Learning Korean names

When I was substitute teaching, I made a very strong effort to learn as many students' names as possible.  As someone that suffered (suffered might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I'm using it for dramatic effect here) throughout life having adults repeatedly mispronounce my name, I wanted to make sure that I did not put other children through a similar torture (again, dramatic, but let's just go with it for now).  I was somewhat successful and while I certainly cannot name every single student that I substitute taught, I can name a fair amount of them.

I resolved to learn as many student names as possible when coming to Korea.  So in my first lesson I introduced myself and then asked the students to write their names in Korean and draw a picture of what they like to do for fun.  This activity was successful in that I learned about my students.  It was not successful in my learning their names, however, because Korean names are crazy hard to learn.

Korean names (in general, there are some exceptions but I've only ever seen one) have three parts, just like most American names.  But everything is in a different order.  So let's compare two names.

Park Ji Sung 

Taleen Marie Brady

Note:  He's a famous soccer player who played for Manchester United and is idolized by Korean teenage boys.  She's a foreign English teacher and part-time blogger and bowler.  Ever heard of her?

Park is his family name just like Brady is my family name.  And his given name is Ji Sung just like my given name is Taleen Marie.  But the difference is that no one calls me Taleen Marie.  And even though I'm not someone who hides their middle name, I can honestly say that no one has ever consistently called me that, even my parents when I was in trouble as a kid.

Also, even though I have written his name as Ji Sung, and his friends would call him Ji Sung, his name might also be correctly written as Jisung, JiSung, Ji-Sung, or Ji-sung.  It's kind of just whatever he prefers because there is no one correct way to English-ize Korean names.  Wikipedia writes it as Ji-Sung, but I have no idea which version this guy uses.  I don't know him personally.

So what does this have to do with student names?  A couple of things.  High school students know that Westerners put their family name last.  So some students would tell me their name was Park Ji Sung and others would say their name was Ji Sung Park.  Which led to me not know what anyone's family name was.  

Additionally, Korean names have very little variation and are usually no more than 3 syllables long, including the family name.  So here are some given names of Korean students.

Ja-ryeong

Bo-won

Jin Seon

Sun Yeong

Da On

Dong Su

Su-yeon

Kang Seo

Ji Su

Ji Weon

Do any of those look similar to you?  Now multiply that by 45 and you have all of my students.  And on top of it, Koreans only have about five common last names.  Kim, Lee, Jang, Choi (pronounced "Chway"), and Park.  As you can imagine, many Koreans have the same name.  

But, this has not completely deterred my efforts to learn students' names.  It's just going to take me a lot longer.  And I am up to the challenge.