Post-21: Is ‘Why’ Rude? Korean vs. English

I was delighted to be interrupted yesterday by my fellow foreign teacher, M.R., midway through a class. He was teaching in the next classroom over at the time.

Knock, knock. He opens the door without waiting for a response. M.R. resembles Steve Jobs (who is a secular saint in Korea), and thus he is half-affectionately called “Steve Jobs Teacher” from time to time.

“Can I ask you something?”

Now, a teacher barging-in and asking such a thing to another teacher is an unusual occurrence. I don’t think it’d ever happened to me before that moment. Maybe another teacher would come in looking for a lost board marker, eraser, or the like (classes “own” rooms at this language institute, and teachers shuffle between them), or maybe one would ask to consult briefly with me outside for some urgent reason. Not this time: What followed seemed, even at the time, a bit surreal: M.R. asked me, loudly, in such that all my students could also hear: “If I call your name and you say ‘Why?’, is it rude?” The door to his room was still open, too, so his own students could hear what was going on.

I say: “In English, it is.” / “Yes, thank you!“, he thunders.

Most students were working on honing the fine art of shirking, trying to do anything but EtE1’s tedious textbook work.

A moment after the exchange above-described, one particularly impetuous student, Trever, loudly agrees with M.R. and me. “Yes, it is rude!”, he says. M.R. gets so excited by this, that he asks Trever to go next door and explain to them. Trever went. Well, he did after he was assured that the other class’ students were all younger than he was.

It seems that M.R. had called on a drowsy, inattentive student, and heard “Why?” in response, and was offended by it.

The thing is, in Korean, “Why?” (“왜요?”) functions as English’s “What is it?” or , more politely, English’s “Yes?“

    In Korean
        A. “Kim?”
        B. “Why?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

    In the USA, in English
        A. “Smith?”
        B. “Yes, what is it?”
        A. “Can you lend me a pencil?”

These two exchanges are functionally identical. A Korean  student responding with “Why?” is just saying in English exactly what she’d say in Korean, and means no offense, I think. I remember my early days when I didn’t realize this yet, and also thought students were being openly rude. I’d never contemplated doing something like what M.R. did, though, and couldn’t’ve anyway, as I was the only foreign teacher at my first language institute, in Ilsan in 2009.