I stumbled across this article in the Korea Herald, written by Brian (in Jeollanam-do). The article is full of interesting points and really helps explain a little of why Koreans fail so badly at speaking English.
I won’t go into it too much, as you should probably take a look for yourself. However, I will comment upon one paragraph, which I think is probably the best paragraph I’ve ever seen printed in a Korean newspaper…
The ubiquity of thoughtless English can have ridiculous or lewd consequences: a shirt that says "Just Do Me," a snack called "Ricetard," a telephone named "Magic Hole," or a poster at a Lotte Department Store reading "Summer Bitch Festival." When the English isn't lewd, it often isn't clear, such as a slogan for a cosmetics store, "beauty food for urban sweety," or the one for an insurance company, "Bravo Your Life."
Well, that just about says it for English in Korea. Everyone is surprised when they come here and find the most ricetarded English printed on giant billboards, on the posters of companies that should really know better, and even in government documents.
I firmly believe that the reason behind these hilarious and lewd mistakes is simply arrogance. It comes from the Korean national trait of considering oneself and ones people as stronger than anything different. Therefore, while foreigners are employed to teach kindergarteners and dance about like monkeys, we aren’t consulted when someone wants to pay thousands of dollars for a giant sign or a huge national advertising campaign.
---
On the subject of language problems…
I was teaching a class of four year olds today and they’d just learned the word ‘hands’ from their Korean English teacher. Of course, she had taught them to pronounce it the Korean way – ‘hens’. So when taught them later in the day and had to teach them the word ‘hens’ (as in the type of fowl) they began laughing.
I had to teach the children the difference by saying ‘hens, hands, hens, hands’ over and over. They’re smart kids and they haven’t been learning English for long, so they got it pretty quickly.
The problem is that when English words are transliterated into Korean, they sound as stupid as when Korean words are transliterated into English (yes, it works both ways).
In this particular example, the children were being taught that ‘hands’ is pronounced ‘핸드스’, which sounds like ‘hendeuseu’. Of course, when spoken quickly the ‘드’ is dropped and you have something indistinguishable from ‘hens’.
The problem here is that ‘a’ in English is normally transliterated as ‘ㅐ’ in Korean, and that’s very rarely an accurate reflection of the sound. Look at how ‘ham’ is transliterated into Korean: ‘햄’, which sounds like ‘hem’.
You see, although we are taught in English that ‘a’ and ‘ㅐ’ are similar sounds, they are in fact not. A good example of the standardization of wrong pronunciation (ie when people get something wrong so often others start thinking they’re right) is Daegu. We English speakers are arrogant enough that we think place names are only pronounced correctly when we here an English speaker saying them. Consequently, everyone in Daegu walks around saying ‘day-goo’, which can be confusing for the locals, because ‘day-goo’ really doesn’t sound anything like 대구. Have a Korean person say the word over and over and you’ll realise that 대구 should be pronounced ‘deh-goo’ (actually, the ‘goo’ part really has no adequate English equivalent).
Once you get that you realise that things like 해물탕 should be pronounced ‘heh-mool-tang’ and not ‘hay-mool-tang’. (Also, it’s worth noting that 탕 is ‘tang’ and not ‘tong’. It’s annoys the crap out of me when people pronounce it or write it as ‘tong’.)
Which brings me back again to why Koreans have so much trouble speaking English and English speakers have so much trouble speaking Korean. You simply have to remind yourself that transliteration is a rough guideline. The languages are totally different, and like Koreans don’t have adequate characters to reflect ‘f’, ‘v’ or ‘z’, English doesn’t have the requisite characters to adequately describe some Korean sounds.
I sometimes question the wisdom of teaching English to two, three and four year olds, especially when they can’t write their own language. But recently I’ve come to realise that it works. Kids at that age can pick up two languages at the same time, and they can do it fast!
The greatest advantage of this that I have noticed is that as their first English teacher, I can correct many of the mistakes that most kids carry into their first lessons with foreign teachers, and which are hard to break.
As I said above, the Korean language lacks the ability to reflect many English sounds, and because Korean teachers often teach by making English sound more Korean, and by transliterating words, the children grow up incapable of making their sounds.
But they are capable! Teach them properly from a young age and they can say ‘f’ and ‘v’ and ‘z’! I’ve been trying to reverse the damage done by my co-teacher. She teaches the children to say ‘boo-ee’ (부이) for ‘v’. That’s ridiculous. I understand it must present certain problems when you can’t write a transliteration of roman character, but it doesn’t help to teach the kids the wrong damn sound! I spent five minutes making my students copy me and they can now say ‘v’. That would be much harder after years of learning the wrong thing.
.jpg)
Posts
