First off, sandwiched as their peninsula is between the landed expanse of China and the island of Japan, Korea has come in for some unwarranted and highly destructive invasion and subjugation over the millennia. Korea had some hellacious wars with the Mongols and Chinese back in the day. Then, Japan invaded in the sixteenth century during the Imjin War. Though the Koreans put up fierce resistance, led by some pretty inspirational military commanders (like Yi Sun-Sin), the Japanese were ultimately victorious. The Koreans ousted them for a few brief centuries before occupation was renewed during Japan's industrial, militant resurgence before and during World War II. Liberated after the war, Korea was then invaded by the Chinese during the Korean conflict, and the poor, put-upon Republic of Korea has been pressured and harangued by North Korea ever since. First China, then Japan, then China again.
Korea is currently engaged in a political tug-of-war with Japan over ownership of Deokdo Island, halfway between the two nations in the East Sea (as the Koreans call it), also known as the Sea of Japan (guess who calls it that). Then there's the popularity contest. I think when a lot of North Americans think "Asia" they automatically think "China" or "Japan." Either they think of Chinese food and intense geography and one billion people and accelerated industry, or they think sushi and samurai and castles and prefectures and anime. Korea is right off the map as far as most Westerners are concerned.
It was certainly that way for me. Before I came to Korea, I knew only two things about it: its capital was Seoul and it got cold there in the winter. That's it. Honest. I knew not one whit about the culture, history, geography, or comestibles of the place. I didn't know a speck of Korean, either, nor one letter of the alphabet. That doesn't strike me as fair at all. I'm increasingly dogged by a sense of guilt about the woeful lack of knowledge I had about this peninsula before I came here, particularly given how fond I've become of the place and how vastly superior I believe it to be to China or Japan. Call me biased after living here for a year. I'll admit I've never been to either country, but from what I've gathered while living here, China seems dirty, overpopulated, callously bureaucratic and Communist; Japan appears competitive, overbearing, liberal and monarchist.
Please, Eiichiro Oda, if you are reading this, forgive me for saying that. You rock (see my last recommended reading).
Korea, on the other hand, is conservative. Adultery is a complaint-based felony, and pornography, though legal, is strictly regulated. Prostitution is right out. Korea is also democratic. They have duly observed and administered elections every five years. All my kids assert that the current president, I Myeong-Bak, is a ne'er-do-well because he imported American beef ("crazy cows") and he is strongly in favor of soul-crushing study habits for the nation's youth. Beyond those two trite adjectives, however, Korea is just...well, nice. The weather's beautiful, the country (for the most part) is clean, the people are sensible (if a little whimsical at times), the food's both delicious and healthy, and there are conveniences everywhere. PC and DVD rooms, screen golf, billiards clubs, fried chicken joints, 24-hour shops, plentiful bars, cheap and handy public transportation, you name it. It may be a tad bureaucratic at times, but what industrialized nation isn't these days? Korea has had to institute parental regulations to avoid overpopulation, but given the size of their country it makes sense (unlike China, which has such vast land area but is still exploding at the seams). It's really a fun and comfortable place to live and work; an undiscovered gem of a nation, ripe for experiencing life to its fullest, dignified in the extreme against the adversity it has faced, and accelerating confidently toward its future.
It also has an easy, logical alphabet and language...which, as you may recall, is the original topic of this treatise. The title, Hangeul, Hangukeo (pronounced HAN-gook-uh), means "Korean alphabet, Korean language." I still know basically zilch about Korea's history and geography, but I like to think I'm a bit more well-informed about cultural norms and characteristic foods now. And I'm getting up to speed on the language, which is the main reason I'm writing this. Whereas the Chinese and Japanese alphabets are both pictographic (where the letters are actually pictures that symbolize their meaning), the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, is not. Like English, the letters stand for sounds. To make things even easier, the vowels are always pronounced the same way, like Spanish. Hangeul is composed, basically, of 14 consonants and 10 vowels, though there are some double consonants and vowel diphthongs which are pronounced a bit differently. I could explain the various characters and pronunciations, but that would take too long. I'm a wordy little booger, as thou knowest. So here's a chart to help you out.
As you'll notice, there are some characters on there that aren't really in the Korean alphabet. They were included to simulate pronunciations in other languages. Why?
Well, as it happens, Hangeul is such a logical, efficient alphabet (routinely classified as one of the most logical and efficient in the world) that it's being "borrowed" to help preserve and propagate dying languages. Languages, like obscure dialects and tribal tongues, which are rapidly disappearing due to lack of documentation or encroaching civilization (especially those that have no official alphabet) will be preserved in Hangeul. It's an easy alphabet to learn and master, and with a few of those extra characters added, any language which might otherwise soon be extinct can be charted down and immortalized for posterity. It's really a brilliant plan. What you can infer, however, is true: in Korean, there is no "z" sound; no "f," no "v," no "s" (at the end of a word, like "this") and no "-nk" (as in "think"; the Korean pronunciation of the English word "think" sounds more like "sinku"). Nor is there any true "r" or "l"; there is one Korean letter but it varies. Sometimes it sounds like "l," sometimes "r." To an English teacher like me, that can be maddening...
But anyway, back to what I was saying before: Hangeul is truly a simple, logical alphabet to learn, and darn attractive to boot. Since it's not pictographic, all you have to do is get the sounds of the consonants and vowels down and then master their combinations. See, one letter just doesn't follow the other like in English. Korean is composed of what are called "syllabic blocks." Consonants are always paired with vowels, and then possibly followed by another consonant. The first consonant is on top. The vowel is to the right of the first consonant if it's vertical (up-and-down), or below the consonant if it's horizontal (side-to-side). Then the second consonant is below all that. Check out to the chart to see some of those combinations. None of those are real Korean phrases; they're just Korean pronunciations of other languages' words. But you get the gist.
Once you get the rules down it's relatively simple. Consonants always go with vowels. Sometimes that gets on my nerves as a teacher. Since Korean words more often than not don't end on a consonant, Koreans are not used to ending a word with a harsh consonant sound. So there I am, in class, teaching, trying to get the kids to say "crate" or "bride" or "stripe," and what I'm hearing is keulate-eu, beulide-eu, and seutlipe-eu. [Insert exasperated growling noise here.]
But seriously, Hangeul is grand. Simple to write and construct, easy to learn and (for the most part) pronounce. The Korean language itself is simpler than I'd feared, for similar reasons. First off, it's an agglutinative language, which means the word roots stay essentially the same while you tack on different suffixes for tense and conjunctions. Unfortunately, there are quite a few of those suffixes. When you're talking about going to some place, then you use the suffix -ga on the end of the noun (I think). When you use a noun in a sentence, normally, you just use the suffix -eul (if the last syllabic block of the word ends with a badchim, or in other words, has a consonant at the end of it) or -leul (if it doesn't). I'd list two or three others, but my knowledge of the language is still shaky at best, and I'd rather not perjure myself about something I'm fond of.
Syntax is slightly different, but not prohibitively difficult. It's subject-object-verb. You don't say "I'm going to the store," you say "I store-to going-am." (You don't say "I'm going to the store and will buy some bread," you say "I store-to going-am bread will buy." (I'd put that down here in Korean, but I'm afraid my keyboard doesn't do Korean characters and I don't trust Babel Fish.) It's not too hard; having subject come first really helps. I, you, he, she, it and these all still get mentioned first.
The trickiest thing about Korean, though, is that there are two ways to say nearly everything. There's a casual, informal way of speaking, used when you're with intimate friends or peers (or speaking to subordinates); and then there's a polite and formal language. I say "language" because it is almost exactly that: another language. The words are almost completely different. Asking your grandfather if he had lunch or took a nap requires the verb jumushida, but in asking your best friend you can just use the correct form of the verb jada. Your grandmother's birthday is saengshin; your younger sister's is saengil. Remembering that, I reckon, is going to be the most difficult thing regarding the construction of my vocabulary. Beyond all them rules, however, Korean is just plain fun. It's the most thrilling thing in the world to be learning a new language, but when you throw in the fact that it uses a completely different alphabet, and has some wacky vowel sounds, the awesome meter goes through the roof.
The hardest of those vowel sounds for me was eu, that one upon the chart that's just a straight horizontal line. I've mentioned it before. To reproduce it you have to make an "oo" sound without making an "o" out of your lips. It's harder than it sounds...literally.
Korean has got some interesting words. Some of them are nondescript; 꽃, or ggot (pronounced like "goat" but quite quickly and without aspirating the "t"), the word for flower, does not seem to suit its meaning to my Occidental mind. Not that it's supposed to, of course; that's just my opinion. On the other hand, 상어, or sangeo (sahng-uh), the Korean word for shark, strikes me as phonetically apt in some way. It just sounds cool, too.
It's true that Korean borrows a lot of its words from Chinese. 우유, or uyu (ooh-yooh), the word for milk, is one such example. Heck, Koreans used the Chinese alphabet up until the Joseon Dynasty, when Sejong the Great invented Hangeul and began promulgating it. (It didn't catch on right away, but eventually it supplanted Chinese almost completely.)
It's also true that lots of other people think Korean is hard. The syntax sometimes trips people up, as does the agglutinative nature of its tenses. But I submit that it's a unique, fairly straightforward and diverting language to learn, despite whatever shortcomings or inadequacies others may find with it. It's darn easier than English, I'll certify that. At least it doesn't have words that have two or three completely different meanings, or contractions, or stuff like that. It's got formal and informal language and a mess of titles and suffixes, but that's honestly it. I'm not bored at all, and the fact that Korean will be pretty much useless anywhere else in the world (except that Manchurian province that has a substantial Korean minority) does not faze me. I look forward to my lessons each day and haven't regretted taking the time to learn.
Korean deserves to be more widely recognized than it is, irrespective of the attention it's gotten lately over its potential to preserve dying languages. As I stated previously, when people think "Asia" they think "China" or "Japan." They offer courses in Chinese and Japanese at even the most out-of-the-way community colleges in the States; I've never once seen Korean offered. Once again Korea is suffering a monstrous injustice. That the stakes are recognition instead of lives, territory or plunder is irrelevant.
I implore you, if you've got a few minutes to spare out of your day and are looking for a diverting and horizon-broadening challenge, look into Korean. It's easy. There's websites you can access that teach you the alphabet at the bare minimum; the last time I checked, WikiBooks had a semi-complete Korean language curriculum. It helped me a lot; that's how I learned Hangeul and how to write it properly. Failing that, there are books aplenty available on Amazon.com or even at your local library, I'll bet. But check it out. 한국어는 재미 있습니다.
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