Is This Korean Language Textbook Right?

It has been found that 50 Korean language textbooks, which have been used by junior high and high school students since the seventh curriculum was announced in 2000, contain 200-300 errors such as wrong words, sentences using the wrong components, and awkward sentences that appear like translated texts.

Some examples are as follows:

1) “A bad eating habit should be overcome as quickly as possible…” (Junior High Korean Language One, page 26): It is correct in Korean that “overcome” should be used in an active form instead of passive.

2) “A husband who possesses a beloved wife and kids inevitably becomes a diligent worker.” (High School Korean Language One, page 84): It is not appropriate to use the word “possess.”

3) “The boy’s mind leaped from disappointment to joy at a single bound” (Elementary reading 5-1, page 104): “Leaped” is not appropriate to use as the predicate. “Changed” should be used instead since the subject of this sentence is “mind.” (“A mind leaped” sounds awkward in Korean.)

4) “Closed pharmacy” (Junior High Korean Language 1-2, page 36) and “It is safe for children to operate” (Junior High Korean Language 2-2, page 127) are phrases using passive voices, but they are wrong in Korean.

There were also errors found in foreign literations. “Macbeth” and “Shakespeare” were incorrectly written and not conforming to the International Phonetics Association rule. In addition, there were even inappropriate suggestions in these textbooks, such as: “There are such words that don’t change their forms, such as ‘Korean language’ and ‘reading.’” (Elementary Reading 4-2, page 74) In this example, “reading” is a noun derived from a verb and therefore, it is not a correct example.

Some 1,000 errors in spacing and spellings found in textbooks approved for use in the seventh curriculum were corrected by the Journalists Association for Korean Language Revision in 2002. Errors in sentences have not been pointed out, however. As a result, students have been using these textbooks without knowing there were errors in them.

These errors were discovered by Choi Yong-gi, researcher at the National Academy of the Korean Language. Choi plans to present his thesis titled: “A Research on Sentences Used in Korean Language Textbooks” in the Hangeul Academy Congress on October 16. In his thesis, he analyzed about 50 textbooks.

“I sent the results of my research to the Ministry of Education and Human Resources last year in May. As a result, 80-90 percent of the errors have been corrected in newly printed textbooks. However, students who used the old versions were not informed of these errors, and I think that there is not an ignorable number of students who are still using these textbooks,” he said.

Responding to this, an official at the Education Ministry said, “Because editors are not the same people who write the scripts, there could be errors in the process of making textbooks. Besides, books are not written by one single person. Therefore, this could have caused inconsistency. We are considering measures to improve these problems.”

Soo-Jung Shin crystal@donga.com