Letter from Korea

A few days ago I got an email from Yousuke, a Japanese student who is studying for a year in Korea. I thought it was very interesting so with his permission I am posting it today. I just made one or two small changes.

"Hello! I'm now having very interesting days in Korea like having a camp with Korean students and studying economics in Korean or watching difference in culture between Korea and Japan. So, from now, I'll write about what I came to recognize through living in Korea. Politeness I think that Korean has much strong polite words like ‘Keigo’ than Japanese and Chinese. Compared with Chinese and Korean, both of which I studied at University, I think that if looked only at language , I think that Chinese hasn’t much polite language because it is very similar to English. In Korea surprisingly, among very close friends, if they have difference of ages, the younger one must use polite words to the elder! It is also among children. They must use polite language to their parents in Korea. And even if Korean people have any fight with each other, they also use polite words if they are not close nor have the same age friend. If a Korean got married, wife should use polite words to husband even she is elder than him.

"Polite things in language also appeared very much in other behavior in Korea. For example, at a convenience store in Korea, customer usually uses polite language to the shop’s person because they are not close. But it is a really strange thing to a Japanese because most Japanese thinks that customer has a strong advantage to the shop’s person and the customer usually doesn’t use polite words to the shop’s staff even if the customer is younger than the shop’s staff! Korean people have pay attention to use polite words or normal words even if very close person. And if the one suddenly use normally words to the other, it may be a little rude thing to the partner. And I think that there is a different appearance of polite meaning in conversation even if the Korean and Japanese are in same situation.

"The different thing among Japanese and Korean is as below thing: in Korean language, most polite meanings appeared in ‘what something is called and is also in the kind of verb used to the speaking partner. But in Japanese language, polite meaning sometimes appears only in a ‘what something is called’ without appearing in the verb. The relation of parents and children is one example of the situation. In Korean families, the children must use their parents by the proper form of address, but also they must use a term of respect in their verbs. Contrary to that, in Japanese families, although the children usually call their father ‘Otousan’ a meaning a polite word for a father in Japanese, children doesn’t use a verb of respect like ’saremasuka?’, the polite word for ‘do?’, to their parents. In this way, I felt that there are many points of difference between Japanese and Korean about 'polite' in conversation and behavior. I also feel that Japanese arrogant manner of a customer to the clerk is not so good thing and it is a sign that Japanese lose a little by little taking care of other person, I think. Maybe difference of politeness between Japan and Korea comes from strongness of Confucianism in Korea. Like that, I think that religion has a strong effect on one country's language. And apart from religion, like custom also strong effect on language. So Americans don't have terms of respect in language, even Koreans grown up in America.

"By the way, I was really surprised that the average English level of Korean students is very high. In Japan, I took TOEIC test and I usually gets a score of around 700-points. I noticed that in Korea, average skill of using English of Korean students is like me or higher than me! I think that it is higher than in Japan. But through English taking class in Korea, I knew that the student's skill is very high here! And they seems to have almost no difficulties to have a conversation with English speakers. I don't know why they are so skilled English even though maybe they don't have so many times to touch with English speakers compared to me. And I honestly felt that their hearing skill is averagely very high . For example, even when I can't understand the English teacher's order in English, almost every Korean student understood it after only one hearing. I felt that it is a sign of how Korea is using the power of English education compared to the Japanese."

Younger and younger

When out cycling around my Tokyo suburb I sometimes see a group of small children playing in the park with their teacher. Most of them look Japanese, but he looks European. And they all chatter away in English. They are from a pre-school popular not only with the small number of foreign parents in my locality but also with many Japanese who hope their kids will grow up to be bilingual.

It was not until this year that English classes were officially introduced into the Japanese elementary school curriculum, after many years of experiments and debate about whether this would mean too much work for children and teachers alike. But increasing numbers of parents are circumventing the standard education system by finding opportunities for their children to learn English. In 2006 it is estimated that 21% of Japan’s five-year-olds were taking private lessons. Are their parents’ expectations realistic?

Yuko, a Tokyo housewife who tries to teach her daughter basic English after she comes home from elementary school, feels Japan’s education system is in crisis and wants her child to have chances that she never had because of her own poor English - including the possibility of going to an overseas university. Doubts about Japanese higher education are growing as the decline in the birth-rate forces many universities to lower standards in order to compete for fewer and fewer students. But for Akiko, an elementary schoolteacher, Yuko’s views are unrealistic. Teaching English to young children means either increasing total classroom hours or reducing time spent on other subjects. And she worries that ability to read and write Japanese will decline.

Almost everyone knows of some child picking up two or more languages quite easily by being in a multilingual environment. But the evidence that young kids learn languages much more easily than older ones is not as clear as many people think. One of the strongest factors in language acquisition is the amount of exposure. It is rare for older children, let alone adults, to be able to immerse themselves in another language because they have so many activities in their lives. But if they did, perhaps they could learn quickly too.

Many other Asian countries have been much more enthusiastic about early English. In the major cities of China and Taiwan, children start the language from grade one, and those parents who can afford it have their kids in private English classes from much younger – a practice that is increasingly common in Saudi Arabia too, where state schools don’t offer English until age ten. In South Korea, where English starts in the third grade at state schools, 74% of children get a head start by taking private lessons in the 1st and 2nd grade. There are even English DVDs for babies. In a survey conducted by Park Yaku of Gyeonggi National University of Education, over a third of parents of 1st- and 2nd-graders said they spent $60 – 100 a month on these classes. Significantly, parents said they would be likely to spend even more on private English if the government carries out plans to introduce the language from the 1st grade. “It’s not that I’m so crazy about English,” one young father told me. “I just don’t have much choice. If I don’t send my son [to private English classes] he’ll fall behind the others.”

Military exercises

When a friend and I were trekking in Nepal twenty years ago we found very few locals able to speak English, but every so often we would pass someone working in a field with whom we could chat fluently. Usually these were older men who had been Gurkhas – Nepalese soldiers who serve with the British or Indian army.

Under international law the Brigade of Gurkhas are an integral part of the British army, yet only in 2007 were their pensions raised to the value of those of their UK comrades; even now the Ministry of Defence appears to be trying to reduce its financial commitment through a policy of early retirement. But there is no shortage of support when it comes to strategies to promote military efficiency, and language is at the centre of these. The Gurkha Language Wing organises courses “to equip Gurkha soliders to operate alongside multinational forces,” including a 9-week English programme for new recruits.

Clearly it is crucial that participants in international training exercises and actual operations are able to understand each other, and the number of such collaborations is increasing. NATO has expanded beyond the group of 12 North Atlantic nations which formed it in 1947. Turkey has been a member since 1952, and the break-up of the Soviet Union led to Individual Partnership plans with several other Asian countries including Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. In 2004 the latter created a military language institute in Almaty to train officers in French, German, Turkish, Chinese and above all English.

Military English is now a significant and growing business. In 2005 a series of coursebooks for teaching military peacekeepers was shortlisted for an Elton, the ELT world’s equivalent of an Oscar. UK-based Military English Language Training Ltd advertises itself as far away as India as a “combination of English language teachers and former military personnel” with experience from British, NATO and UN operations. It targets members of overseas armed forces expecting to take part in multinational operations and its website http://www.military-english.co.uk/ includes pages in Arabic. The British Council has been particularly active in this field, managing a programme of Peacekeeping English projects on behalf of the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

But British military involvement in Asia is dwarfed by that of the United States, whose emergence by the end of the Second World War as a global military power was a major impetus behind the globalisation of English. In South Korea, for example, General Hodge set up an English military school in 1946 whose cadets included future president Park Chung Hee. The Korea Military Academy sought to adopt not only America’s military practices but also its doctrines and culture, with English language a key discipline. Today the Academy’s intensive English programmes target the whole cadet corps and aim “to cultivate officers capable of performing joint military operations with UN forces”. These include the four main annual exercises of the SK-US Combined Forces Command: Team Spirit, Ulchi Focus Lens, RSOI and Foal Eagle.

All the examples of military English mentioned above have been tools of powerful governments, but it should not be forgotten that English also has a small but significant role among Asia’s anti-government movements. Many of the ethnic-based forces fighting the Burmese government make extensive use of English to stay in contact with each other and the outside world. And when a faction of the Japanese Red Army hijacked a Japan Airlines flight in Dhaka in 1977 they refused to speak Japanese, even to the Japanese negotiator flown to Bangladesh. The tapes that survive from the incident reveal some of the communication problems that can occur when a well-educated but English-deficient group of hijackers try to convey threats about time limits and hostage executions to negotiators who either genuinely do not understand them or claim not to do so as a delaying tactic.