood for which unpronouncable new vowels, and what they did when combined with consonants, and where you place them in relation to each other, and how to identify a whole string of them stuck together on flash cards, and so on. I think I'm getting it pretty well for a total beginner, but lord it moved fast, and every time I thought "Surely that's enough new stuff for today," the enthusiastic teacher would cry "Five more!" By the end of the class period, I suddenly realised that she was laughing at me, and it was because the muscles propping me up had totally given way and I was sprawled across the table on my belly as I tried to decipher the letters she was holding up.

There were about ten students in the room, and a bunch of them already knew either some spoken korean or at least the alphabet, so they were getting things on the flashcards faster than I was. There is no shame in being a beginner, but I'm not used to being behind the rest of a class, and so it was a little frustrating to watch a couple of things go by while other people yelped the answers. I suspect I'm getting it at least as fast as they did the first time, though. Bah. It gives me a new appreciation for the frustration people get at home when Dr. Caton leaps to a brand new interval or chord progression. The woman today actually taught a lot like he does. I think I will like it very much, especially as I get caught up with the other students. The other section went much more slowly than us, only getting through the ten vowels and four consonants. It is possible that when they redo the sections, I will have the less speedy teacher. Even though I have catching up to do, though, I think I'd rather have the fast one. I lagged a bit today, but I was not floudering, and as long as I'm not floundering, I'd rather get through as much as I can in the few weeks I'm here. Partly that will help me get around town, and partly I think it will just help keep me interested in learning the material every day. I'd be depressed if it took me a whole week to get through this alphabet, with eight or more hours of class time spent repeating "Ah, Yah, Aw, Yaw, O, Yo, Oo, Yoo, Eu, Ee." I am glad that we are learning the alphabet first instead of going straight to spoken words. If we got words before the letters, it would be awfully tempting to visualize the words with roman letters and remember them that way, which would make life harder reading things down the road.

After class, I walked down the street to the bookstore for a history text, and to my delight found that I could pronounce a lot of syllables on the Korean license plates and other signs. What they mean I have no clue, but I'm getting to pronounce them. It's been very curious to be here with everything written in a different alphabet. It's not like just not being able to understand the language, as I feel when I look at Spanish instructions and the like on US products. It's like being completely illiterate, and that is a very funny feeling, because I'm not used to being aware that I can read. Being illiterate makes you unable to participate in the world. If I get a chance before I lose that feeling, maybe I will muse on it and write something.

And that is the story of classes today.

Someone said before I left that they knew I wasn't coming here for the scenery. They were correct in that that did not go into my decision-making process, but the scenery does not hurt. If the internet will behave, I will attach a few pictures of what Korea looks like.