Tag Archives: parents

Language Training in the Missionary Training Center

Posted by on June 2, 2009 8 comments

Before I write this post, I should give you a disclaimer. Although I was a LDS/Mormon missionary in the past I have since removed my name from the church for reasons I talk about in this post called “물몬교의 숨은 역사”. I am not bitter or angry against the church or the members, I simply have come to believe that it isn’t true. I loved my time as a missionary and am very happy that I went. Heck, I wouldn’t know anything about Korea if I didn’t go on my mission. Now that y’all know where I’m coming from, let me give quick overview of what a mission entails.

Just some quick facts about LDS missions, unmarried men 19 to 25 can serve two years while unmarried women 21 to 25 can serve one and a half years. It’s expected that all young men in the church serve a mission (though it’s technically voluntary) while completely voluntary for women. All missionaries around the world pay $400 US dollars each month to cover all expenses. During those entire two or one and a half years missionaries dedicate their entire life to preaching the gospel. The only contact they have with family is through letters once a week and two phone calls a year. There are also a lot of rules that make it so missionaries don’t play around, but we did get time to do what we wanted (not everything) once a week from morning until 6. The rest of the week missionaries either proselyte out on the streets (oh many do I have stories there) or teach in appointments. Okay, let’s look into the MTC. Here I am entering the MTC (no name tag yet, so it actually looks a little weird lol), bright-eyed and eager to learn!:

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For missionaries, this is the last time you will see your family for two years regardless of how close you serve to them. They have a little presentation and then the parents go out one side of the room and the missionaries go out of the other, so it’s a very emotional time for many.

As many of you know, missionaries always travel in pairs (called companionships). Well, missionaries even stay in pairs in the MTC. You go back to your new dorm and meet your new companion who you’ll be with 24/7 for your entire MTC stay. For English missionaries, they stay two weeks, Spanish six weeks, and for harder languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean it’s twelve weeks. That’s all the time you have before you’re thrown into the field to find and teach investigators with nothing more than up to an hour of personal language study every day. For companions who don’t click well, the MTC can be a living hell, but my companion was really fun and not totally uptight. Here’s us trying to escape from the MTC (which missionaries can’t leave):

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Everything is organized exactly how it is in the field. Missionaries are always in companionships of two or three people (called threesomes) if there’s an odd number. Those companions are in groups of about four companionships called districts. Districts are part of zones (in the field it’s all geographically based, in the MTC it’s all language based). Teachers teach one district each, so we get a lot of individual attention. Here was my awesome district:

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Our group of Korean missionaries actually was quarantined for a few days, you can read that post over here.

If you’ve ever called a phone number from an LDS commercial or from one of the cards the missionaries give out, you’ve probably talked to a missionary. In the MTC we did service by answering phone calls to the church about sending out pamphlets and free books. It also helps us get out of our shell in case we’re super shy or anything like that. Out of all the missionaries there, I always got the long calls for some reason. I guess it prepared me for my mission since I had many ‘interesting’ conversations out in the field. Anyways, here’s me at one of the desks in the call center:

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Now to get into the beef of the MTC: study time! Our daily schedule was pretty much the same every day. We would have three study sessions every day that lasted three hours, one session which was personal study. Each session would be about half language and half gospel.

The first thing we learned do to in Korean, after spending a one day on Hangeul, was to pray. We prayed when we woke up, when we started and ended a study session, ate food, before we worked out, at night before going to bed, and numerous other times. We were encouraged to say our prayers in Korean anytime possible to practice. As you can imagine, our prayers were fairly repetitive since we didn’t know much Korean. It was always pretty simple, things like ‘thank you for giving us our families’ and such things. We also did things like sing hymns in Korean, read scriptures in Korean (even though we didn’t understand it, it was mostly pronunciation practice), etc. Most, well pretty much all, of our vocabulary was attained through learning it in the context of teaching about our church.

Instead of using a regular Korean textbook, we had a special book put together by the church which taught how to teach about the gospel in Jesus Christ. It was kind of funny, because we couldn’t talk about a lot of simple topics but we could talk about advanced gospel topics. Not only that, we didn’t even practice middle form. In order to be respectful, we only learned the highest form used in normal conversation (-합니다/-합니까). Korean missionaries are never allowed to use low level language (-해) and are expected to use high form when they teach out in the field.

The teachers in the MTC were returned missionaries who had served in Korean speaking missions so they pretty much knew how to prepare us for the field. The teachers are generally students from Brigham Young University (BYU), the university next door which is also owned by the church. Here’s one of the teachers who was a second generation Korean from Hawaii:

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We played some games that helped us have some fun.  We did things like 3-6-9 (funny video of that game here) and some others that I can’t remember the name of.  We also had weekly sessions where we taught fake investigators for 20-30 minutes twice with a scenario and another session where we taught another teacher other than our main teachers.

All in all it was pretty good training for teaching about the gospel and provided a good root for learning Korean.  I cemented my love for studying Korean in the MTC and so was infamous for studying Korean every free minute of the day.  Now that I’m home I’ve found a lot of joy in continuing my studies, hoping to finally get to Korea.  As missionaries we weren’t allowed to watch TV or listen to music, so I’m still filling up on those right now =).

Understanding Korean Management (MBIK 3)

Posted by on January 12, 2009 1 comment

Koreans have come a long way, at the end of the Korean war they were a very poor people.  Now you have well known brands like Hyundai, LG and Samsung (although I think most people don’t know they are Korean brands).

Organizational Loyalty

Koreans have a very rigorous work schedule, some start at 8:30 am and end by 8:30 pm.  Even wives sometimes tell their husbands to work more if other husbands around the neighborhood do more.  It’s a social norm for an employee to seemingly dedicate their life to their company.

Koreans have a word for this idea of loyalty to a company, it’s called 인화 (human-loyalty).   Because of this, and perhaps many other factors, the rate of absenteeism in Korea is only one percent while it is five percent in the United States.

Founder’s Conviction

Since Korean companies are so young, they still have the entrepreneurial spirit that their founders had only one generation ago.  Many of the companies today are being run by the sons of the founder, who try to emulate the spirit which brought the companies from nothing to strong multi-national organizations in seemingly no time.

Paternalism

One of the big differences between Korean and Western companies is that Korean companies run like a family.  While Western companies frown on such activities, Koreans see it as a mutual relationship.  They hire on to a company expecting to have a secure job and have their family taken well care of.  In return, the company expects the employee to work as hard as they can and be loyal to the company.

Hierarchical Organization

Korean companies are organized very much like the military, employees respect those in higher positions very much and those in higher positions expect those lower than them to obey with no questions asked.  This is very much like the Korean society, which is very much a age-based hierarchy.

‘Carrot and Stick’

Employees of many companies get two things, rewards and punishments.  This idea (신상필벌) comes from the people responding to stimuli for better or for worse.

Group Orientation

Like the Japanese, Koreans are very group-oriented.  Rather than make some decisions as individuals, many decisions are made as a group so as to build comradeship and cohesiveness.

Promotion or Termination

Many older workers are involuntarily retired before age fifty-five.  Some companies even have an unwritten rule to not renew ten percent of contracts of executive contracts every year.  This type of policy is counter-balanced by the strong Korean custom of children taking care of their parents.  Unlike the United States, in Korea children are expected to take complete care of their parents until they pass away.  There is a much higher percentage of families who live with their parents/grand-parents than in the Western society.

Fear and Loathing in Departmental Politics

Since Korean middle-management has a fear of being laid off, many of the managers feel like they should not consult other departments because it will be seen as a weakness of skills.  Therefore, it seems that many departments are headed by people with more general skills rather than a special skill-set.  In Western culture, it is completely acceptable to ask just about anything to other departments but in Korea it is regarded as an admission of incompetence.

If something is needed, managers will send the request up to higher management who is over both departments which will trickle down to the other department and then back the same route.  This can add a lot of extra time which some Western cultures may see as wasted.

Along the same lines of trying to present an air of how one’s self is important, requests for information and demands for modification that go through the department are always commented on or some action done.  If they don’t do much, their department may be seen as something that is not needed.

Government

There is a huge tie between the Korean government and the industries it has helped start.  With such limited resources, Korea felt it was to their advantage to consolidate resources and help individual entities.  Many people call it “Korea, Inc.”  The one major example I heard of this was the huge role the government had in jump starting the steel industry in the south.

Next chapter, Getting a Handle on Information or select a chapter.

Just a few updates

Posted by on December 30, 2008 No comments

I’m probably going to be moving over to a new domain in the future. I just bought http://www.mstrum.com (unique, eh?) so I’m probably going to be moving this blog over there. I’ll be installing WordPress so I can really customize it and make it better. This move probably won’t happen for quite a while, but it will. The new blog will most likely be available at http://www.mstrum.com/onmywaytokorea. I’ll be having some fun setting that up over the near future.

Also, I’ll be adding English and Korean subtitles to the ‘common mistakes Koreans make when speaking English’ video. I’m going to be focusing on being with my parents before heading back to University so I might break my precedent of making an entry every day. That’s OK because I need to try to be a 효자 and if that means spending every moment of the day with them.

클래식 (The Classic)

Posted by on December 7, 2008 2 comments

classic

클래식 is by far my favorite Korean romance movie. It combines the traditional dramatic forbidden love story with a modern tale of love and happiness finally found. If you like tear jerkers, this one’s for you. The flowing dialog, beautiful cinematography and music, and deep character development all contribute to potentially the best film out of Korea.

Sometimes I think I’m a hopeless romantic…

Music Video

Cultural Notes

1. Arranged marriages were and are still fairly common in Korea, though they are a little different than what Americans think they are. Instead of the parents finalizing the decision, usually the parents continually choose new suitors while the daughters/sons can choose from the people their parents put them with.

2. More poop humor, you have to love it. I think I kind fine some in every movie. Along with seeing guys look through poop to find some beetles and later collecting bags of their OWN poop, you get to see the infamous 똥침 (literally translated as poop-needle). I have only received this once thankfully. Korean kids love to walk behind people, put their hands together making a ‘needle’ with their two index fingers, and punch you in the butt as hard as you can. I’m not looking forward to this at all.

3. Korea is a very patriarchal and age-respective society. Not to say America doesn’t have some of the same traits, but it is much more engrained in the Korean culture. There’s a special character in Korean that means dedication to your elders (효) which most Koreans believe is much more important than personal thought / freedom. Thus you see more families living with their parents, less departure from parental beliefs, etc. I won’t say what happened, but you see a very sad turn in the plot due to this particular trait.

Language Notes

A girl asks a guy to say these tongue twisters before he runs away (go here for more):
간장공장 공장장은 장 공장장이고 된장공장 공장장은 강 공장장이다.
“The manager of the soy sauce factory is Manager Jang and the manager of the soy paste factory is Manager Gang.”

엽기적인 그녀 (My Sassy Girl)

Posted by on December 3, 2008 1 comment

mysassygirl

I believe it is very insightful to study a language and culture through the film industry. Unlike books, you can see people in action dealing with situations which show the peculiarities with each culture.

Although, if you believe everything you see in k-dramas you would probably believe that every person is currently dating the wrong person and will eventually run into a 3- or 4-person love triangle which will end up with the perfect couples together in the end (and along the way someone will probably die or be injured very badly).

I’ve watched so much Korean TV, I’ll try to do some reviews for stuff I’ve seen in the past. By no mean will these be comprehensive, I just want to post a few thoughts for all of the movies, dramas and music I have watched or listened to.

My first Kmovie I ever watched

I loved 엽기적인 그녀! I am a romantic-comedy lover and this is definitely a classic. Yes, it’s a little long but you will appreciate it in the end when everything comes together. The chemistry between the actors is very well developed. The main girl breaks the traditional girls-are-weak image and is outlandishly blunt and open. She writes horrendously horrible stories, constantly hits and makes jabs at the main guy. He of course is thrown into the relationship and just rides along as he begins to realize he likes her even though she’s a little crazy. Like most Korean love stories, in the end fate is what really decides if you should be with that other special person.

Music Video


Culture Notes

1. There are some great scenes that really seem to show how parents are to their children, especially about education and punishing children. A lot of Korean parents use a round-stick (which has a special name, but I forgot what they call it) that is basically the American version of the belt.

2. Drinking is very integral in the Korean social culture so you get to see that, I love how Koreans drink 소주 and then make the throat sound (hard to describe, you have to see this in the Movie). A few of my friends do the same thing so I have gotten into the habit of doing it.

3. Gang culture is very big at least in the Korean film industry. You get to see some fun jabs at it.

4. The issue about what level of language to use between people of different ages is brought up. I spoke nothing but 존댓말 (used to show respect) for two years so it’s still a little hard to switch to 반말 (spoken between friends) sometimes. I usually forget to switch 나 for 저.

Just a side note, I saw the American-remake and I was a little disappointed. Stick with the original.