Meghan은 간다, Meghan ya no esta aqui

Learning Korean.

Well, learning Korean is certainly interesting. Learning any new language is difficult, yet rewarding. Sometimes your brain hurts. But sometimes it feels really good. Yesterday Stephanie and I had our third official Korean lesson with two ladies at church. They have been giving free Korean lessons to whoever wants to take them, but people have been cycling through. First it was a friend of ours who went home, and now we heard the other two people (a couple) who were taking the lessons are headed home in a couple weeks, too. That means our teacher:student ratio is 2:2!

Kitty is Korean, older, and speaks very fluent English. She learned English as a student, but then also during the Korean war when she and friend begged and pleaded for a missionary to teach it to them. She does most of the translating. Myeong (i always forget her other name) is younger, and does a lot of the pronunciation and teaching. The most fun is when Myeong wants Kitty to explain something to us, and then get into discussions about things in Korean. It's fun to watch them discuss and interact.

Learning a new language is a very humbling thing. Whenever I am trying to learn a new language (Spanish or Korean) I am always reminded at how impressed I should be with those who are trying to learn English. We don't have a place to church to meet officially and so we are always in one room, people come in, we get shuffled out. In all of this we end up trying to pronounce Korean letters in front of many Koreans. This is most definitely humbling, yet I was reassured when one guy in the computer room had listened to us for a while, and on our way out of the room, he smiled at Stephanie and I said and said "ahh, learn Korean" and we said "yes". He had a nice big smile on his face.

We have only been working on the alphabet so far, and perfecting our recognition. Consonants, vowels, final consonants, combined vowels, etc. The Korean language is REALLY cool, and I'm not just saying that because I'm learning it and am here in Korea. The written alphabet was created some hundred odd years ago by a group of people who wrote the consonants as they appeared inside the mouth. For instance, the open "o" at the beginning of a syllable is only a placeholder and produces no sound, so they made it an "o" shape to simulate the open mouth with no sound. However, the first "o", with special marks, in this syllable "화" is an "o" with marks over it, making a "huh" h-sound. Similarly, other consonant sounds are made to represent the movement within the mouth. Very cool.

Korean is formed with an alphabet, much like English, where a certain symbol stands for a particular sound, whereas in a language like Chinese many symbols stand for a whole word, and you, therefore, must learn a ton of symbols and their meaning. However, where English is written each letter left to right, Korean is written in syllables, so that one block of letters is a syllable in the word. The characters are written left to right and then top to bottom.

Example: 영= "Yeong" (pronounced Yung or the English Young) the first o is a placeholder and makes no sound. The line with two lines out the side is a "yeo" or "yuh" sound, and the last o is the "ng" when it comes at the end of a syllable. Oh wow, I bet this is boring the stuffing out of you all. But anyway, I think it's pretty fascinating. The best part is that wherever I go, I can practice reading Korean! Now I just have to work on my vocabulary.

Here are some fun things for you. I actually had to input these here from our school's computer, which has Korean and English, and I might try to input some more tomorrow. You can try to read the corresponding characters. I'll break the syllables up. Pretty soon you'll be learning how to read Korean!

화영= Hwa Young. It's the Korean name I've jokingly given myself. We learned in Korean class that "hwa" means fire OR flower, and I figure that's a pretty good name for myself. And Young is often the second part of a first name for a girl.

나무= Na-mu. Tree.

감사 함니다 =kam-sa ham-ni-da. Thank you.

So there you go! There's your Korean lesson! Yesterday in class we finished reading alphabet stuff and started on greetings and it started making my head spin. We'll see.

Also, we got these super cute, really great self-learning books to help us out as well. Here are some pictures with more words. You can see why we picked it out - it's a lot of fun.

Left to right, top to bottom, pronounced: No-Ray (song, as in "noraebang". "bang" means room. "Noraebang" means "song room"), ah-nay, kah-gay, ah-chay, see-kyay, yay-kee.

And, for your enjoyment:
Yes. America is Korean is "mee-gook". And, just because it's there and you can see it, man is "nam-chay"

posted by Meghan @ 9:06 PM