Learning Korean 10: I told you so

In keeping with my decision to slow down and get my head out of the textbook (and ignore its demands that I keep cramming in vocabulary and new grammar), I've been focusing on one thing for about a month now: the indirect reporting construction. 

This is the "said that" construction, as in "I said that it was cold yesterday."

What makes this difficult (beyond it just being a new construction in Korean) is the different, but related, forms it can take: in the future tense, instead of -다고, -ㄹ거라고 is used

학생이 수업을 다녀요. "The student attends class."

저는 학생이 수업을 다닌다고 했어요. "I said that the student attends class." (Compare with 저는 학생이 수업을 다닐거라고 했어요. "I said that the student will attend class.")

In the future, it's 저는 학생이 수업을 다닐거냐고 물어봤어요. "I asked whether the student will attend class."

저는 학생이 수업을 다니는지 물어봤어요. How this differs from the form above, I don't really understand. I also don't understand what happens when subjects are omitted in these kinds of indirect statements and questions. The subtleties multiply. I'm just trying to keep up with the rudiments.

Incidentally, the direct reporting construction ("I said, quote, it was cold yesterday, unquote.") is very similar to the indirect reporting construction: instead of -다고 it uses 라고.

저는 학생이 수업을 다녀요라고 헀어요. "I said 'the student attends class.'" (Notice how the original sentence—학생이 수업을 다녀요—appears completely intact here, followed by 라고, which acts like a closing quotation mark.)

Anyway, this is what I've been doing: writing sentences and then "converting" them into indirect statements and questions, one after another, hoping the repetition somehow hammers it home.

On Tutoring

I just wrapped up another quarter of volunteer ESL tutoring at Seattle Central College. This was, I think, my fifth quarter, and I still really enjoy it. I like feeling that I can play a role in someone's life, helping to introduce them to English, to Seattle, to the US. I admire these students, who have probably had to overcome far more than I have, and I'm proud to have the chance to help them. Unlike previous quarters, this quarter I had only one student. R is from Somalia. She's peppery. That's the best word I can think of to describe her. She is prone to kvetch, not shy about complaining. But she warmed up to me, and we would laugh as we read together from her workbook or when I quizzed her on past tense forms.

I still think that's one of the toughest things about English. It's just so confounding, the way the language forces you to memorize unguessable exceptions to everyday words, words you'll use and encounter in every English conversation. It seems so mean. R had trouble with this. She couldn't remember some of the most common irregular verbs, and she resorted to a workaround: did leave for left. I told her that didn't sound very natural, but it was good enough for her.

Prepositions in general were difficult, too: I came six o'clock. The truck leave Somalia. She talked him.

Another thing many English learners, including R, have a great deal of trouble with is articles. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that English forbids certain nouns—singular count, or countable, nouns—from appearing naked: *I ate cookie. *We visited museum. *When playing soccer, the man broke finger.

In each of these almost-but-not-quite-English sentences, a singular count noun (cookie, museum, finger) appears without an article. (Actually, what they lack is a determiner, of which articles are one type.) You have to use a determiner with a singular count noun: for instance, I ate the cookie; We visited that museum; When playing soccer, the man broke his finger.

I have seen English learners from all kinds of linguistic backgrounds produce sentences like those, sentences with bare singular count nouns. This particular mistake seems pretty resistant to correction. In my solipsism I always wonder: How can they not hear how... unfinished that sounds? I know that's a dumb reaction. They don't hear it because they haven't yet mastered this arbitrary requirement of English. Just as I haven't yet mastered plenty of arbitrary requirements of, say, Korean (or any arbitrary requirements of Somali).

R and I ended the quarter on a good note. She told me more about her personal story, how she made her sometimes harrowing way to Seattle. And I was reminded, again, of the importance of language. How this person's experiences—all our experiences—are locked away inside until language can send them out into the world.