language is so important. I met a Nepalease kid recently, and he was sharing with me the ways and means that his people in exile go about a cultural protest...a means of defiance- A way to not be erased even when your country is not your own. Language is one such way.
I have been thinking about being (at least) bilingual for a while now, Jae-ha.
I live in the Philippines, where Filipino and English are the official languages, and many are usually able to speak a third language (a local one, like Bisaya or Ilocano). Up until recently, that third language was being used in schools in the provinces, although use of the larger "thirds" in media is still widespread, so they're perhaps not disappearing any time soon.
Unfortunately, however, the use of local languages—whether it be Filipino, which is a somewhat "constructed" language based on Tagalog but integrating words from other regions to be widely understandable by most Filipinos; or the third languages—are seen through this prism of class and privilege. The better you speak English, as the thinking goes, the farther you can go in life. If you listen to song in Filipino, your tastes must be pedestrian. That sort of thing. Short-minded, if you ask me. I consider myself fluent in English (I write in it almost exclusively) but I don't lose anything by continuing to use Filipino in conversations. I feel freer doing that, even.
And yet I am now seeing children who were raised on Peppa Pig and other English-language pre-school programming, who speak very well in English (complete with the accent) but struggle to communicate with other people in their home language. But then, they're just the "poor" people, right? And you don't want to associate with them, right? And if this continues, well, it's a slippery slope.
I think you take on class and language is spot on. And your judgement of people's judgement on it as well. All hail the mighty english...and if you do not speak that than you are less then. Crazy system. linguistically english is crappy language. The grammar makes no sense, we lack a lot of nuance and beauty in out words because words are object identifiers rather than experience sharers. I have noticed in a lot of other languages a word will be for a whole phrase in english that really describes a very specific experience. We just label things. I think there is a metaphor about the US and English in all of this ;)
Ha—I like your last point. An example we often use is "kilig". We Filipinos just know what it means, but struggle to translate it to English. "The swooning feeling you get when you're around someone you really, really like" is just a mouthful.
I think what you wrote is beautiful and addresses so many relevant issues. In South Korea, wives will accompany their children overseas so the kids can learn English without a Korean accent. The U.S. and English accents are the most valued, so kids whose parents have money will go to one of those countries. The next tier choose Australia and New Zealand, because it's closer to home. The less wealthy will go to the Philippines. (These tiers are anecdotal, based on what my relatives and friends have told me.) I never saw my cousin's wife on recent trip, because she was in Australia with their daughter.
There are so many white people in Korea teaching English, who don't have teaching degrees. Their qualification is that... they speak English as a first language. For some, their English is their second of third language, but they're white, which fits into the perception of what an English speaker looks like. I was told that even though I have advanced degrees in journalism etc., schools would prefer to pick a white "teacher" than me, because I look Korean and therefore must not speak English well.
Anyhow, now I'm going off on all kinds of tangents! lol
You're definitely right about Koreans flying here to study English. I find it astounding that we are considered some of the language's best speakers when we ourselves have that unspoken tiering system, where if you speak with an American accent, you must be better. (I... pass off; someone thought I studied in the US, when I have never set foot there!) It's why those working in call centers here have so highly sought: that English training.
Also funnily, a lot of us Filipinos are now studying Korean, whether informally—the ex-girlfriend's knowledge came in handy when we went to Seoul; my sister eventually learned it to be able to watch more Super Junior videos—or formally. I suppose it's partly because translating jobs pay well, but mostly it's just so we can watch K-dramas without relying on subtitles... but that's anecdotal, too.
As for our language, well... "pedestrian" and "dirty" and "not educated" unfortunately come along with it.
One of the things that I think about often is as someone who left Korea when I was very young, the language has changed exponentially. During one trip, I was trying to read the instructions on how to operate something (maybe the TV? I don't know, lol). And it didn't make any sense. As I read it out loud (and my Haneul reading skills are pretty poor to begin with), my husband said, "That's English..." The instructions were in phonetic English, but written in Korean. WTF? I don't even understand that. Why not just write it all in English? Or write it all in Hangeul?
There are a lot of English words that are a part of Korean vocabulary, and I'm not feeling great about that. For instance, the modern(ish) word for "cup" in Korean is... "cup." But when I was growing up, we said カップ, because that's what my parents called it. I didn't realize until I was an adult that it a Japanese word that they carried over from the days when Korea had been colonized by Japan.
I can't read Hangul myself (outside of knowing the characters that make up "Mamamoo", hahahaha) and I have the same reaction when I look up a song title and realize it's just an English word, but in a different alphabet. Makes it easier to find the Christmas songs though. :p
Jae, this is so good -- thank you so much for writing such a heartfelt piece on the greatest language ever invented! ;) Of course, I'm a bit biased, but hey, in comparison to English, Korean is so much more straightforward and elegant. And something else totally unique -- it is a language isolate, i.e., it belongs to no other language family. Attempts have been made to stick it with the Altaic (Turkish, Mongolic, etc.), but there are still too many questions to make that a closed case. It's totally our language, which always makes me a little sad to see so much English spoken now. But I guess that's just inevitable, since it's become the de facto lingua franca...
Since Korean was all I knew for the first ten years of my life, the grammar and structure come naturally to me, but lord, my vocabulary has leaked like a sieve out of my brain. :( Which is why I need to watch more K-Drama!
Thank you, Sung! I was too young to go to school when we lived in Korea. So I can't diagram a sentence in Korean or explain why words are placed where they are, but that part just comes pretty naturally still when I speak (thank goodness). I'm not a huge fan of all the English words that are now a part of Korean vocabulary either. A lot of these K-dramas use the Romanized versions of the English word as the title, too. e.g. MOVING (무빙). I don't get it. WHY????
When I was in Seoul a few years back, I was at the gas station and saw "셀푸" at the pump...Self! As in "you pump it yourself," I gathered. WHY, PART 2?!!??!
exactly! I think NPR had a piece a few months back asking people to contribute something like that- a word from their language that just doesn't translate to english. And what I saw, or the sense I got was that it was because these words for experiences.
The podcast really gets into the difference between letters (roman alphabet) and pictograms.. And I was like "ohhh." that explains so much to me, English speaking, western indoctrinated, etc. Anyway, it was revelatory and has totally altered how I see certain written systems. I am no longer frustrated by "poor translations". Its an impossible task for my Google lens. A picture is a depiction and can mean whatever that image is. How do you write that as letters? Let alone on a keyboard! The myriad insidious ways the west/north asserts dominance...
A Korean emotion-factor dataset for extracting emotion and factors in Korean conversations | Scientific Reports(This just came out today and Obviously I knew who I had to share this with). I believe the study is openaccess (it was for me).
I am American Caucasian woman 62 years old from Connecticut. I’ve been watching kdramas and following K-Crossover vocal group as well as K-pop. This past May I. went to South Korean for 16 days. I love listening to the language, learning about the culture, eating Korean food and studying the country’s difficult but amazing history and now your newsletter and writings1
II hope to return to SK soon but in the meantime, I am enrolled in Korean Conversation # 1 Class—we learned Hangul the first 2 weeks and now we are learning grammar and vocabulary. It is offered through https://www.klcei.org.
I am one of 15 adults in that class and every single person in the class is super enthusiastic. We are all making more mistakes than being correct but learning as we go. It has been such a pleasure and privilege to have the opportunity to learn Hangul. To anyone reading this, dont be afraid to try if you have the chance. Put in the work—you wont regret it!
My adult daughter tells me often she wishes I spoke Korean because she remembers asking me the definition of English words growing up and she wants to do the same with Korean to help her learn. I often joke that Korea should offer K-adoptees scholarships to go to Korea to study Korean language (culture and history too) but truth be told I’m 100% serious.
If I were you I’d talk as much as possible to my kid in Korean. Even the pidgin version is better than nothing. My kids and I use as many Korean phrases as possible with each other. So much so that anyone who’s in our proximity on a regular basis also learns the phrase.
The struggle is real that’s for sure. But it would be even worse without King SeJong! ㅠㅠ
There SHOULD be formal scholarships available to adoptees... Seriously!
My Korean is pretty fluent now. I made an effort to relearn it, but I resisted when I was younger. But I learned the alphabet when I was a tween and that helped immensely.
I’ve never heard of scholarships specifically for K-adoptees. And the ones I have seen are usually only available to people under 25. So many K-adoptees are way past that age by the time we even realize we’re not white. 😉
language is so important. I met a Nepalease kid recently, and he was sharing with me the ways and means that his people in exile go about a cultural protest...a means of defiance- A way to not be erased even when your country is not your own. Language is one such way.
I have been thinking about being (at least) bilingual for a while now, Jae-ha.
I live in the Philippines, where Filipino and English are the official languages, and many are usually able to speak a third language (a local one, like Bisaya or Ilocano). Up until recently, that third language was being used in schools in the provinces, although use of the larger "thirds" in media is still widespread, so they're perhaps not disappearing any time soon.
Unfortunately, however, the use of local languages—whether it be Filipino, which is a somewhat "constructed" language based on Tagalog but integrating words from other regions to be widely understandable by most Filipinos; or the third languages—are seen through this prism of class and privilege. The better you speak English, as the thinking goes, the farther you can go in life. If you listen to song in Filipino, your tastes must be pedestrian. That sort of thing. Short-minded, if you ask me. I consider myself fluent in English (I write in it almost exclusively) but I don't lose anything by continuing to use Filipino in conversations. I feel freer doing that, even.
And yet I am now seeing children who were raised on Peppa Pig and other English-language pre-school programming, who speak very well in English (complete with the accent) but struggle to communicate with other people in their home language. But then, they're just the "poor" people, right? And you don't want to associate with them, right? And if this continues, well, it's a slippery slope.
I overburdened you with this, I'm sorry!
I think you take on class and language is spot on. And your judgement of people's judgement on it as well. All hail the mighty english...and if you do not speak that than you are less then. Crazy system. linguistically english is crappy language. The grammar makes no sense, we lack a lot of nuance and beauty in out words because words are object identifiers rather than experience sharers. I have noticed in a lot of other languages a word will be for a whole phrase in english that really describes a very specific experience. We just label things. I think there is a metaphor about the US and English in all of this ;)
Ha—I like your last point. An example we often use is "kilig". We Filipinos just know what it means, but struggle to translate it to English. "The swooning feeling you get when you're around someone you really, really like" is just a mouthful.
I think what you wrote is beautiful and addresses so many relevant issues. In South Korea, wives will accompany their children overseas so the kids can learn English without a Korean accent. The U.S. and English accents are the most valued, so kids whose parents have money will go to one of those countries. The next tier choose Australia and New Zealand, because it's closer to home. The less wealthy will go to the Philippines. (These tiers are anecdotal, based on what my relatives and friends have told me.) I never saw my cousin's wife on recent trip, because she was in Australia with their daughter.
There are so many white people in Korea teaching English, who don't have teaching degrees. Their qualification is that... they speak English as a first language. For some, their English is their second of third language, but they're white, which fits into the perception of what an English speaker looks like. I was told that even though I have advanced degrees in journalism etc., schools would prefer to pick a white "teacher" than me, because I look Korean and therefore must not speak English well.
Anyhow, now I'm going off on all kinds of tangents! lol
Ha—no, tangents are great!
You're definitely right about Koreans flying here to study English. I find it astounding that we are considered some of the language's best speakers when we ourselves have that unspoken tiering system, where if you speak with an American accent, you must be better. (I... pass off; someone thought I studied in the US, when I have never set foot there!) It's why those working in call centers here have so highly sought: that English training.
Also funnily, a lot of us Filipinos are now studying Korean, whether informally—the ex-girlfriend's knowledge came in handy when we went to Seoul; my sister eventually learned it to be able to watch more Super Junior videos—or formally. I suppose it's partly because translating jobs pay well, but mostly it's just so we can watch K-dramas without relying on subtitles... but that's anecdotal, too.
As for our language, well... "pedestrian" and "dirty" and "not educated" unfortunately come along with it.
One of the things that I think about often is as someone who left Korea when I was very young, the language has changed exponentially. During one trip, I was trying to read the instructions on how to operate something (maybe the TV? I don't know, lol). And it didn't make any sense. As I read it out loud (and my Haneul reading skills are pretty poor to begin with), my husband said, "That's English..." The instructions were in phonetic English, but written in Korean. WTF? I don't even understand that. Why not just write it all in English? Or write it all in Hangeul?
There are a lot of English words that are a part of Korean vocabulary, and I'm not feeling great about that. For instance, the modern(ish) word for "cup" in Korean is... "cup." But when I was growing up, we said カップ, because that's what my parents called it. I didn't realize until I was an adult that it a Japanese word that they carried over from the days when Korea had been colonized by Japan.
I can't read Hangul myself (outside of knowing the characters that make up "Mamamoo", hahahaha) and I have the same reaction when I look up a song title and realize it's just an English word, but in a different alphabet. Makes it easier to find the Christmas songs though. :p
Jae, this is so good -- thank you so much for writing such a heartfelt piece on the greatest language ever invented! ;) Of course, I'm a bit biased, but hey, in comparison to English, Korean is so much more straightforward and elegant. And something else totally unique -- it is a language isolate, i.e., it belongs to no other language family. Attempts have been made to stick it with the Altaic (Turkish, Mongolic, etc.), but there are still too many questions to make that a closed case. It's totally our language, which always makes me a little sad to see so much English spoken now. But I guess that's just inevitable, since it's become the de facto lingua franca...
Since Korean was all I knew for the first ten years of my life, the grammar and structure come naturally to me, but lord, my vocabulary has leaked like a sieve out of my brain. :( Which is why I need to watch more K-Drama!
Thank you, Sung! I was too young to go to school when we lived in Korea. So I can't diagram a sentence in Korean or explain why words are placed where they are, but that part just comes pretty naturally still when I speak (thank goodness). I'm not a huge fan of all the English words that are now a part of Korean vocabulary either. A lot of these K-dramas use the Romanized versions of the English word as the title, too. e.g. MOVING (무빙). I don't get it. WHY????
When I was in Seoul a few years back, I was at the gas station and saw "셀푸" at the pump...Self! As in "you pump it yourself," I gathered. WHY, PART 2?!!??!
exactly! I think NPR had a piece a few months back asking people to contribute something like that- a word from their language that just doesn't translate to english. And what I saw, or the sense I got was that it was because these words for experiences.
That sounds like an interesting broadcast. There are some Korean words or phrases that I simply cannot do justice to when translating it into English.
The podcast really gets into the difference between letters (roman alphabet) and pictograms.. And I was like "ohhh." that explains so much to me, English speaking, western indoctrinated, etc. Anyway, it was revelatory and has totally altered how I see certain written systems. I am no longer frustrated by "poor translations". Its an impossible task for my Google lens. A picture is a depiction and can mean whatever that image is. How do you write that as letters? Let alone on a keyboard! The myriad insidious ways the west/north asserts dominance...
I know what you mean. I take translations as a helpful marker, even if you know they can't be 100% accurate. Thanks for sharing!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45386-8
A Korean emotion-factor dataset for extracting emotion and factors in Korean conversations | Scientific Reports(This just came out today and Obviously I knew who I had to share this with). I believe the study is openaccess (it was for me).
Thank you, Phinneous! I look forward to reading this!
Feeling this post in my bones.
Thank you for taking the time to read this, Rebecca!
I am American Caucasian woman 62 years old from Connecticut. I’ve been watching kdramas and following K-Crossover vocal group as well as K-pop. This past May I. went to South Korean for 16 days. I love listening to the language, learning about the culture, eating Korean food and studying the country’s difficult but amazing history and now your newsletter and writings1
II hope to return to SK soon but in the meantime, I am enrolled in Korean Conversation # 1 Class—we learned Hangul the first 2 weeks and now we are learning grammar and vocabulary. It is offered through https://www.klcei.org.
I am one of 15 adults in that class and every single person in the class is super enthusiastic. We are all making more mistakes than being correct but learning as we go. It has been such a pleasure and privilege to have the opportunity to learn Hangul. To anyone reading this, dont be afraid to try if you have the chance. Put in the work—you wont regret it!
Thank you for sharing all of this, Diane! I hope you get to return to South Korea again soon.
My adult daughter tells me often she wishes I spoke Korean because she remembers asking me the definition of English words growing up and she wants to do the same with Korean to help her learn. I often joke that Korea should offer K-adoptees scholarships to go to Korea to study Korean language (culture and history too) but truth be told I’m 100% serious.
If I were you I’d talk as much as possible to my kid in Korean. Even the pidgin version is better than nothing. My kids and I use as many Korean phrases as possible with each other. So much so that anyone who’s in our proximity on a regular basis also learns the phrase.
The struggle is real that’s for sure. But it would be even worse without King SeJong! ㅠㅠ
There SHOULD be formal scholarships available to adoptees... Seriously!
My Korean is pretty fluent now. I made an effort to relearn it, but I resisted when I was younger. But I learned the alphabet when I was a tween and that helped immensely.
I’ve never heard of scholarships specifically for K-adoptees. And the ones I have seen are usually only available to people under 25. So many K-adoptees are way past that age by the time we even realize we’re not white. 😉
https://radiolab.org/podcast/wubi-effect