Here We Go Again

In the wake of the Dallas police shootings, it's astonishing to see so many Republicans who somehow thought the election of our first black president could miraculously erase five centuries of white violence against black bodies.

Also telling that trained law enforcement officials initially mistook one guy with one military-grade rifle for four highly trained snipers.  Hey, turns out if you make military-grade firepower legal for anybody to buy you're basically going to turn American neighborhoods into war zones.

That'll Do, Pig. That'll Do.

Here's a video of a wild boar storming into a Korean pork soup restaurant, no doubt in an act of triumphant revenge.

One of those "Korea has problems but fuck me the US is a violent hell-hole" kind of days.

— James Got Hacked (@wetcasements) July 8, 2016

My First Complaint Post!

My god, Blogger is awful at importing text and not allowing you to change it to what you already have in use, font and font-size-wise.

Anyone know any tricks for this that don't involve going into the HTML?  I can't believe it's even an issue.

Who Gets To Speak "Real" Chinese?

Historically, the advent of mass communication in the form of television, newspapers, and radio tends to homogenize languages.  Regional English dialects in the United Kingdom were "normalized" by things like the BBC.  The American Mid-Atlantic Accent became the most popular accent for TV and film due primarily to market forces.  But now in China, social networking is having the reverse effect:

"This linguistic homogenisation is being enforced, however, just as a number of forces are pushing in the opposite direction. Technology is empowering regional languages, of which there are hundreds, and enhancing the centrifugal effect of migration, modernity and social change. Young people, empowered by mobile phones and computers, are changing the way they use their own language and breaking out of the straitjacket that has restricted communication for millennia. The trends in language mirror broader tensions between centralising, top-down forces trying to prevent dissent, and bottom-up trends among an increasingly empowered populace. They are adding to social fault lines that the Communist Party fears may threaten national unity. 

Linguistically, China wants to be like America—a country where language and script are unified. In reality it is like medieval Europe—a continent full of different languages, nominally united by a written lingua franca. Before the 20th century, regional Chinese literati could communicate on paper in classical Chinese, but barely in conversation, just as European scholars communicated in Latin. The fracturing of Europe, politically and religiously, led to the emergence of written regional vernaculars like English and German."

 I speak absolutely no Chinese, but apparently the Chinese government refers to Cantonese (the Chinese of Hong Kong and Guangzhou) as a "dialect" of Mandarin.  That's at very best an understatement, if not an outright howler.

"there is only darkness in today's world"

Korea Herald on the history of the Korean obsession with "perfect" English:

"Some experts say a deeply rooted inferiority complex, admiration for English-speaking societies and the fixation on continuing the country’s industrialization with globalization may be factors behind the English craze.

In the book 'Korean and English,' author Gang Jun-man describes the deeply rooted English craze via 1930s advertisements in the Chosun Ilbo newspaper.  

'Old or young, if you don’t speak English, there is only darkness in today’s world' and 'Those who do not know English are the losers of the society,' the ad copy read. 

Gang said English has been used as a means to gain power since colonial times, with many prominent figures using the language to move up the social ladder and top-tier universities adopting English tests for entrance exams even back then."

Wanting to speak English fluently isn't a bad thing in itself, and I'm certainly happy to have a job teaching it, but the pressure to speak perfectly also drives a lot of South Koreans completely neurotic when it comes time to speak to an actual foreigner.

A huge part of the problem is the TOEIC, or the Korean standard English test which focuses primarily on grammar rather than communication.  Many companies will require a minimum TOEIC score even for jobs where speaking English isn't necessary.  And so from an early age, Koreans approach English not so much as a language but as a painful series of tests they must master at all costs, laden with tricks and traps (the TOEIC is notorious for gotcha-type grammatical questions that even native English speakers would have trouble with).

Another problem comes in the form of intermediate level students who want to improve their English but are literally too ashamed to speak to a foreigner for fear of making mistakes.  They've internalized a fear of failure when they should be working to boost their confidence levels.  Of course, you can only do this by making mistakes.

And so English remains an apocalyptic, all-or-nothing affair for Koreans, rather than what it actually is -- just another language, just another tool for two beings to squawk at one another in hopes of understanding, among thousands of others.  And one where a partial grasp is better than no grasp at all.

But if perfect fluency is the only desirable outcome and anything less is shameful, why bother in the first place?

Note: Advanced Conversation posts quote from articles I've discussed with my adult conversation students.

'Murca

Q and not U, "And The Washington Monument Blinks Goodnight"

Happy Fourth of July!  It's rainy and damp and decidedly un-summer like here in lurvely Daegu, but I miss my family and friends back in the US a little extra bit more today.

Hankering for a a bratwurst grilled by somebody's drunk uncle right about now.

Summer Update

The good news: this August I'll be making my annual trip to America to see my family in Washington, D.C. and Seattle.  It's always great to see them.

More good news: the semester is over and my grading is done!  For anyone who puts up with me on Twitter, you're probably aware that as much as I enjoy teaching, I've always hated grading.  Throw in the fact that South Korean hyper-bureaucracy (i.e., tons of paperwork) is a definite thing, and the end of every semester can actually be a bit stressful.  But I really pushed myself to just get the stuff done this time around, and it worked out.

Funny how discipline actually pays off at times.

Potentially great news: Me, my boss, and my two foreigner co-workers won a stipend from our college to write a research paper about using more effective teaching methods in the classroom.  We're putting together a study regarding effective questions based on the Socratic Method in the less English proficient (L.E.P.) classroom.  (That's fancy pedagogy speak for beginner level students.)  Over at the old place I was starting to do some posts based around our research so far, and while some of it is pretty damn dry it's nice to be able to articulate some of the things that I've always felt instinctively while in the classroom regarding what works and what doesn't.

Long story short, this is going to be a very busy July for me even though my main classes are over for the summer.  We've got to be ready to do our research when the next semester starts up at the end of August, which is probably going to involve recording conversations with five to ten of our students from every class (which can range from 25 to 50 students on average).  We're finishing up our literature review now and moving on to working out the methodology next week.

Other than that, it's jang-ma season here in lurvely Daegu.  Jang-ma are basically heavy summer rains, and the streets and gutters of Korea go from perfectly dry to drenched and swelling within minutes.  So now it's hot, humid, sticky, and insufferably damp!  Good times!

"I want that information very much today"

"Wet Casements" is a poem by John Ashbery.  You can read it here.  If you go down to the "Naropa Institute" listing here you can listen to a recording of it.

"home's where I belong"

Pavement, "Blue Hawaiian"

There's a lot of work to do on this here new blog and I'm pretty busy with work these days, so expect slow, incremental improvements as I get up to speed.

Meanwhile, I tweet over here and I tumbl over here.

"David Bowie, not Paul Daniels"

The best piece I’ve read on the Brexit comes, not surprisingly, from Laurie Penny:

“This Britain is not my Britain. I want my country back. I want my scrappy, tolerant, forward-thinking, creative country, the country of David Bowie, not Paul Daniels; the country of Sadiq Khan, not Boris Johnson; the country of  J K Rowling, not Enid Blyton; the country not of Nigel Farage, but Jo Cox. That country never existed, not on its own, no more than the country the Leave campaign promised to take us to in their tin-foil time machine. Britain, like everywhere else, has always had its cringing, fearful side, its cruel delusions, its racist fringe movements, its demagogues preying on the dispossessed. Those things are part of us as much as beef wellington and bad dentistry. But in happier times, those things do not overwhelm us. We do not let bad actors reading bad lines in bad faith walk us across the stage to the scaffold. We are better than this.

I believe we can still be better than this. I want my country back, and it’s a country I’ve never known, and getting there will take more strength, more kindness, more resilience than this divided nation has mustered in living memory. Meanwhile, I’m putting the kettle on again. Today is a day for mourning, for retweeting sick memes and holding our loved ones close. Tomorrow – well. Tomorrow, we get to work.”

Amen, sister.