Teacher?

I've done a lot of talking on here.  I've talked as a traveller about the sights of Korea.  I've talked as a ninja, about the new and interesting ways I daily learn to make badguys' faces go ouchie.  I've even talked as a poet about being inspired by a fantastical land.  But none of those are really my job. 
So this week I'm going to take a little break from all of those and do something Jeff-teacher should've been doing on here long ago:  teach language. 
First of all, let me be frank with everyone.  Every (especially monolingual) English speaker needs to know something that will be absolutely vital to today's lesson:
English
Is
Complicated.
Yes, we've all got it figured out.  And we use it unbelievable amounts every day.  Some of us may even be quite good at it.  I know I aspire to hold that title.  And through a good deal of practicing writing and speaking, I've come to be pretty darn competent at speakin Amurrican.  The problem, however, comes when a student doesn't ask me HOW to make a sentence, but why I phrased it that way.  Here, you know what?  Let me show you

Take this sentence:
I would like to have gotten a black belt by the time I leave.

The subject of this sentence is fairly obvious- I.  the sentence is about me.
There are two nouns in here, time, and black belt.
Verbs?  Now we get into trouble
would like, have gotten, leave.  A sentence describing a single action takes five verbs?  uh oh.
not to mention all the 'to's and 'the's and 'a's with which English loves to garnish such magnificent spreads.

And why do we say "have gotten" and not "have"?
well, one describes the act of acquiring the belt, the completion of training, the other is just a state of being in possession of---
And if you had tried to answer this question in this manner, your 12 year old Korean student's eyes would've glazed over, before rewarding you with a meek "ok"  and returning to her seat.

When you try to put the whole picture together for every sentence, the question of why we phrase things the way we do becomes more and more daunting, as you realize that almost everything you know about English, you just know. 
Great.
Now teach.

Possibly (read: certainly without a doubt) compounding the problem is the inherent vagueness in much of the Korean language.  As with last time, I'll give you an example.  I was studying my Korean textbook with my language exchange partner this weekend, when I came across a sentence whose every word I could translate.  For all the help that did me, the sentence may as well have been in Aramaic.
It read, literally,
Movie like.
I asked my language partner, what does that mean?  She was surprised I couldn't understand, after all, the words were English now.

It means, she told me, like movie.

Like movie?  These two words are insufficient to carry meaning in English, and could mean all manner of things.
I like this movie.
I would like a movie.
I like movies (Korean words are often ambiguous as to singular or plural)
Do you like movies? (there is no subject in the Korean sentence).
I had to supply several sentences in English relating to the topic before a meaning could be discovered (it did in fact mean I like movies)

Of course, English speakers often speak in incomplete sentences (see the game last night?), but this is only in casual conversation.  Textbook Korean is indeed this vague. 
So the next time I curse helping verbs, or the present continuous tense in English, it might be a good reminder for me to again appreciate whether I movie like.

I'd like to make a final note here before signing off.  I recently had an international study brought to my attention that showed Korean students as the single group who graduated with the lowest social skills of all the countries surveyed.  And when you think about it, they never really had a chance at this competition.

• Most of the students I've met, starting at middle school, are in all boys or all girls schools, because having the opposite sex in class detracts from studying
• Students' regulated haircuts and uniforms are to prevent- you guessed it- appearances from distracting from study
• Students in class are conditioned not to take initiative in discussion, but to instead sit passively and note-take
• When offered the choice between training in multiple choice test-taking skills and training in better speaking and writing, the students will choose the test skills (in my experience) because their speaking and writing skills will not get them into a university or a job, their test skills will. 

So essentially a group of students who are actively prevented from learning to talk to the opposite sex, learning to dress and groom themselves independently, learning to speak in class, and learning to speak and write their own ideas at all are being pitted against the western world's students in exactly these categories. 
Are you surprised at all?   Would you go to the Kentucky derby and bet on a fish?  (a consistent individual will have the same answer to those two questions, for the record).
The counter may be made by those who have seen the international reports that Americans are consistently outscored by Koreans on fair globalized, standardized tests- that socializing is nice, but Korean students graduate much better prepared to achieve high-paying jobs.  To everyone who bemoans the diminishing ability of American graduates to keep up with their better educated peers in the East, I offer a single, simple reminder, a third test if you will, to the socially skilled American and the academically skilled Korean

And this test will take place in a job interviewer's office.


If you can't baffle them with your brilliance, bedazzle them with your BS,
Jeff-Teacher