This is getting ridiculous. I need to start learning Korean.

Probably the most effective way to go about this would be to attend some real language classes, or meet up with a private tutor, but I don’t see that in the bank account. I’m still broke from surviving student teaching back in Boise, plus, my credit cards took a substantial hit from a New Years visit to the mountains which was financially ill-advised, but there are some people you just have to see before you up and move to Asia.

So I’m going to have to approach this acquisition of language from a more grassroots standpoint. For Christmas, my older brother got me a book called Say it Right In Korean. I gave it a cursory glance on the plane—there were fourteen hours to kill, after all—but I was quickly discouraged by it. Korean is easily the most foreign-sounding language with which I have ever come in contact. Not only is there an overwhelming amount of syllables in every word, none of the sounds seem to fit right together. Everything seems so choppy, as if the words themselves are being diced in the air as they leave the speaker’s mouth.

Before I can try reading it, much less attempt speaking, I need to figure out what the Hangul alphabet is all about. This is probably what I should have been doing while unemployed for the month of January. Additionally, the guy here before me left two books in the apartment: Korean through English and Romanized Korean. I am least frightened by the Say it Right book, but there’s no correlating alphabet in that one, so I pick up the Romanized one, since it’s smaller.

I quickly discern an underlying logic to the system that I can appreciate. The English language has been through many major overhauls, influenced over the centuries by a picnic spread of Western languages, suffering mass identity crises every several hundred years on the heels of this invasion or that migration. Speaking English competently is a bit like being in a codependent relationship with a schizophrenic. One moment, things are going swimmingly and everything makes a quirky kind of sense. Take gh, for example. English used to want the ghs pronounced way back in the throat (as in the ch of the Scottish loch), and so it was done. And then, for reasons too complex to understand without a PhD in Linguistics, English decides that we’re dropping that rule, it’s all just crap, and from now on we’ll be saying it just like a normal g, like ghost.

“Well…okay,” you think. “If you really think that’s best.” You’re pretty sure you love English, and besides, it’s all you know. Too late to switch to Dutch now. And just as you’re getting used to this new side of English, he rounds on you again. Now, he claims you’re supposed to say gh like it’s an f. Like in cough.

“But what about the new ‘g’ rule?”
“I never said that.”
“Yes you did!”
“Well, not at the end of a word.”
You sigh. “Okay, I guess. So what you’re saying is you want me to start saying 'through' like ‘thruff’?”
“Well, no, not this time.”

So English can be exasperating, and symbolically, it probably should just be scrapped and rebuilt according to the International Phonetic Alphabet, which equates exactly one sound to one symbol with little cheek and much refreshing honesty. Oprah would definitely tell us to end this confusing relationship with a language that doesn’t know what it wants, but deep down, I think we all know we’ll never really leave our mad, deranged language. It would take so long to rebuild. But that’s exactly what the Koreans have done, or more accurately, did—back in the fifteenth century, when the difficulty of Chinese script meant high rates of illiteracy, which in turn spurred a reinvention of the written word. I am delighted with the straightforwardness of the Hangul alphabet.

There are still a few overlapping sounds that trip me up. For instance, [g] often sounds like [k], as with [b] / [p], and [l] / [r]. But those are similar enough sounds, even in English, and I’m willing to forgive Hangul for the minor inconsistencies. It keeps our newfound relationship interesting.

So it doesn’t take all that long to figure out the phonetics of Korean. Within a week of study, I can stumble through the names of places on the subway, and even read a menu haltingly. It sounds exactly like when my kindergarteners try to read English, and I vow to remain patient with them. And it is time to stop speaking Spanish to the melon man.

written by  alli_ockinga on May 7, 2009 from Inch'on, South Korea
from the travel blog: I go Korea!
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Right on point. According to English-language rules we should be able to spell fish like "ghoti". Then add in all the French words and other foreign language words and we have a bunch of different rules for English orthography. Most other languages including Hangul are more consistent in their pronunciation but you can still use online tools to help you show the pronunciation: http://www.languagehack.com/2008/12/05/pronouncing-words-in-a-foreign-language/

written by  Vietnam language hacker on May 8, 2009

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Beautifully worded and incredibly (sickeningly?) true. Oh, English. Why did we choose to get degrees in it again? Because I gotta tell ya, back home right now it feels like my degree is about as useful as a third elbow.

And yeah, Spanish is not the same. ;)

written by  Ryan on May 8, 2009

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A nice compressed history lesson there. I'm sure an interesting book could be written about the history of just spelling the English language if it hasn't been written already. It would also require an explanation of how languages like Chinese and Korean are "romanized" into English.

written by  T. Christ on May 11, 2009

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