On Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones’ Tongue Surgery

I must admit, as someone who’s been teaching Koreans English for a decade now (more, if you include the Koreans in my classes at Concordia University in Montreal). I’m extremely dubious about this: Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country. But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn’t pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet. Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum …

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Orcs!

This entry is part 28 of 72 in the series SF in South Korea

One of the fascinating things that keeps coming up in my Korean lessons is the generation gap. It’s not that I was unaware of this before, but my tutor has made a careful point of noting when she shows  me a word that older people either won’t find appropriate in speech, or which she considers a “young people” word. One example is 찌질하다, which is a word I can’t quite translate into English. My tutor explained it as something that someone would say to a friend who is acting like goof or a geek, but at a party a few …

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Back in the [Korean Study] Saddle Again

Let’s see, in my notebook there are the following new vocabulary terms: 신상 정보: personal ID information 생물측 정보: biometric information 심리학: psychology 작업 멘트: pickup line 몸이 좋[지않]다: to [not] have a good body 핸드폰 번호 따다: to get [someone’s] phone number 세계 구역기구: The WTO 합병하다: to take over [something], for example, the WTO taking over the UN. 세상: universe (to be used in the context of discussing baby universes) 사고 | 나다: accident | occur (occur being the verb for accident) 화학전쟁: biowar[fare?] 증거: evidence These words, of course, are all related to the two stories I’ve …

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You Have Nose Star Calipers? AKA Maybe I Should Practice Korean More?

Today’s fun conversation in Korean: ME: You have a nose star calipers?1. DOLLAR STORE CLERK2.: Huh? Nose star? ME: Yeah, you know. Nose star calipers.3. DSC: You mean a nose hair trimmer? ME: Uh… maybe. Nose hair? DSC: Yeah. Like, this? [Makes snipping motion.] ME: No, no. I mean like this… [Makes a buzzing noise, and spins finger round in a circle quickly.] DSC: Oh! Yeah, right over here. ME: What’s this called? DSC: A nose hair trimmer. ME: Ah. Right. Hair. Stars are in the sky, hair is in my nose. DSC: [With a giddy laugh.] That’s right. Shall …

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Poems on Hangeul

Myung Mi Kim is a Korean-American poet, and you can hear her read poems about some of the various consonants in the Korean language. This is a link from the previously mentioned Factory School link I put up a few days ago. I think she gets the names of a couple of consonants wrong, by the way, but I’ve only listened once. Anyone notice this?

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New Korean Expression

같은 값이면 다홍치마. It came up in conversation the other night, and Lime and her friend couldn’t explain it to me, so I asked Chullsung here at work. He explained that it was something like, “If the two skirts are the same price, I’ll take the fancy royal red one!” Something roughly like that. 다홍 is some kind of word for red, which I could perhaps have guessed knowing that 홍차 is “red tea”. Apparently this means something about choosing the better of two options, given that each one comes at about the same “price”: the nicer of two men, …

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I’ve Joined Up!!!

Blinger’s started up a blog for foreigners learning or working on their Korean. It’s for posting about learning, for practicing writing in Korean, and so on. Unlike Kangmi’s blog, which is a kind of personal-self-study log, this is a kind of community effort with multiple posters signed up. I’m sure I shall be the worst poster, and perhaps (with my writing projects) the most infrequent, but I shall try do a regular post and get a few new words and points in each time. I am studying a lot nowadays, not as much as Blinger, but more than I was. …

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한국어 포스트 eclexys에서 왔어…

옛날에 한국어 블로그 있었는데 요즘 그 블로그 update 안했어. 그런데 요즘 한국어 공부를 다시 시작 했어서 까금 한국어 쓰기 연습 하고싶어서 eclexys에서 in Korean category 만들었지! (여기서 볼 수 있어요.) 그리고 엿날의 포스트들은 거기서 볼수있어요… (I’ve recently begun studying Korean again and while I don’t have it in me to sustain regular posting in Korean as I once did on my old Korean blog page, from time to time I would like to practice my writing in Korean, so I’ll post here. I’ve imported my old Korean blog’s posts into a category on this blog, called “In Korean”, which is …

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