처음부터 지금까지

처음 - The Beginning

Four years ago in Kyongju, I was waiting to cross a street in the city when a Korean man came up and spoke to me in Korean. Apparently, he had mistaken me for a Korean. I replied to him in English that I don't understand Korean. Immediately he switched and spoke to me in a mixture of simple English and Korean. I guessed that he was asking me where I came from. I told him I came from Singapore. He said that Singapore, beautiful. I smiled. He went on speaking in Korean and the only words I could pick out was "hangook myon" (한국면-韓國面). I used my hand to pull out an outline of my face and repeated "hangook myon?" to confirm that he was actually trying to tell me that my face looked like a Korean. He nodded his head. I grinned.

Back then, I have not started my learning of Korean language. So I was pleasantly surprised at myself for guessing correctly what the Korean man was trying to say. But guessing was not something that I was satisfied with. On returning from my Korea trip, I started my search for Korean language course, textbook, dictionary and website. I thought that it was that "accidental" meeting which set me off on my Korean language learning journey.

Four years ago, Hanryu (한류-韓流) has yet to reach the shore of Singapore. The opportunity for Korean language learning was very limited. The Singapore Korean School was one of those few institutions that offered Korean language course. But when I checked their website, there was no updated information on upcoming language course. In fact, for more than a year, the language course information in SKS's website was not updated. Maybe there could be courses running, but I never called to check. The Cambridge School of Languages was another institution which I checked on. I wrote several enquiry e-mails at different time to them but they all bounced because the school's mailbox had reached its size limit. It was quite disappointing. Because of that experience, I thought that the school was not my type of institution and I decided to give it a miss.

I also checked on the National University of Singapore's website but there was no Korean language courses offered. Finally, I had to settle for self-study. I bought three Korean textbooks and one dictionary from the bookstore. None of them was published in Korea. The dictionary was published in the US and the three textbooks were published in places like London, Taiwan and Hong Kong. I self-studied Korean language for about three years. But there is a limit to how far one can learn through self-study. The downside of self-study was apparent to me. I was strong in writing, average in reading and very poor in speaking and hearing.

In August 2005, I decided to search the web again for Korean language courses in Singapore. I was in luck when I checked the NUS's website. Korean language courses finally made their way into NUS. I submitted my application form for the Conversational Basic Korean Level 1 which started in October and the rest was history.

지금 - The Present

It was almost a year since I started my Korean language programme at NUS Extension. The progress I had made in my Korean language over the last 10 months was way much more than what I had achieved over the 3 years of self-study. For my course now, I am using textbooks published by Sogang University and a respectable English-Korean dictionary published in Korea. I am grateful to my Korean teacher for undertaking the task of setting up a comprehensive curriculum for Korean language learning in Singapore and to Hanryu for creating a sizeable demand for Korean langauge courses and set the momentuan for the development of better and higher level Korean language courses locally. Today, I am still a beginner in Korean language and I will like to remain a beginner in my learning of the language.