Teacher packs bags for year in Indonesia
Published: 06 Nov. 2009, 23:38
Chung Duk-young
Chung Duk-young, a 48-year-old volunteer who teaches Korean to foreign workers and spouses married to Koreans and at the Multicultural Family Center in Anseong, Gyeonggi, was recently selected to be the one.
A retired drug company executive, Chung is expected to fly in January to Buton, where some 60,000 Cia-Cia live, to teach Hangul to high school students there. In his planned year-long stint in Indonesia, Chung is also expected to train local elementary school teachers.
Flying to Indonesia to teach Hangul is certainly not what Chung imagined he’d be doing during his more than 20 years at a local drug company.
But he said his interest in language grew while he was positioned at the company’s training center, instructing customer service representatives on how to speak to clients. During his spare time, Chung used to read dictionaries for fun.
“I always had to consult the dictionary to figure out the right word and pronunciation to teach employees to use when they talk to customers,” he said.
“Not a whole lot of people may understand, but for me, it is so fun to learn a new word or phrase from a dictionary and study how that expression came into being.”
Chung even appeared in July 2006 on a popular Korean language skill challenge show on KBS that calls upon participants to answer a series of tough questions about archaic or rarely used words and expressions - and he won.
Teaching Hangul to an Indonesian tribe who does not even speak Korean, all while unable to use the local language, was never going to be easy, Chung admitted.
But he is no stranger to teaching foreigners with whom he can’t communicate well, as he has instructed some 30 foreign brides and migrant workers in his neighborhood for more than a year.
After retiring two years ago, Chung took even deeper interest in exploring his mother language and started teaching Korean to these communities. He also aspired to teach the language to young ethnic Koreans who are unable to speak the language of their ancestors.
“I was just an ordinary office worker, and I still am a ordinary person, but I wanted to spend a small portion of my life on people other than myself and my family,” said Chung. “And what I can do best for others is to teach them the Korean language.
“I know it’s a big challenge, but I’m pretty confident I can do this well by using a bit of English, body language, drawings and so on,” he said.
By Jung Ha-won [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
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