Monday's Hallyu Lecture

I am writing about Monday's presentation by Dr. Jungsup. I was rather let down, since the lecture was disorganized and filled with statistics that he admitted to making up. However, I will focus primarily on the content.

Some of the lecture’s main points were sound, although fairly obvious. For example, it suggested that Hallyu, defined primarily in terms of dissemination of cinema and music, could serve as a vessel for transmitting Korean culture and raising awareness of Korea to the rest of the world. This is certainly true, as I suspect the majority-Korean audience already knew. It is also likely true that the rising international prominence of Korean entertainment will generate an increased interest in Korean language.

That’s about all I agree with.

I think his assessment of the current Korean language situation in the United States is very wrong. He used strong language to condemn the state of Korean language instruction in the US, which forces me to question his familiarity with the subject. To use Penn as a case study, the burgeoning participation in Korean language recently led to the creation of a new, separate department, on par with the Japanese and Chinese language programs. The suggestion was that there is an ambiguous “something” fundamentally wrong with current teaching techniques, a claim which the speaker did not substantiate and which I contest from personal experience.

I disagree with the idea that instruction based on Hallyu materials should replace current methods of Korean language teaching. The very simple reason is that the use of movies and music to teach language requires a large requisite amount of prior knowledge of Korean. An audience member asked a very valid question about how analysis of song lyrics, for example, would be productive for students that are just learning grammar fundamentals. This question was not answered. I think teaching Korean based on content from entertainment materials is generally an unsound practice. For example, extensive analysis of Daejanggum would teach me how to argue like a 16th century Chosǒn woman, but might leave me unable to ask a simple question like “Does the #53 bus stop here?”

Movies and music also typically commonly use colloquialisms or otherwise compromise grammatical integrity for the sake of rhyming and whatnot. As such, they should be viewed dubiously as mediums of language education, not openly embraced. There is also the issue of the tendency for some (not all) mainstream Korean pop artists to lapse into English for a chorus, whole verse, or even an entire song. I wonder how many people will actually start the arduous, lifelong road to learning Korean on the basis of appreciation of music, especially when considering that many popular hits are “bilingual.”

I do think that the Hallyu phenomenon can generate increased awareness and interest of Korean language and culture. However, these materials should be used only sparingly in Korean language education for all the reason I mentioned. In other words, music and movies should be an occasional complement to traditional methods, rather than a substitute as Dr. Jungsup suggested.