Hangungmal

I am now in my second week of Korean language classes at the University of Ulsan and I have really been enjoying learning the language of the people I live among, as well as being back in the university atmosphere (if only for a few hours per week). I think that taking classes now, after I've already been in-country for six months, was a good idea because I have already learned hangeul (the Korean alphabet, which deserves its own post actually) and a few key phrases in Korean. It's shocking how much I've learned just from being around my students everyday; I sometimes think that I'm learning more than they are (which doesn't say a lot for my teaching abilities!). Here are three things that I really like about Korean:

Honorifics: Sure they make learning a language that much more difficult, but they also make it that much more interesting. Additionally, learning how to use honorifics teaches one about social stratification in a given society. As I've mentioned before, age is all-important in Korea, in large part because it effects which honorific level to use when speaking to someone, whether they be senior, junior or chingu (friend- someone who is the same age as you are). The point of any social interaction is to denigrate yourself and exalt your conversation partner through language. To illustrate my point: a couple of weeks ago, I was out on a Friday night with a group of my Korean friends and they decided to play a trick on one of the girls, Da-eun, by convincing her that one of the boys was younger than her. She ordered him to "Drink up!" using the very familiar form of the imperative, which is commonly used when talking to people younger than you, especially children. As it turned out, he was in fact her senior, and poor Da-eun was extremely embarassed. In some ways, I wish we had something similar in English. Certainly, there are ways of speaking English (parole) that are reserved for specific situations and people, but there isn't anything comparable on the level of langue, which would make the subtleties of Anglo-American social interactions more legible to non-native speakers.

Hanja: As in Japanese, many words in Korean are borrowed from Chinese. There is a way of writing these characters, known as hanja in Korea and kanji in Japan, that students learn in school, although I think it is becoming less and less popular in Korean curricula. However, many of these loan words are also written in hangeul and used frequently. For example, saram is the purely Korean word for "person," while in is the Chinese character, used in waygukin (foreigner) and migukin (American) for example. Our professor told us that it is usually considered more polite to use the Chinese loan words as it indicates that the speaker has been educated. In addition there are two counting systems used for different situations, one based on pure Korean numbers (hana, dul, set...) and one Sino-Korean system (il, i, sam...). The Sino-Korean system is used for counting anything that would usually be represented in a text-artifact by written numbers (1,2,3...), such as monetary amounts, telephone numbers, ages, years, etc., while the Korean system is used to count things. However, both are used to measure time, the Korean system to count hours and the Sino-Korean to count minutes, which keeps things interesting.

Economy of language: I don't really know enough Korean yet to meaningfully comment on this, but Korean seems to me to be an economical language. In other words, many of the tools we use in English to draw contrasts between things in language, such as articles and conjugations based on person, for instance, are absent from Korean. Comprehension of any given utterance comes as much from its context as it does from what is being uttered. It makes things a little more complicated at first, but it gets easier.

I had forgotten how much I love learning languages, I guess I'm just a big ol' dork like that! I hope to be able to have a conversation with one of my taxi drivers by the end of three months; already I can stumble through in broken Korean and "Konglish" for a good ten minutes.