GARDEN GROVE : In Any Language, Customer’s Right

In a small classroom, students eagerly jot down words in their new language.

“La fecha. La hora,” the teacher writes on the board--Spanish for “the date” and “the hour.”

The group’s members are Korean--merchants, business people, health-care professionals and others. They are studying Spanish to improve relations with their Latino clientele.

“A lot of Koreans are in a small business and deal with Hispanic customers,” said Dr. Koo Oh, a Garden Grove dentist and president of the Korean-American Assn. “They need to understand Spanish so they can deal with them in a more friendly way.”

By improving communication with the Latino community, Oh said, the merchants also hope to prevent recurrences of incidents like those during the 1992 riots in Los Angeles when some Korean business owners clashed with residents.

The Spanish class, which began last year, is now in its fifth 10-week session. The program has drawn increasing numbers of students and has split into basic and advanced groups.

Twenty-five graduated from the first session; 67 from the third. More than 80 are enrolled for the current session.

Spanish, with an accent similar to Korean, is easier for the students to master than English, said teacher Maria Song, 24, who lived in Argentina for 10 years. And Latino customers are patient with merchants’ language errors, she said, a further incentive for her students to keep learning.

“Because they’re both minorities they get along better, and they’re not so critical if they don’t speak the language perfectly,” Song said.

Students in her classes learn more than grammar, Song said.

“They also want to understand what the culture is all about,” she said.

Song explains to students that pointing, for example, a common gesture of Korean conversation, is considered impolite by Latinos. And while avoiding eye contact signals respect among Koreans, Latinos and other Westerners may perceive it as aloofness or disinterest.

She also teaches that the two cultures share a devotion to family and respect for elders.

Some former students have used their new language skills for more than day-to-day business transactions. A group of Korean doctors who studied Spanish have gone on medical missions to Latin America, and last week they left for another one, in Peru.

“I’m working as a nurse, and I see some Hispanic patients, and Spanish really comes in handy,” says Patsy Kim, who began studying in April and is now in the advanced class. By knowing another language, she said, “you become more than one person.”