Learning Korean

Before we came to Korea, I got some beginners Korean language tapes and read a number of blogs by foreigners living in Korea to get a feel for the language and culture. It provided me with a decent base of knowledge upon which to build.

After making my way through the tapes, I had told myself that I should learn how to read the alphabet. The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, is widely regarded as one of the most intelligent linguistic inventions in history. It was created by the King Sejong in 1446 as a means of improving literacy in his country. It is a phonetic language, meaning that every character is directly associated to a sound. It must have worked because literacy in Korea these days is roughly 99%.

Learning the characters is apparently quite easy to get to the point where you can sound out individual words. Unfortunately, due to a lack of time, I didn't have a chance to learn it before we left. So I was constantly trying to find time to sit down and learn it. This proved difficult as I had an interpreter on hand and more interesting things to fill in my time. Despite this set back, In the time we were there, I was able to develop a moderate collection of functional language, which helped out with things like meal times, greetings, basic requests.

Koreans as a people are generally very polite and this is reflected strongly in their language. Even something as simple as pouring alcohol has its own hierarchical influence. During a meal, the junior must be alert to the state of their elders glass and be ready to refill it should it near emptiness. When pouring or getting your glass filled by an elder, you must grasp the bottle or glass with two hands. Having your hands in your pockets when bowing or saying thank you is seen as a big no-no. One I was guilty of a couple of times.

When speaking to people older than you, it is essential to use a more polite tone than if you were speaking to your peers or those younger than you. This is more than just adding the equivalent of please and thank you to your speech. Formal language is often entirely different to its more casual equivalents. It is seen as quite rude to use informal language to your elders, and elders would get quite irate at you for doing so.

Before we left, Jiran had predicted that if she were to tell her parents that she was teaching me Korean, they would blame her for every mistake I made. So she decided to stress to them that I had been learning the language by myself and she wasn't to blame for my lack of knowledge. Hence they were quite forgiving whenever I made a mistake or couldn't remember something. However, this didn't extend to Korean customs and somewhat amusingly (to me) Jiran's dad blamed her for not teaching me the customs better.

But the Korean language while not being tonal like Chinese, is still a very difficult language to learn. The necessary politeness expands the required vocabulary considerably but because of the structure of the language there are many words that sound very similar to one another, where only one syllable varies but would have an entirely different meaning. That combined with an entirely foreign grammar structure makes learning Korean quite a difficult task. I bought myself a Korean language book while I was over there, so hopefully I will have the alphabet down soon so I can carry on with my study.