School's out!

My class and teacher at Yonsei

Thursday was our last day at Yonsei University and boy does it feel good to be done with school! While I don't regret going to Yonsei, those last couple weeks were really tough to get through (as evidenced by the lack of blog posts!). In the end, though, we were some of the proud and (amazingly) few that passed the Yonsei course.

My class ended the semester with a cooking class where we learned how to make Tak Toritang (spicy braised chicken and potatoes) and an Australian wine and French pastry party. Our teacher was enthusiastic and funny and one of the best language teachers I've ever had (definitely better than the ones I had when I was learning Spanish at U. of C.).

But I struggled in the second half of the semester trying to balance my class schedule (9am - 1pm plus homework time) and work schedule (3pm - 9pm). After the midterm, the class picked up pace quite a bit too, as the people who couldn't handle the class (for various reasons) dropped out. By the last week, we were learning three grammar rules and tons of new vocabulary a day. The brutal pace the class took in the second half of the semester showed on the final exam -- everyone did poorly on the grammar section and even people who were great students didn't pass some of the tests.

Given how poorly so many people did on the finals, I really question the point of Yonsei's intense teaching method. Four hours a day, five days a week, for ten weeks is a huge amount of time. But language acquisition doesn't happen overnight and the repetition that you need to learn a language couldn't occur when we were taught new things every class hour.

Our next class at Ewha Womans University will start in just under two weeks. It will be a lot less hours (three days a week and just a couple hours a day), so we're both looking forward to taking a more leisurely (and more sane) approach to learning Korean next semester.