By Korea.net Honorary Reporter Salwa Elzeny from Egypt

Hangeul Proclamation Day is a day of pride in the history of the Korean nation, Koreans in South Korea celebrate it on October 9 every year. The holiday is also celebrated in North Korea on January 15 every year, but North Koreans refer to it as Joseongeul Day.

The main idea of Hangeul Day is to celebrate the promulgation of the Korean alphabet, or Hangeul. King Sejong the Great worked personally with his Hall of Worthies (Jiphyeonjeon in Korean) to create a writing system that was much simpler than the Chinese writing system that had been in use. In 1446, Sejong the Great promulgated this new alphabet and published it along with a guide to its use in the book Hunminjeongem (Correct Sounds for Instructing the People). The Korean alphabet was a major success and increased the literacy rate of the Korean population.

Today, the Korean language continues to gain popularity worldwide. Many King Sejong Institutes have been opened around the world due to the huge demand for learning the Korean language, which has been selected as a second language in Turkey; many Arab students want to learn it as well and King Sejong Institutes have already been opened in both Cairo and Abu Dhabi while many other Arab students are looking forward to additional King Sejong institutes in their countries.

In second language acquisition, learners of a new language, especially those who are not children—teenagers and adults—have many problems while acquiring a language. These problems are greatly displayed when learners try to acquire a new language which is of a totally different language family than the one they already speak.

And this, of course, is the case of Arabs learning Korean. Since Arabic is from the Semitic language family while Korean is from the Altaic language family. These two families are so far from each other that each is found on a different continent: Africa and Asia.

And it is not just Arabs who make many mistakes but also other nationalities and they differ in the different languages ​​they speak. So I was able to interview Mona Serag El-Din, who was the first teacher who taught me Korean at the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in Egypt. She is a teaching assistant in the Faculty of Languages at the University of Ain Shams in the Department of Korean Language and Literature, and graduated in 2011. She speaks three languages ​​fluently: Arabic, her mother tongue, and English, having lived in England, and Korean. I also interviewed Mr. Lee Soon Seok, my other Korean teacher, who is a Korean language teacher at the Nambu Campus of the Seoul Institute of Technology & Education and who speaks fluent English and has completed his English language studies in the United States of America and traveled to many countries around the world.

- What are the common mistakes made among Arab learners of Korean?

Professor Mona: The answer to your question would be that you will find mistakes on so many levels. I don't think you can just group them into vocabulary mistakes or sentence mistakes, or even pronunciation mistakes. These problems are found on so many levels: sound formation (phonological level), word formation (morphological level), sentence formation (syntactic level), and meaning formation (semantic level).

In addition to this, even though all Arabs speak Arabic, some mistakes may be affected by the Arabic colloquial variation they speak. In other words, mistakes made by Egyptians would be different than those made by Moroccans or Tunisians or Jordanians. There will be major similarities but there will also be some major differences. Therefore, I think it's a bit more complicated than grouping mistakes to "common mistakes made by Arab Learners".

- What is the difference between foreign students who learn Korean language since you teach many different nationalities and are there things in common in their mistakes despite the difference in the mother tongues?

Mr. Lee: Well, it depends on the period when they learnt it before but usually they are having difficulties in learning Korean vowels.

- Has Korean become a "language to learn" in the Arab world, just as English, German, French and Spanish?

Professor Mona: I think the interest in learning Korean has increased over the years, I mean much more than during the establishment of the department of Korean language and literature in 2005 at Faculty of Alsun (Languages) at Ain Shams University in Cairo. So the answer to this question would be "yes, thanks to Korean dramas, K-pop, technology and cheap and fast internet".

- Which are the most distinguished nationalities in learning Korean?

Mr. Lee: Since Korean is an East-Asian language, three countries, China, Japan and Korea, use Chinese characters so it makes it easier for Chinese and Japanese students anyway.

- Is the level of Arab students good in speaking and writing in Korean? Does the difference between languages still affect them?

Professor Mona: Even though speaking and writing are both a performance output, I think Arabs' conversational skills are much higher than their writing skills. This is because writing needs the knowledge of producing the language being spoken, in addition to editing and proofreading. We can say that writing is more of an art than speaking. Speaking is just the language produced but writing is more than just production, it needs to be refined; it's like a "refined edited and proofread speech". The answer to your question is yes, the differences between the Korean and Arabic languages affect Korean language acquisition.

- What is the way to improve Korean pronunciation and not to fear speaking Korean?

Mr. Lee: They have to try in many different situations. Making Korean friends helps, also repeating (speaking out loud) Korean sentences through dialogue or even dramas and movies will be good to improve Korean pronunciation.

- What do you advise students who are preparing for the TOPIK exam nowadays, you do know that the exam is in less than a month?

Professor Mona: I'll tell them to practice by solving exam questions as much as they can; and to compete against time.

Practice is the key to scoring in any proficiency test, whether it's the Korean TOPIK, English IELTS or TOEFL, or even the Japanese JLPT.

- What would you advise learners who would like to improve their Korean language skills?

Professor Mona: I would like to tell them that a language is a skill that you acquire by listening, repeating and making mistakes. I would tell them to simply think of themselves as a baby who is learning to speak and to follow in their footsteps; to see what s/he does to acquire their own native language and to apply these steps when learning Korean as a second/foreign language.

They also have to keep in mind that a language is a whole system that you have to learn as a whole, and in order to do that you have to fully immerse yourself in it. In short, surround yourself with Korean and you'll become a Korean speaker.

Finally, I would like to wish them good luck.

wisdom117@korea.kr

* This article is written by a Korea.net Honorary Reporter. Our group of Honorary Reporters are from all around the world, and they share with Korea.net their love and passion for all things Korean.