A Great Awakening > IDEAS & IDEALS

• 목록

As a Korean professor of English in a university in Seoul, recently I have attained a great awakening in my life: I do not have to strive and struggle to speak English well hereafter. Now I find I have lived without speaking it for many months, nay, many years, but I find nothing has gone wrong with me. And paradoxically enough, I see the chance of my speaking English will decrease in the future, when all of us are supposed and required to be able to speak English well.

      One of the chief reasons for my somewhat irresponsible assertion concerning this urgent matter of English education in Korea lies in the plain fact that no one around me has bothered me to exercise or mobilize my ability of speaking English for so long. Not only my fellow countrymen but also so many ubiquitous foreigners around me would not provide me with an opportunity to use my English. As an aged professor of English who has lived his entire life wrestling with English, I feel I have become useless and obsolete,
while greatly relieved of the constant anxiety, burden and fear of speaking it.

      Circumstances were quite different decades ago when there were only a few Koreans who could dare to speak English, and when Americans were the only foreigners to be seen around us. Whenever I saw a foreigner anywhere, an American to be sure, I approached him, with much anxiety though, to please, to help him, and to seize the great opportunity of improving and practicing my poor English on him. I knew well that my English, especially speaking, was terribly poor then, as it is with me now, but I was full of enthusiasm and vanity to show the world that I could speak English well. And to my great relief and pleasure, the foreigners addressed by me responded accordingly as I wished and expected them to do. I could see and feel the envy and admiration in the eyes of people looking at me nearby, and my heart swelled with pride.

      But I feel the time has changed. No one seems to pay attention to foreigners, nor to English speaking Koreans any more. There are too many foreigners around us to begin with, and at the same time there are too many English speaking Koreans available. And English and foreigners are not what they used to be in our land. Both have ceased to be a novelty and an attraction. And beware, foreigners are no longer Americans only! You cannot approach a foreigner in Korea with English nowadays as I used to do. He could be a German, a Frenchman, or an Italian, and what not, who cannot speak English at all, or has as much difficulty in speaking it as you do. Nowadays you should not expect all foreigners to speak English, nor embarrass them by speaking a foreign language to them on the streets of Seoul.

      Furthermore, some foreigners often put me in shame by responding in fluent Korean when I address them in English. I feel momentarily puzzled before them. Should I continue to speak in English, or retreat to my natural and easy native tongue? Sometimes I insist on speaking English and win over him, and sometimes vice versa. In either case I feel foolish and fall into a deep retrospection after the incident: will there come the day when all the foreigners in the world will be able to speak Korean so well that we Koreans do not have to bother ourselves to learn to speak English at all?

      The day has already come, not only here in Korea but also everywhere in the world. I could confirm this truth and fact during my sight-seeing tour made recently to New York and Los Angeles in the United States and to some famous cities in Europe. Before I left home I thought I surely would have a great opportunity to speak, nay, to show off my English before my wife, who is always suspicious of my English speaking ability. Although she has seen me read and carry so many voluminous books in English, but she has rarely seen or heard me use it in practice. She knew that I was the only expert on English language among the group of 20 men and women in the tour and the fact seemed a great relief and pride for her, but definitely a burden and anxiety for me.

      But all her relief and pride, and my fear and anxiety, proved all wrong and groundless. Since I began to learn and teach English, I have heard and taught that English is an international means of communication, which means, English goes everywhere on the face of the earth. But to my great surprise and disappointment, it did not. In Paris they spoke only French. In Frankfurt they spoke German. In Rome, Italian, not English. In Madrid, Spanish. Everywhere people spoke their own language and they did not care whether I could speak English or not. Under these circumstances it was not I but the other non-English experts among the fellow travellers who took the advantage of my circumspection and silence by flourishing their Konglish, which elicited great admiration for them from their ignorant wives, but only more distrust for me from my equally ignorant wife.

      What made me agape and aghast, however, was not the uselessness of speaking English during the European trip; it was the widespread use of Korean there. Owing to the immense number of the Korean tourists, immigrants and residents all over the world, and to the money the they spend, Europeans cannot afford to disregard Korean clients, and consequently Korean language. In the cog-wheel train going up to the top of the Jungfrau in Switzerland they greeted us in Korean along with in English, German, Chinese and Japanese. In the Vatican museum I bought an expensive catalogue of the masterpieces of arts annotated in Korean language. All of the large and famous department stores had Korean employees. While I and the other husbands were waiting outside engaged in idle talkings, my wife and the other wives enjoyed their shopping at the main Burberry store in London and at the Lancome cosmetic store in Paris, with better service and kindness than in Seoul, they said.

      With the current English fever affecting our young parents, their children and even their babies, and with the ever increasing number of the Koreans going abroad, sooner or later, all of us Koreans will be fluent in speaking English, and at the same time the Korean language will be spoken by more foreigners all over the world. In either case, the chance and need of my speaking English will ever shrink, diminish and finally disappear. Nay, it has already disappeared, as I said. But I will not grieve. I will find strength in what remains behind. Putting the heavy burden of speaking English on the back of my young generation with a smile, I will spend more time and energy to reading the great works of English literature, and write more essays in English to please my readers of The Korea Times, and those who would happily come across them anywhere.