Getting to grips with Korean

I've been living in Korea for about six months, I've known Her for over five years, and yet, as I said in my first post on this blog, I can't speak Korean. It's not for lack of trying. But I must confess I should have tried harder. In fact I am eager to learn, but so far I have learned in a haphazard way, which means I know a few complicated things like conditionals but only recently have I learned the days of the week. This makes Korean a confusing language to me.

And yet, things had started off easy, as not everything is crazy complicated in Korean. Hangeul (the Korean alphabet), for instance, is comparatively easy to learn. It works exactly like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). This means one symbol equals one sound. 

In French for instance, one letter can be pronounced in so many different ways. Not in Hangeul. So Korean is pretty easy to read. I remember an article in The Economist calling Hangeul "fantastically easy to learn"  which is not untrue, only slightly exaggerated.

So when I started "learning" Korean a few years back, I tried to read or decipher everything I saw, and I was surprised to see that oftentimes I could actually recognize the word(s) I was reading. That's because a lot of words you can see on signs or ads in the streets, are English words transcribed "phonetically." With one big difference though : Korean is a syllable-timed language, when English is based on stress and reduction. This is one of the reasons why Koreans tend to add an extra syllable when speaking English. They will also add syllbales to French words with silent vowels or final consonants. So for instance my first name in Korean changes from Vincent (2 syllables) to 빈센트 or "Bin-sent-eu" (3 syllables). Some people's names undergo even greater changes, like French writer Bernard Werber (4 syllables) who becomes 베르나르 베르베르 or "Be-reu-na-reu Be-reu-be-reu" in Korean (8 syllables). The "v" in my name and the "w" in Werber's become /b/ because /v/ and /f/ don't exist in Korean. Add to this the fact that the "er" (or /ɚ/) sound is often pronounced more like "or" (or /O:/) and you'll see why this famous tennis player's name  sounds a little different in Korea

로저 페더러 or 

/‘lQdZO: ‘pedO:lO:/

Here are a few funny ones that I have come across over the past years :

캐치 미 이프 유 캔 ("Catchi me ipeu you can")

도리토스 ("do-li-to-seu")

스파클링 (seu-par-keul-ling)

Tetris, aka 테트리스 ("Te-teu-li-sseu")

Mixing French and English : "Ca-mang-be-leu mo-shu-loom whoppor"

"on-to-cho-beul" (note that the name of one of the actors, Omar Sy (/si/) is pronounced /sai/ in Korean)

I haven't only learned the alphabet, I have also learned a few chunks that I can use in my everyday life, but at the end of the day I don't know much more than a two-year-old kid (I can say hello and goodbye, talk about eating, sleeping, and that's pretty much it). So in order to go a little further, when we were in France, Her had the very good idea of labeling all the furniture, appliances, and room doors in our apartment with their names in Korean. We also put up posters made for kids to teach them how to read or count. But to little avail. I ended up living in this apartment full of Korean words and signs without really paying attention to them.

화장실 = Bathroom

Having moved to Korea now, all this is far from enough for me to be able to live a normal life, by which I mean not having to rely on Her whenever English isn't enough to make myself understood. Last year, at the time of the Pyeongchang Olympics, I came across this ad at Incheon Airport.

I beg to differ...

Although the idea is great (multilingual information and assistance for foreigners), I really do think that not speaking Korean in Korea is a problem. I already mentioned emergency messages. I also hate it when I want to use this app to collect points when buying something and I get this pop up message and I don't know where to click so I give up on using the app unless Her is around.

That's why I have started taking Korean classes. There are free classes at the  Multicultural Family Support Centers in Busan ( https://english.busan.go.kr/bslearning ). Two classes per week, two hours each. I've been going there for three weeks now, so it's quite recent but I have already reached two conclusions : 1) I like it, 2) Speaking Korean will be an uphill battle... I'll post more about that in a while when I've found my bearings.

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