Well, I’ve been in Seoul for about two months now and midterms just ended, so I figured it was time for an update.

All is well on the southern front, despite what the news was reporting back home a couple weeks ago. As always, the northern threat is there, but everyone here has grown so used to it that they couldn’t care less. I figure if the natives aren’t concerned, I shouldn’t be either. After all, this is their country and their way of life, and they have the most at stake.

Classes are tough — and it’s not the material that’s difficult, but the way it’s taught. There is heavy emphasis on testing over things like homework and participation, which alone isn’t a problem, but together with the rigid class structure has really been testing my learning ability and my patience. Granted, I’m not taking as many courses here as my peers because I knew the ones I decided to take would be challenging, but I’ve never considered myself very good at operating under time pressure, and there’s certainly been a lot of that as of late…but enough with the excuses.

Learning Korean has been compelling at times, but by and large, it has become a chore. Perhaps this is the culture shock talking, but it’s clear any foreign language skills I had in high school are gone, along with any real interest in pursuing Korean following my return to the states. I know plenty of people who seem to have a knack for it and are enjoying themselves though, and I don’t see fit to rain on their parade, so I’ve decided to carry on and see what happens.

On a more positive note, my research has been going very well. I’m not prepared to reveal the totality of what I”m doing for Professor Simha just yet, but I now have a system capable of randomly selecting a word from a dictionary and automatically generating a phonemic multiple choice question based on that word, complete with one correct answer and three incorrect ones. Thanks to some helpful libraries, this actually didn’t turn out to be too difficult, though there’s certainly some room for improvement, especially as far as the selection of plausible incorrect answers is concerned. In fact, it was far easier for me to develop procedures to generate correct answers to questions than incorrect ones, primarily because incorrect answers have to be, well, wrong, but also believable, which is pretty hard to explain to a human, let alone to a computer. It’s all coming together now though, and I’m excited to continue working on it into the summer. Hopefully I’ll be able to elaborate a bit more on what we’re looking to accomplish at that point too.

That’s about it from me for now. Not the lightest post ever, but rarely do I ever come out of a week of midterms feeling overly positive, so in the meantime I’ll take comfort in knowing these dark times will pass. Until next time, adios.

After a couple weeks traveling Europe — London, Amsterdam and Rome, to be specific — and a quick two-hour layover in Doha, I have arrived at my final destination for the next few months: Seoul, South Korea. I actually arrived a little more than a week ago, but I’m enrolled as an foreign exchange student at Korea University and classes start today, so I figured I’d wait to provide this little status update until I was settled.

I’d discuss Europe and my thoughts, but I feel as though I did a pretty good job documenting everything in the form of pictures I uploaded to Facebook, so I won’t bother — at least not for now. That said, this past week in Seoul has certainly been just as interesting. Beyond the obvious language differences, there are much more subtle cultural ones that I’m still trying to get my mind around, and countless other minor practices I am constantly finding myself forgetting. The latter, for example: it is apparently customary here to eat one’s rice with a spoon. Now, I can’t say I have a problem with this, but I do prefer chopsticks because they slow me down when I’m eating, which I find makes my dining experience more enjoyable overall. This, combined with keeping one’s rice bowl on the left side of your soup bowl at all times, is slowly driving me insane. Notice, too, how most of this stuff revolves around food. That’s because eating is, at least traditionally, a very social practice here; from my understanding, not more than a couple of decades ago, it was unusual to be caught eating alone. This has since changed or at least started to change thanks to globalization and the inception of things like the twenty-four hour convenience store and coffee shop, but it is quickly becoming evident that eating with friends remains the preferred choice. Again, this isn’t a problem, but in light of the fact that classes begin today and many of my courses are back-to-back with only fifteen minute break periods, it should certainly make grabbing a quick bite to eat more interesting. Anyway, I haven’t been here long enough to touch on everything, but I’m hoping to uncover more aspects of Korean life and report any additional nuances here along with whatever else I might have to say.

I’m hoping to restart my research with Professor Simha back at GW sometime this week. The time difference will certainly throw a bit of a wrench in things at first, but I’m hoping we don’t run into any further issues being that all of this will be done remotely until I arrive back on campus in July after finishing my stay here in Seoul at KU.

And that’s my update. Regards.