Foreigners, including young children, the writer says, tend to find Korean rather hard when they first meet it and try to learn it. Language is sometimes called memorization, but to know its principles accurately and become used to them, a varied course of education is needed. Korean students, even when they have studied English, often cannot use it well on the ground, because the learning was only mechanical memorization.

Even without that kind of mechanical learning, the writer says, if a person knows precisely what to use, which word to use, and what to say, then speaking, listening, and writing cease to be a problem. The program described here is aimed at foreigners, and its level is kept low because, above all, Korean should be learned in the midst of daily life and should feel easier, so that it can be learned with more speed. It is much easier, the writer says, to lay a foundation first and only then move into theory.

Theory alone will not be usable in real life — the same logic as Koreans’ use of English — so the program first places activities that make Korean familiar, lets people become used to the language, and makes time to know Korea in some detail, so that affection for the country can grow. The age of the people the program is for should not, of course, be too high. Foreigners who have already immigrated, the writer says, are in general less and less likely to acquire the language of the new country quickly as they grow older.

They are too used to their first language, and, more than that, their rate of cultural adaptation is lower than that of younger people. For that reason the program prefers activities that make culture familiar and allow a quicker adaptation to Korean, rather than a more purely instructional set of lessons, so that Korean can be learned more quickly. In the conclusion, the writer says that if Koreans themselves go abroad, the fastest way to acquire the language is first to learn the culture, to meet it in dramas and films, and to come up against people and talk.

Theoretical teaching is needed too, but if one does not first feel an interest in the language, a proper acquisition is hard. The older one is, the harder it is to acquire another country’s language easily, and even after teaching or study it is harder to use well; even so, to learn a country’s language one first needs to know the country well, and that is why a program of this kind was made. A detailed weekly timetable is not set out in the extract used here.

The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.