Nice To Meet You!

There's a teacher at my school who says to me "Nice to meet you!" every day we meet. My students do the same thing to me, and no matter how many times I tell them it's wrong, they just don't quite get it.

Whether you're old friends catching up, or strangers walking past each other on the street, "Nice to meet you" has become the quintessential greeting Koreans use when speaking English. There is very little deviation from it (until people become quite fluent), which I can't quite understand. I think it stems from a bad translation of the Korean word 반갑다 (bangabda), meaning to be pleased, which is a general greeting used in all sorts of situations for Koreans. Since this verb can be used for both "Nice to meet you" and "Good to see you again" people here seem to have stuck with the first one they learned. And so I've begun taking pain-staking process in each of my classes to differentiate between "Nice to meet you" and "Good to see you".

The next miracle I perform on my students will be to stop the use of nouns to describe feelings. This, however, I find hilarious, and I'll be sad if I do ever teach them to stop answering questions like "How are you?" with "Teacher, I am smile." or "Teacher, I am pizza!" One of my favourite responses when I ask how students are comes from one of lower level students. Wang Jeong Uk (왕정욱) is in gr. 5 and has about zero English skills. Even 5 extra hours a week with me still didn't get him anywhere. But now, after two years with this goofy kid, this is how he answers me:

Me: Jeong Uk, how are you?

Wang: Teacher, my angry... (waves his hands) Kim Jin Geon punch-ie! (makes a punching sound.) My (korean ramblings)... My teacher (falls out of chair) yes? O-K? Yes!

Me: Good job, Jeong Uk.

So it goes.

I'm off to make some legitimate extra money after class today. You may or may not be aware of many teachers making extra cash teaching private lessons in Korea, which is quite illegal and can get you booted from the country. In the last week however, I've gotten myself some legitimate overtime with the city education office at $30 an hour, plus Shannon and I did the voice recording for a small island English text. The city job is pretty straight forward, but the recording was quite unreal. I don't think there was much emphasis put on getting it done "properly" when it came to this book. Besides the savage amounts of spelling mistakes, Shannon and I were put in a recording booth with no one who spoke English, given no direction besides "stop" and "go" and asked to read various paragraphs and dialogues. Some of the dialogues invovled as many as 5 separate characters, and while I tried to do some voice "alteration" to fool some of the more deaf children who might listen, all you get is me sounding like a horse and Shannon giggling in the background. And our Korean soundman?

"Good. Go." he says.

Anyway, they may call us in to re-record it, they may just give us $150 each for 2 hours work. I'm not expecting any further interest in my talents, but it sure would be fun to do again. If anything new happens, I'll write about it next week. Thanks for reading.