Crowds coming out of Samhung Station on Pyongyang's Hyokshin (renovation) Subway Line, unlike ordinary commuters streaming out of other subway stations during the morning rush hours, are divided into two groups of college students, distinctly different from each other in appearance and manner. Students of one group, wearing Kim Il Sung badges tidily in school uniforms, move in files of ten or more, while those of the other seldom wear Kim Il Sung badges, regarding the practice as boorish, and don't walk in throng. The former, reminding one of most exemplary students, are students of Kim Il Sung University, the most prestigious institute of higher education in the North, and the latter belong to the Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages and are considered to be the most "vibrant youngsters" in the North.

Students there relish their youthfulness, drinking beer till late in the night along Changgwang Street off Chunggu Subway Station in central part of the capital. Members who constitute the mainstream of the so-called "Pyongyang playboys," the North Korean equivalent of the "Orange People" are youngsters who led the disco and blue jeans booms in the wake of the 1989 Pyongyang World Youth Festival. Intrepid children who attend the school wore hip-hop trousers of sea blue, similar to the color of their school uniforms, when the authorities banned blue jeans. Some regard them as troublemakers, who aroused public criticism by watching a banned foreign movie in the college's audio-visual room, yet these are all aspects of students of the Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages, the "hotbed of revisionism and bourgeoisie culture."

But don't rush to assess them based on those features only. They are the young people who are the most enlightened in North Korea, who are well aware of what's going on in the world, and who possess talent and competence.

The only institute of higher education teaching foreign languages in the North, Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages faces Kim Il Sung University across the Kumsung Street leading to the Kumsusan Memorial Palace. Its total enrollment runs to some 2,000, 90% of whom are graduates from Pyongyang Academy of Foreign Languages with the remainder coming from senior high schools across the country. Graduates, upon completion of four-year courses, are accorded foreign language expert certificates. The college has Russian, Chinese, Arabian, Japanese, German, French and other language departments, of which the English Department is said to have the largest number of students.

Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages is one of the most prestigious institutes of higher education in the North. While most entrants to Kim Il Sung University are the children of senior bureaucrats, their counterparts in the foreign language college are mostly the offspring of core members in society - decision makers and men of wealth.

As the college is popular, so is severe competition to enter it. Entrance competition to the college starts when applicants apply to Pyongyang Academy of Foreign Languages, offering senior high school courses. On the day of entrance examinations to the academy, its playground is full of expensive passenger cars, and scandals about unfair screening are bound to follow. That Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages has the stigma of being the "compound of power and money" and is not unrelated to such occurrences.

Such popularity of the foreign language college arises basically from the fact that it "offers relatively greater chances of 'grabbing the tail of an airplane,' namely a chance of going abroad, than other colleges," maintains a North Korean defector in the South who graduated from the college.

Lectures at the college are mostly given in dialogues. Foreign languages are taught in mother tongues not only in the classroom, but in ordinary conversation. During the first month of college days, simple greetings are repeatedly taught and practiced with the stress given to pronunciation, which is said to prove of great help in the long run.

Pyongyang College of Foreign Languages takes pride in offering students occasional access in classes to renowned literary works, or films of the country whose mother tongue is the subject of study. Unlike other college students, they translate into Korean foreign novels and watch films produced in Hong Kong, Russia and India, among others, as a means of learning the spoken languages involved. They take part in monthly foreign language contests, conducted by each department.

Among the contests given are reciting the new year's message in the foreign language one studies, translating a specified document of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jung Il into the foreign language involved, writing many foreign words during a fixed period of time, and explaining in a specific foreign language a scene of a foreign film watched on the spot in a given number of minutes.

Though reputed to be the most free-spirited young people in North Korea, foreign language college students do have their own agonies. There main concern is finding employment upon graduation. Most attractive to them are posts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or Trade, agencies publishing foreign publications and translation jobs at film studios. But their quorum is limited, and tickets to them are liable to be snatched away by parents with clout even before they are delivered to the college. Consequently, foreign language college students from day one in the institute have to shoulder psychological burden about jobs.

(Kim Kwang-in, kki@chosun.com )