{"id":2794,"date":"2015-03-04T07:36:28","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T15:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2794"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:02:31","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:02:31","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-it-takes-a-lifetime-with-michael-elliott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2794","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: It Takes a Lifetime with Michael Elliott"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"michaelNotebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and <\/em>The Polar Intertia Journal<\/a>, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Seoul’s Sinchon district, Colin talks with Michael Elliott, creator of the English-learning site for Koreans English in Korean<\/a> and the Korean-learning site for English-speakers\u00a0Korean Champ<\/a>. They discuss why Koreans insist on the difficulty of their own language; whether and why he considers Korean difficult; what it means that “there are so many different ways to say the same thing” in Korean; the perennial issue of saying “you” in Korean; the “native speaker’s privilege” to go a little but out of grammatical bounds; why the Korean alphabet has displaced Chinese characters more or less entirely; why Koreans rarely acknowledge the language itself as a driver of interest in Korea; the different, more intense ways trends manifest themselves in Korea than in America; whether we can call English education in Korea a “craze,” and why Koreans spend so much money on it to so little apparent result; the degree of parental involvement in English education and how “keeping up with the Joneses” drives it; the trouble with\u00a0studying the languages of “poor countries” in Korea; the dominance of “the right way and the wrong way” in Korean thought; what it takes to make it to the highest level of Korean study, and why that sets off suspicion in Korean people; how tired he’s grown of explaining to those\u00a0“back home” why he went to Korea to study Korean in the first place; how he got an exemption not just from Korean trends but from American hipsterdom, or indeed any kind of “team”; how he came up with his new Korean Champ\u00a0videos shot on the streets of Seoul<\/a>; what would happen to the Cheonggyecheon Stream if built in America; how he studied multiple levels of Korean at once; the importance of observation when learning languages, and the general resistance to it; the “little bit of a scoff” with which Koreans sometimes correct Korean-learners; and the sleep he loses on the rare occasion\u00a0he says\u00a0something incorrectly in Korean.<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul’s Sinchon district, Colin talks with Michael Elliott, creator of the English-learning site for Koreans English in Korean and the Korean-learning site for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,33,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2794"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2865,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2794\/revisions\/2865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}