Korean

Korean-run businesses are filling bustling Liberty Avenue in the heart of Richmond Hill’s Little Guyana. The change has rankled some longtime local grocers – but not Guyanese immigrant shoppers, who flock to many of the new shops.

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Sunny Yang, a recent immigrant from South Korea, studies English at a school in Manhattan, but finds that the best way to improve her language skills is to interact with native speakers. So she uses Meetup.com, a popular social networking site, to meet English speakers. In exchange for helping her to learn English, she offers to teach them to speak Korean.

For some immigrants, social networking has become not just a means of sharing photographs or staying in touch with old friends but a valuable tool for assimilation. Sites like Meetup.com and Facebook help immigrants to establish themselves in America by connecting with others who speak the same language and face similar challenges.

In an e-mail, Yang, 25, wrote that even though she and other immigrants could meet people the old fashioned way — at clubs, parties, bars and other social events — recent immigrants often feel marginalized by differences in language and customs.

“For us, the foreign students who don’t know American culture and people, it is not that easy to go in any bars or clubs and get along with them,” she wrote. “On the other hand, the Internet is easy to access and you can even say hello to anyone, anytime, anywhere. There is no one who is staring at you when you make mistakes because of your language or culture difference.”

Net Effect For Asians

Traditionally, Asian immigrants in New York — and particularly Queens, which has the largest Asian population of all the boroughs — have connected to other immigrants, improved their English or integrated into American society through the community and public institutions.

“When there was no Internet,” Yang wrote, “the only way to meet people and make friends in the foreign country was just being introduced a friend of friend, going to church or attending school.”

But now Chinese and Korean immigrants in Queens, are increasingly using social networking websites to meet people and make friends.

Yang could do that without the Internet, she admits.

“For foreigners like me, it is way more difficult and something we need big courage to do,” she wrote. “Or maybe I am too shy?”

Facebook Fans

Yang belongs to The New York City Korean Language group on Meetup, which boasts 651 members. Several Facebook groups dedicated to immigrant groups each claim more than 100 users.

Andrew Dong Hyuk Hahm, 19, started a Facebook group that connects 114 users interested in the Korean-American Presbyterian Church of Queens – it’s called “I went to KAPCQ yea yeah.” Based in Flushing, the church is more than 35 years old and has a weekly attendance of between 2,000 and 3,000 congregants, most of whom are immigrants. The Facebook group allows former church members to stay in touch.

“A group like the one I created connects people,” Hahm wrote in an on-line interview conducted through Facebook. As an example he cited an uncle who, having attended KAPCQ in the early 1990’s, recently opened a Facebook account and joined Hahm’s group. Now, the two keep in close contact.

But not every Facebook group has worked out as its founders wanted.

A little more than a year ago, Linny Fang, who moved to Flushing from Taiwan in 1990 when she was eight, created “Chinese in Queens NYC,” a group on Facebook with 153 members.

“I had many plans in mind for the group when it was first established,” Fang wrote in a Facebook message. She had hoped, for instance, to post frequent updates about community events so that the members of the group could meet.

But the group hasn’t succeeded as Fang had hoped.

“It is a big effort to try to maintain the ideal group,” she wrote. “Unfortunately, and I am mildly ashamed, I haven’t been doing my part to really actualize my plans and thoughts.”

Common Goals

Other Internet-based social groups have had more success. For three years, Al Jeannot, 54, a paralegal and trained linguist, has organized language groups through Meetup.com, which allows users to join groups with the purpose of sharing a common goal — in this case, learning and preserving an immigrant’s language.

“In New York, (immigrants) are isolated and often room with people whom they have no affinity with, so they go to the Internet to find their own kind,” he said on a recent afternoon at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where about 10 members of the Meetup group he founded, “Chinese Chat,” met. Based in Flushing, the group’s members primarily live there and in neighboring Bayside.

Jeannot, who moved to New York from Haiti in the 1970s, speaks seven languages: Haitian Creole, Spanish, German, Japanese, Italian, French and English. Next up? Perfecting his Mandarin.

“The best way to learn a language is to meet up with people and speak to them,” he said.

No one knows that better than Sunny Yang, who considers the social networking she does on Meetup.com to be indispensable to her assimilation into American culture.

“I can’t even imagine my New York life without the Internet,” she wrote.

(To read an interview with Dr. Julia B. Carroll, deputy chairwoman of the Basic Educational Skills program at Queensborough Community College in Queens, click here.)

Dr. Julia B. Carroll, deputy chairwoman of the Basic Educational Skills program at Queensborough Community College in Queens, talks with us about language issues and the challenges Korean and Chinese immigrants face at Bayside, where there is a large Asian population.

What are the challenges of learning English as a second language?

I think that some of the challenges are that students are living in communities where they are only speaking their own language most of the time. They are hanging with their friends and speaking their native language, or even working at a job where they are speaking their native language, and they have this feeling that somehow when they come to class, their language issues are going to go away miraculously. We find that happens a lot.

They are also living in a generation where everything is instantaneous and they want to learn the language faster and faster. But at the same time, their actual exposure to English is limited.

As an educator, how do you address that?

Well I give them a lot of reading and writing and work outside the class because I think they are just not getting enough exposure to the language. I tell them to get a job where you can speak English at least 65 percent of time, and watch television in English and listen to music in English and try to speak English to your friends.

What immigrant populations do you teach?

We have a little of everything here. There is a large population of Asian students, Koreans and Chinese, and we have quite a few South Americans too. Probably because we are in Bayside, which is pretty much a Chinese and Korean area so there are a lot of Asians here.

What do you think it is about Bayside that attracts Chinese and Korean immigrants to the area?

There is already a well-established community here. They got the stores, the restaurants, the businesses and lots of people have been living here for a long time. So when you have relatives that are already here, and people speak your native language around you, that’s very appealing.

Do you find that Chinese and Korean immigrants come to this country knowing more or less English than other immigrant groups? Or is it about the same?

It depends on the other immigrant groups. For example, you’ve got Haitian immigrants from Haiti where there’s a broken system with a huge literacy problem, and then you have Russian students who are very well read and their language is much closer to English than Chinese or Korean is, so they have fewer problems.

I think Chinese and Korean immigrants are very serious students and they study very hard. The language issues they have have to do with the grammar and the structure of the language. It’s very, very different than English and it takes them longer to master.

Do you notice a pattern among Chinese and Korean immigrant students in terms of the time it takes to learn English?

I think it depends. You take students from Hong Kong where they have had a lot more exposure to English than students from Central China. I hate to stereotype. I think they have very good study habits and they are coming from backgrounds and families that support them and encourage them to study.

But I think if they memorize information their whole lives, when they come here it’s a big shock because a lot of the assignments don’t involve just memorization. It’s actively using the language to interact and participate in class discussions. I think that’s a challenge for a lot of students.