sounds

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Sim, why are you writing at 8am? Would it happen to have anything to do with the lead-footed jackass who lives above you?" Astute observation, dear reader. And yes, it just might have something to do with him.

Did you know that for native English speakers, Korean is one of the five hardest languages to learn? I'd assume that that's a two way street, and that the inverse is true, that English is just as hard for a native Korean speaker to learn. (4 "thats" in that last sentence, setting a new single sentence Journey to the East record.)  Pretty much everything about the two languages is different, even basic things like word order, sentence structure, and the alphabet.

Korean has its own alphabet. You may look at it and just see a mess of pictures, not all that different from Chinese. But Korean actually has letters which represent sounds, and which when put together form words. Once you learn the letters, the pictures become much more discernible, and it's actually quite an easy language to learn to read. Much easier than English, in which rules are constantly contradicted.

Not only do the alphabets look different, they sound different as well. They have sounds we don't have, we have sounds they don't have. The most notorious example of this would be our distinct sounds for R and L. In Korea, both of those sounds are represented by the same letter. They also have no letters for F, V, X,  and Z.

Here's where Konglish rears its ugly head. Konglish is English words that have been adapted into Korean. Words like radio, computer, chocolate, etc. However, because the alphabets are so different, the words get mangled in the transition and come out sounding weird. Also, if there's ever a sound in an English word that doesn't exist in Korean, they must substitute in something else. Fs become Ps, Xs become SHs, Vs become Bs, and Zs become Js. Konglish gets Koreans used to mispronouncing these sounds. It's a problem that almost all Koreans have, from novice learners to those who've been studying for years.

It can also be funny, because they can often mispronounce a word, and in doing so say a completely different word. Take the word "Zoo". Remember that for them Z is J, so "Zoo" can quite easily become "Jew". As a result, and as happened to me the other day, you can have a Korean child adamantly proclaiming, "I hate jews!" and "Jews smell bad!"

You know, blogger.com allows you to see which google searches brought people to your blog. I might be in for a steep uptick of my anti-Semitic readership.