Installing the English Language Pack for Office 2007

Like most teachers who come to Korea, you'll find that you're given a computer that has the Korean version of Windows installed.  Unless you speak Korean fluently, you'll find that this leads to a lot of stumbling around the user interface trying to figure out which button to click.

Fortunately, you can "fix" Microsoft Office so that its menus and buttons are in English.  Finding the proper install file can be hard to find because Microsoft has stopped distributing the file, but Digital River (a distribution partner of Microsoft) still has a copy available on their servers (see link below).  It was well worth the effort, as it saves me tons of time when I'm preparing worksheets and presentations for my lessons.

Here are the instructions:

1. Download the English Language Pack for Office 2007 at: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-42421/X12-42421.exe
2. Run the downloaded program.
3. Open 시작 > 모든 프로그램 > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office 도구 > Microsoft Office 2007 언어 설정 (which translates to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office 2007 Language Settings)
4. Change the drop-down box on the first tab from 한국어 to English.
5. Click the left button on the bottom of the dialog to apply the changes.
6. Re-open Microsoft Office.  Congratulations!  You can now read the menus and buttons!

Note, this does NOT install a new copy of Microsoft Office.  It simply updates the existing copy of Microsoft Office to support additional languages in its User Interface.

I did all this before I decided to write this tutorial.  So, if I missed any steps, or if you get stuck, please let me know and I'll get it fixed.  I'm using Office 2007, but if anyone else figures out how to do this for the other versions of Office, please post on here for the benefit of anyone who stumbles on this post who is using those versions.

I hope this is helpful to someone!

The Perils Of Language

Much of second language acquisition is about taking risks.  You'll have a hard time mastering a language if you're afraid to experiment and improvise when your not sure how to say something.  This unfortunately means that sometimes be misunderstood, but when you learn what your mistake was, it'll very likely to stick.  Furthermore, its exhilirating when you are understood, even more so if you're told that you said it "correctly" (i.e., the meaning was clear and sounded natural).  So, experimenting not only creates verry effective opportunities for learning, it can be very motivating by showing you that you are learning and you can use what you're learning.

The mistakes you make can often be comical, so long as they don't result in a serious miscommunication.  An example of a "mistake" I made occured a few weeks ago.  I was chatting with one of my coworkers via text message.  He teaches Korean Literature and is one of the most fluent English speakers in the school (he reads English newspapers on a regular basis).  I was giving him my new phone number (having a smartphone in Korea makes life much easier, by the way).  He asked me to save his number.  I wanted to tell him that I had done it, so I replied "끝내요" (goon-nay-yo) with is the present tense, polite, informal form of the verb "to finish."  He asked me what I meant, so I explained that I meant that I had "finished" saving his number.  Then I asked if I had said it wrong.  He replied that 끝내요 means that "the relationship is finished."  I was mortified, especially because he's one of the teachers that I've become closest to among my coworkers (see my previous post here).  He hadn't taken offense, thankfully.  He knew he hadn't understood me.  He just said "It won't be easy for you to adjust to korean word cheer up" (sic).

I realized later that I should have used the word 하다 (ha-da), which essentially means "to do."  Using the past tense 했어요 (hay-seo-yo), instead of the present tense 해요 (hay-yo), would also have made it clearer.

Unfortunately, the idea that its okay to make mistakes is one of the hardest lessons to teach my students.  Americans, and I suspect people from most cultures, have a hard time grappling with the fact that making mistakes is a natural part of learning and growing.  But, in Korea that fear of making a mistakes is magnified many times over.  Making mistakes is often considered shameful, and so Korean students feel that anything they say in English, especially if its in front of their peers, has to be "right."  So, it can be quite hard to get them to say anything at all.

안녕하세요!

I've recently started studying Korean.  Why?  Because I'm a glutton for punishment, it seems.  Well, there are other reasons, but I'll save that for another post.

For now, I'd like to share a few insights for anyone else who may be at the initial stages of teaching themselves Korean.  I've only been at it for a few weeks, but I've already discovered a number of things that would have saved me some time if I'd known from the beginning.

First of all, I've found that it's harder to find good resources on the Korean language compared to some other languages. I've been studying Japanese for a year, and there is a plethora of online resources that have proven to be very valuable.  I've found fewer such resources for the Korean language, and most of what I have found isn't of the same quality.  I suspect that this will change over time, as it seems that interest in Korean culture is increasing.  That's not to say good learning resources don't exist: they most certainly do.  But, compared to Japanese, which has enjoyed a greater volume of cultural exports (e.g., anime) for a longer period of time, it seems there has been less demand for, and therefore fewer, high quality learning resources.

Secondly, before starting to learn Korean I had read from a number of source about how "easy" it is to learn the Korean alphabet, Hangul.  Many touted how it could be learned in only a few hours.  This, for all practical purposes, is false.  While one could easily learn to recognize the symbols that comprise the alphabet (which I'd estimate one could learn in as little as 20 minutes), that does you little to no good if one has neither the Korean vocabulary to understand their meaning nor the understanding of pronunciation rules to be able to read them aloud, neither of which can be learned in 2 hours.  I think many simply learn the most basic, heavily accented pronunciation of the letters and think they can read Korean.  This ignores two very important facts:

1. Most Korean sounds have no direct corollaries in English.  Some Korean sounds have English sounds that are similar, while others are quite different from anything that occurs in English.  It takes significant practice to learn to pronounce these sounds correctly, or to even distinguish the differences between sounds in some cases.
2. More importantly, while Korean pronunciation is fairly regular (unlike English), Hangul does not represent how words are pronounced so much as it represents the underlying structure of the word and any particles or suffixes that have been added onto it.  In order to know how to pronounce something written in Hangul, one has to know the various rules for the phonetic transformations that occur between the written and spoken language, which in many cases can result in a quite different pronunciation than what one would come up with without applying those rules.

Coming to grips with pronunciation has, so far, been the greatest hurdle for me to learning Korean.  One resource that has proven very useful for me is the book The Sounds of Korean: A Pronunciation Guide¹.

1. There is another book titled The Sounds of Korean just released this month that intended for the same audience as the first book.  It's by a different set of authors, so I don't know if it's intended as an update to the original or not.  I've not read it and there's no reviews on Amazon, yet, so I can't comment on it.