Teaching Languages is No Picnic!

Korean Teachers

This afternoon, I finished reading Korean Teachers, a novel by the Korean writer Seo Su-Jin. I read the English version translated by Elizabeth Buehler, which I chanced upon while browsing in a local bookstore in Singapore. Since Korean literature had always interested me and yet I had read very few books by Korean authors so far, I decided to give this novel a try.

Korean Teachers turned out to be a very interesting read. The novel revolves around the professional and private lives of four different women who teach Korean in a language school in Seoul.

With the massive appeal of Korean pop culture, including K-pop, dramas, and films, as well as fashion and cosmetics, the Korean language has risen in popularity among language learners around the world. Even setting aside Korea’s soft power, the country’s technological prowess in numerous industries provides incentive for business people to learn Korean.

One might think that teaching Korean is a highly popular and sought-after profession, but Korean Teachers reveals that the reality is not always rosy and hopeful, not only for those working in the industry, but also for foreign students enrolled in language schools to study Korean.

One recurring theme in the novel is the lack of stability of a teaching position in a Korean language school. The four women constantly worry about the possibility that their teaching contracts might not be renewed, regardless of how experienced they are in teaching the language.

More often than not, their fate is influenced by their students’ evaluations at the end of each school term. Even if you are an effective teacher, if you are not well-liked by students, you risk being rated poorly. Also, it goes without saying that not every student is motivated to study or pleasant to deal with. Some students repeat a level multiple times and can even be disruptive in class.

Students have their own difficulties too. The novel mentions the instance where a group of Vietnamese students suddenly went missing and stopped attending class as they went underground to work illegally in factories. Their broker agency hired gangsters to find them and take them to the airport. This reflected badly on the school in the eyes of the immigration authorities, affecting their reputation and making them even more desperate to attract new students.

This is reminiscent of Japan in the late 80s and early 90s—right in the middle of its economic boom—when there was a massive influx of Mainland Chinese students and workers who sought substantially higher wages and a much better life than in their homeland.

Numerous Japanese language schools cropped up everywhere to accommodate them, and there were similar issues of some students being disruptive in class or skipping school altogether as their primary aim was to earn a living rather than study Japanese.

It’s not hard to imagine the working conditions of Japanese teachers back then, who were hired to cope with heavy workloads and students who were not necessarily motivated to study. Most language schools closed down as Japan’s economy went south in the subsequent years, and Japanese teachers were let go accordingly.

History might not always repeat, but it definitely rhymes. I feel that what’s described in Korean Teachers is a microcosm of the issues faced by language schools both in Korea and beyond. Running a language-teaching business is no picnic by any stretch of the imagination, even if the language being taught is in hot demand around the world.

Curiously, Korean Teachers was published in 2020, a couple of years before the launch of ChatGPT and other generative AI chatbots, which has substantially affected the business landscape for language learning. The situation facing language teachers has drastically changed. In order for them to survive, they need to leverage on skills that cannot be commoditized by AI.

As a language-learning enthusiast, I did a great deal of thinking while reading Korean Teachers. Regardless of advances in technology, I like to believe that language learning will never become obsolete as a human intellectual activity and those dedicated language teachers will continue to be relevant and command decent wages in the years ahead.

Do Not Stop Learning, Ever!

金閣寺

This afternoon, I finished reading The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, a novel by the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. This is the second novel by Mishima that I have read, after Confessions of a Mask, and I read it in the original Japanese.

Mishima is famous for his ornate and exquisite writing style, using a profound and literary vocabulary that is rarely used in modern spoken Japanese. He often discusses highly abstract concepts, making his works not easily accessible to general readers.

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was no exception, and it was definitely not easy for me to read. Similar to what I did with Confessions of a Mask, I carefully perused the novel and stopped to look up the meaning of every unfamiliar word I came across with the help of ChatGPT. It took me a little over a week to go through the whole book, covering 326 pages in total.

From a language acquisition perspective, consulting the dictionary for every word you do not recognize may be dismissed by most linguistic experts as a bad idea. I can certainly understand that point of view, particularly for beginners and intermediate learners of a foreign language: the number of words you need to look up can simply get too overwhelming, bordering on torturous. The whole process can become excruciatingly tedious, not to mention woefully inefficient.

As for me, I can only practice this method with books in Japanese, English, and—to a lesser extent, Chinese—as I possess sufficient vocabularies in these languages to avoid feeling too frustrated to read a medium-length novel.

There were certainly times in the past when I found the act of reading painfully labor-intensive, even with Japanese books; it was only through repeated practice and intensive vocabulary building that I gradually overcame my fear of difficult words and began to genuinely enjoy reading, which only happened after I became an adult—I was definitely a late-bloomer when it comes to reading.

Now, with these languages, instead of finding it a tedious chore, I feel a great deal of joy looking up unfamiliar words, which have become relatively few and far between in most popular books as I have expanded my vocabularies. A virtuous cycle has finally emerged, whereby my robust vocabulary makes it easier for me to read, which in turn facilitates my acquisition of new words.

Regrettably, my French has yet to attain that level, so it’s probably not a good idea to insist on looking up every unfamiliar word I see in a book. With French, my primary task will continue to be learning the vocabulary from a dictionary with the Anki flashcard app until I can breeze through most popular French novels in the future.

By the way, the advent of digital learning tools like Anki and ElevenLabs, as well as AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude, has undoubtedly been a boon to learners of foreign languages like me. However, this does not mean that we can skip the act of studying itself. If anything, acquiring basic knowledge such as vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation has become even more important in this age of artificial intelligence.

This is because, as real human beings, we are increasingly expected to play the role of someone who ultimately checks and controls how artificial intelligence performs in tasks related to foreign languages, such as translations. AI can help us generate massive volumes of translation in sheer seconds, but we still need a set of human eyes to verify whether the productions comport with natural human language. Without the basic knowledge of language, we will not be able to perform this most human and critical function.

Returning to the topic of reading books like The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, I do believe that trying to tackle such abstract literary works remains relevant today, as a good foundation in reading comprehension directly ties in with strong critical thinking skills—a must for us to maintain the upper hand in our coexistence with modern technology. With this in mind, I am more determined than ever to keep nourishing and challenging my mind with the cultural riches left by our ancestors.

We've Reached the End of the Age of Reading

A few days ago, I read an article titled The Age of Reading is Over by Rose Horowitch in the August issue of the Atlantic magazine.

I perused it with great interest, as the subject of reading is a fascinating one for me, especially as it relates to the phenomenon that people are reading significantly less than before and the kind of impact it has on our intelligence, discourse, and ability to think logically. As it turned out, it exceeded my expectations: I found it very well written and informative, not to mention highly relevant in this age dominated by smartphones and artificial intelligence.

Back in 1995, when I was studying English in Seattle during my gap year from college, I was fortunate enough to come across Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death as a reading assignment for my media communications class.

Written in 1985, right in the midst of the golden era of television, the book’s overarching message was “the medium is the metaphor,” arguing that the medium used to convey ideas and information determined the quality—and by extension, the seriousness—of their contents. 

Postman warned that the transition from the print media to television as the most prevalent means of consuming entertainment and gathering information would eventually rob people of their ability to engage in calm, levelheaded thinking based on facts; instead, they would start making decisions largely dictated by their visceral reactions to visual and auditory sensations.

More than four decades later, we can now see how prescient Postman was, as evidenced by people’s decisions in numerous countries to vote into office rabble-rousers running populist campaigns with empty promises and demagoguery.

Coming back to this Atlantic article, the journalist Rose Horowitch succeeds in reinforcing and expanding on Postman’s arguments by presenting intriguing and convincing data related to Americans’ reading habits, or the lack thereof.

For example, according to a recent survey, more than half of all American adults read less than one book in a given year. This is hardly surprising: in fact, the statistics are largely in line with those in Japan, where about 60 percent of adults reported reading less than one book per month, according to the Japanese journalist Toyoshi Inada’s latest book, People Who Can No Longer Read.

The article also mentions that bestselling books nowadays are written in sentences about one third shorter than those in books from a century ago, attesting to people’s inability to comprehend and digest complex sentence structures. People nowadays have a smaller vocabulary, perpetuating a vicious circle in which they face more challenges in understanding text, causing them to read less and have less opportunity to enrich their vocabulary.

Most alarmingly, Horowitch mentions that the Flynn effect, whereby the IQ of Americans had been rising steadily since the 1930s, started to reverse about 20 years ago, dropping about three points per decade. Diminution of reading has evidently made Americans less intelligent.

Another interesting perspective presented in this article is concerning the impact that artificial intelligence will have on people’s ability to think in the coming years—something that Neil Postman couldn’t have written about back in 1985.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have made the act of writing significantly easier than before. It’s undeniable that this development has brought immense benefits to society, provided that information and messages conveyed are accurate and based on facts. 

According to the article, the number of books released on Amazon has increased threefold since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced to the public. Barnes & Noble launched 60 new stores last year—something unimaginable a few years ago, when the financial performance of this storied bookseller was at its nadir—definitely a welcome development for book-lovers like me.

However, the obviation of the grind of writing made possible by generative AI also means that people no longer need to expend that much energy on thinking, which is the most effective exercise to develop our intelligence.

Interestingly, recent technological advances didn’t just make the proportion of non-readers grow; they have also made it possible for a small segment of the population to enjoy more books than ever before.

I, for one, have grown to love books more in the age of smartphones and AI. With convenient gadgets like the Google search engine and dictionary apps, I can now easily look up unfamiliar words or concepts that I come across in a book, making reading more effortless and pleasurable. 30 years ago, I would have had to lug around a bulky dictionary to do all that. Evidently, technology cuts both ways, so it’s important to consciously place yourself in a position where you can benefit from its development.

As the title of this article aptly suggests, the age of reading as we know it may indeed be over, but as long as we educate ourselves and take appropriate measures to protect our intelligence, there is still hope that we can continue to enjoy the inexhaustible cultural richness bequeathed by our ancestors.