Jiyeon Song Professor Fuentes English 1101 24 November 2013(Revised)

My Literacy Memoir Jiyeon Song

In Korean education, English is considered to be enormously important foreign language. Except some older citizens who could not receive education because of poverty after the Korean war, almost every person had experiences of studying English in schools or other academic institutions in Korea. Of course, I was not the exception. I was forced to study that language following the stream of the society. Since English is a foreign language, I should always study that language consciously unlike acquiring my first language, Korean. In this paper, I would like to talk about huge differences between the two languages which made it hard for me to learn how to read and write mostly deriving from the different ways of thinking between the two groups. Like English has the alphabet, Korea has its own alphabet called Han-geul which was invented by King Sejong in Joseon dynasty about 700 years ago. This alphabet has a one-to-one correspondence between the letter and the sound. For example, which is the very first letter of Han-geul like the A in English has only one sound [g]. This sound is always stable regardless of any words or letter combinations. The A in English, however, can be enunciated differently depends on the combinations of letters. For example, the word Artist and Aerobic are pronounced differently although the two words start with the same latter A. Since I was so used to the one-to-one correspondent of Korean reading system,
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this made it hard for me to learn English even harder. Whenever I see the words start from A, I always read it as [a]. Therefore, every time the English teacher asked me to read texts in the class, I would make mistakes a lot before I realized the letter A can be pronounced in many different ways. The second struggle I should suffer when I learn English was the syntax the word order. In Korean sentences, after putting the subject, objects comes first than verbs. Therefore, a subject comes very first and then an object comes and a verb comes lastly. However, in English, a verb comes first than an object. It was my third grade in elementary school when I was asked to write English sentences for the first time. At that time, I seriously had no idea about English grammar and even Korean grammar too. I didnt know what the subjects, verbs or objects are. Even before I learned the exact notions or definitions of these grammatical terms, I was required to write some English sentences. Although that sentences might have easy and basic structures, it was very long sentences for me at that time and I felt they were just like alien words. Besides, I couldnt even understand or accept why I should write down these strange sentences which were different from what I used to know. For me, it felt like more correct if I put the object first than the verb just like writing Korean sentences. Thus, I used to reorder English sentences to fit Korean syntax as I believed to be correct. Whenever I incorrect, my English teachers forced me to memorize the whole sentences as it appeared on the texts so I just memorized correct forms without understanding them enough. This was also, however, corrected after I learned some grammatical notions and noticed there are distinct different word orders between two languages after several years later. The last thing I want to mention which made it difficult for me to learn English was to understand the tense systems in English. In Korean, there are just two tenses present and
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past. However, in English, there are tree tenses present, past and past participle. And the way people express actions using tenses in English implies and includes multiple facts at the same time. For example, lets say an English-speaking person says a sentence like The bell rang while Mari was taking a shower. This sentence has a time sequence. The action of taking shower of Mari happened first and ringing the bell happened next. If I want to express this one sentence into Korean, I need more than one sentence. The other different things are past perfect, present perfect and future perfect. In order to translate these three tense notions into Korean, we had to make new words which are not existed for expressing Korean tense system. To give a simple example for the past perfect which is formed as had + past participle, The deer had run before the tiger appeared. will be suitable. This sentence means the deer disappeared even before the tiger saw the deer. Like the first example, we need more than one sentence to express this action in Korean. Of course, I could not understand the intention of these sentences when I just started to learn English tense systems. I dont know English-speaking people always consider these facts when they talk but we need several sentences or have no exact verb forms to describe the one English sentence in Korean. Therefore, I always need to analyze and it takes some time to think before I read, write, say or understand the sentences while English-speaking speakers tell this kind of sentences unconsciously, instantly and naturally. To understand these tense systems were painful because I should understand what I dont have and what I dont know. However, this process got easier after I realized that the western people probably have different understandings about time from me and Korean people. It got also easier after I decided to think that the western people tend to classify and have analyzing instincts about time though they might not agree with me.

Of course, the lists I wrote above are not the only things I should struggle with when I studied English. I had to spend a lot of time when I should understand like the plural, articles and phrasal verbs which are also not existed in Korean language. However, the lists above are so strikingly and severely scratched my brain so I couldnt help writing them this paper as the representative examples. Its not long before I could understand the full meaning of that kind of sentences. Also, whenever I should write sentences which contain many verbs and sentences, I felt nervous about making mistakes even until now. Although Korean and English are completely different languages so thats the reason why I should suffer a lot, still I think the mistakes I have made and the difficulty I have met are crucial and necessary processes to learn the foreign language English. Also, I believe I can read and write in English without conscious notice at the end though I still have a long way to go.