#korlang

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Can you please tell me your favorite things about this picture?

It looks like someone's hand, and was made on a Wacom tablet and then printed out.

[studying-engineering]

2020.07.26 // Day 21

It’s really hard for me to study a language. I just learned english before because “it sounds better that way” rather than analyzing what is the subject, object and other parts of the sentence. Now I really gotta pay attention and re-learn all those stuff again 😂😭 studygram

[etirabys]

I and the giant were in a Korean-run restaurant last week and he noted with pleasure that he could make out some of the words from the TV, which was running some political news

I told him that if he heard the suffix -dang, it meant party - they were using it a lot so I thought I'd teach him

"By party, you mean..."

"Political party. The Korean word for party, as in with music and drinking, is just 'pati'. It's a loan word."

"...That's really funny."

[yumiclmpn]

[ 02.05.18 ] It's been 15 weeks Learning Korean is not easy.

[studying-engineering]

2020.07.27 // Day 22

 studygram

[etirabys]

me teaching the giant the Korean consonants: and this is the ‘m’ equivalent. (voicing out) mah, muh, moh.

the giant: I hear a hint of a ‘b’ in there?

me: no, there’s... (voicing it out again) huh, I see what you mean. I guess the Korean ‘m’ is somewhere between the English ‘m’ and the English ‘b’. Anyway, here’s the ‘b’ equivalent – bah, buh, boh.

the giant: that’s a ‘p’.

(arguing ensues, in which he keeps asking me if the consonant is voiced or unvoiced, because it sounds so ambiguous, and I keep saying I don’t know and don’t care, all I can do is repeat it for him and let him correctly bin the consonant in his mental buckets that I don’t share)

me: anyway, ‘b’ is different from ‘p’. This is a ‘p’ – pah, puh, poh.

the giant: they sound exactly the same

me: no they don’t! bah vs pah! buh vs puh!

the giant: the difference is in the vowels, not the consonants. Can you really not hear this?

(more arguing ensues)

me: and here’s the hard p / double b, which is like the French p in petite – if you say ‘app’ and then, without opening your mouth from ‘p’ sound, say ‘bah’, then you’ll have pronounced the double b.

the giant: (looks incredulous about this but succeeds)

me: great! and now here’s the ‘d’ sound – dah, duh, doh...

the giant: that’s a ‘t’.

[etirabys]

while reading the wikipedia entry on the Korean language to get the history straight for teaching purposes

In general, Korean lacks grammatical gender. As one of the few exceptions, the third-person singular pronoun has two different forms: 그 geu (male) and 그녀 geunyeo (female). However, the terms were invented in the 20th century, under the influence of foreign languages, and they seldom appear in colloquial speech.

expanding on the last sentence – from what my middle school language teacher told me, gendered third person pronouns came into being in order to translate texts in languages that had gendered pronouns (and the gender mattered in the text). I’ve never used them while speaking, and can remember seeing them only in somewhat formal literary contexts.

[etirabys]

For native English speakers, Korean is generally considered to be one of the most difficult languages to master despite the relative ease of learning Hangul. For instance, the United States' Defense Language Institute places Korean in Category IV, which also includes Japanese, Chinese (e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese & Shanghainese) and Arabic. This means that 63 weeks of instruction (as compared to just 25 weeks for Italian, French, Portuguese and Spanish) are required to bring an English-speaking student to a limited working level of proficiency in which he or she has "sufficient capability to meet routine social demands and limited job requirements" and "can deal with concrete topics in past, present, and future tense."

I assume the difficulty goes the other way as well. I guess this explains why, despite English language education being so emphasized in South Korea, Korean students generally don’t reach fluency – in middle school I knew classmates who were spending 5~10 hours every week in English classes inside and outside of school, but barely reached conversational level