I don't really need a Korean person to teach me Korean except for speaking immersion practice because it's easier to learn by myself. Obviously I can't teach myself Korean conversation and watching movies isn't as good as interacting with a live Korean person as nobody in the movie is interacting with me directly. But I wouldn't really call this person a "teacher" as such. It's just someone who can speak Korean speaking in Korean to me - simply at first and slowly. I can learn from taxi drivers if I drove around in taxis all day. The taxi drivers wouldn't know I am learning Korean conversation from them. They would just think I am a passenger trying to converse with them.
And even some of the taxi drivers are not that useful. If they know English words but not be able to string them together in a sentence, it's not that helpful listening to them because they will use English words. For example, they will say "promise" meaning they have an appointment to meet someone, and I will say "yasok? appointment?" and they will say yes, "appointment". Instead of saying "yasok" they will say "appointment" because they know the word for appointment. So even those with very poor English aren't as useful to learn from as those with hardly ANY English at all.
So I REALLY need someone with almost virtually zero English skills because it's too tempting for them to use the English words they know instead of the Korean words when communicating with a foreigner. Then I will be teaching THEM a foreign language instead of the other way around. If they understand a bit of English it's OK so long as they don't USE English. So long as they don't SPEAK English, I mean.
I really need 100% Korean immersion practice. That's how I learned English fast as a kid. No one in school spoke a word of Korean. My sisters started to speak in English at home when I was still clinging to Korean but they didn't actually formally TEACH me English. I just absorbed the English I heard from them at home.
I think it's possible for ANYONE to learn to speak a foreign language fluently this way -- if they receive enough immersion. Just people talking to them in the target language and NEVER lapsing into the foreigner's language like they do all the time in Korea. Because English is a universal language I suppose it's expected that most people in Korea know some English even if it's just some single words (and can't speak sentences). It's the nature of the beast. If I could not speak English well, my Korean would probably be better than it is now, even without making an effort to learn Korean. That's why the Turkish guy had an edge in learning Korean - his English wasn't that great. But it might pose a difficulty when it comes to learning reading though. How many Turkish language books are there for teaching Korean? How many Korean books have Turkish translations? Compared to those that have English translations?
So to repeat, I really do not need a 'teacher' as such. I need lots of interactions with Korean speakers who are going to speak KOREAN with me (and not lapse into English even if it's single words they are using). The rest I can learn myself. I can study all the books and learn reading comprehension myself. I can read translations of Korean by myself. Occasionally I might need a teacher to explain a point or two in grammar I don't understand myself but that's about it.
I think teachers can get in the way actually. They can stress you out and stress is bad for learning a foreign language. I know I don't like to be corrected. And some people who teach you think it's their job to correct you all the time. They correct you so much that you can't get past one word for like five minutes. They insist you say the word/phrase perfectly correctly before they allow you to move on. I don't mind if a teacher repeats words just for the sake of repetition as repetition is good but I don't like it when a teacher repeats a word because they think you aren't pronouncing it well enough for them. Geeze, what do they expect? They are haranguing you and they even get upset with you - their voice rises in irritation with you. You do not know what you are doing wrong and yet they keep telling you that your pronunciation/intonation is off. They are just a LITTLE BIT too anal I think. And they speak to you in English all this time so you are hearing mostly English and not Korean.
These people aren't good teachers at all. In fact they might have personal problems and are taking their frustrations out on you. You shouldn't take that kind of treatment. I mean, who has perfect pronunciation, intonation and rhythm from the get-go?
I think so long as we are able to communicate that's enough. We can move on at that stage. We shouldn't stay stuck on the one phrase just because my pronunciation, intonation or rhythm isn't perfect .... The person who was teaching me like this actually had a strong Korean accent coming through when speaking English to me at times so what a hypocrite! And he made some mistakes in English like dropping articles though he had been living in western countries since he was a teenager, for the past 30 years actually. So it seems like he was expecting perfection when he wasn't perfect himself. LOL!!!
I don't think I could last long with someone like that. Actually, he wasn't my teacher really. He was my relative and he was just testing me out. I showed him my Korean level and he got kind of angry with me because my intonation (stress on individual syllables) wasn't good enough for him. If I had to pay someone to teach me, I wouldn't accept this treatment and would get rid of this person if they started behaving like that.
In other words, I am not a passive learner. I instruct the conversation teacher on how they should teach me. If they ignore my instructions and start to teach me in a different way then I will get rid of them. I do not leave the teaching method up to them.
This is why paying someone is very important. It puts you in a position of control. They know this or should know this and will follow your instructions if they want to keep the job. If you don't pay them even if it's like bartering - doing language exchange so in a sense you ARE paying them by giving them English conversation practise in exchange - it doesn't work half as well. The person is not obligated to obey your instructions. The only thing you can do is just drop them. Because it becomes an unequal exchange situation. There is no point threatening them or warning them. They aren't your employees or your hirees. If they don't get it, then it's not worth keeping up with them. They obviously don't understand the basis for language exchange. Even if you remind them, they will forget and will just do what they did before. Obviously they are bad at reciprocating. And you shouldn't make allowances for them and continue because you build up resentment inside yourself. And this will eventually come out which will make you feel bad. So it's best just to discontinue the exercise. Unless that person is very entertaining and likeable and you want to keep them as a friend. If a person is that stupid or forgetful they can't remember to dumb down the level for you or don't pick up that you are a beginner then it's not worth keeping up with these people. They lose out eventually but don't realize that this will happen in which case it's not really beneficial to continue the relationship with these people.
And I don't want to talk for hours with a boring Korean person. I am lonely but I still don't want to talk with someone who doesn't interest me for very long. I have better things to do with my time. In fact that's why I gave up on the last person. She was trying to squeeze out as much English practice from me as possible. She spent the exact time speaking in Korean as planned which was half an hour but when it came to speaking in English, I ended up speaking to her for an hour, an hour and a half, I can't remember exactly. She never paused and said, "I think we need to switch to Korean as it's not fair for you." She was perfectly aware that I was spending a lot more time speaking in English to her and she liked it. I only stopped when I realized that I could have spent the past hour or half an hour doing something more productive with my time. It felt too much like 'work' for which I wasn't being paid for for my liking. I realized she was sneaky kind of controlling the situation by not picking up the phone or answering my text messages when it didn't suit her, and then by letting the English part go much overtime without feeling much guilt about it, and expecting me to just let it slide. I pretended to let it slide and I didn't say anything about it to her but I thought to myself, wow, that was an unequal language exchange! She didn't really make an effort to dumb it down for me either. I think I reminded her several times to dumb it down. She didn't take the hint and I got nothing really out of the Korean speaking part. I think I decided then that it wasn't really worth continuing with her. I don't like it when someone doesn't pick up the phone even though they are at home - it was in the morning on the weekend - just because they don't agree with the message. I felt like I was wasting my time. I didn't say so directly to her all of this. In fact I gave the impression that nothing was wrong and I said that in the future I can't keep to a schedule (which was true) and that we can just try contacting each other on Skype when we can see the other person is available and we have time to do language exchange. That way things can be more flexible and we might fit in more language exchange. I thought she wouldn't like this and she didn't. She never contacted me since.
I am OK with that. I didn't really like her sneaky attitude and her not giving as much as she was taking. I am not that assertive a person and I am easygoing. If I don't like someone's behavior but I am not their employer or something, I am not going to take them to task or even criticize them. I just kind of dissociate myself from them. Besides I reminded her gently and obliquely many times that she needed to dumb it down for me and she refused to do so. Whether it's because she is a really hopeless teacher (which is hard to believe as she was an English teacher for children) and did not know how to dumb it down or just didn't care enough to try and talked Korean at a level that was comfortable for her but was really hard for me to follow, wasn't important. I don't think I could continue with her. She would get satisfaction with each session and I would get none. She wasn't that communicative either and ignored a Skype text message to her that I had written earlier. I needed someone a bit less cool and more friendly than her.
