English in Korean

Here's a list of Korean words that have been adopted from English. It may be good practice with alphabet to sound them out and then try to guess what they mean. The answers are below.

1. 마트
2. 센터
3. 테레비존
4. 하우스
5. 피아노
6. 바나나
7. 컴퓨터
8. 소파
9. 기타
10.버스
11.스피커
12.마이크
13.라디오
14.커피
15.포크
16.컵
17.브라드 피트
18.쿠션
19.드럼
20.카페트
21.테이블
22.아파트
23.에어컨
24.스파게티
25.스테이크
26.샐러드
27.토마토

1. Mart (a lot of small convenience stores have names that end in this)
2. Center
3. Television
4. House
5. Piano
6. Banana
7. Computer
8. Sofa
9. Guitar
10.Bus
11.Speaker
12.Mike
13.Radio
14.Coffee
15.Fork
16.Cup
17.Brad Pitt
18.Cushion
19.Drum
20.Carpet
21.Table
22.Apart (short for apartment)
23.Air Con (short for air conditioner)
24.Spaghetti
25.Steak
26.Salad
27.Tomato

Koreans call these kind of words 외래어, which means words from foreign countries. There are a ton of these in Korean, and not only adopted from English. For example, 아바이트 is adapted from the German Arbeit, which means work, and in Korean it refers to the kind of work you'd do as a part-time job, like working in a cafe. And of course there are a huge number of words in Korean that are derived from Chinese, including the number system used to count days and currency, that have become a major part of the language. These are called 'sino-Korean' words. This means that knowing Chinese would be really helpful in understanding Korean, kind of like Latin would be useful in learning English, but it seems more directly.
Anyway, this list should give you a chance to practice sounding out han-gul letters as well as a sense of what sounds are lacking in Korean and how other western words and names are likely to be adapted into Korean. I can continue to add to the list as time goes on.

Names of Korean Letters

In my last post about Korean, I introduced the Korean consonants. Now it seems like a good idea to have a quick post about what those are called so we can talk about them. Most of them are pretty regular so it's easiest to just list them and you can very easily see the pattern. The form of my presentation will be consonant: consonant's name.

ㄴ: 니은 nee-eun
ㄹ: 리을 ree-eul
ㅁ: 미음 mee-eum
ㅂ: 비읍 bee-eup
ㅇ: 이응 ee-eung
ㅈ: 지읒 jee-eut
ㅊ: 치읓 chee-eut
ㅋ: 키읔 khee-euk
ㅌ: 티읕 tee-eut
ㅍ: 피읖 pee-eup
ㅎ: 히읗 hee-eut

That's right, the basic form of the name of a consonant is two syllables: that consonant plus ㅣ and then that consonant ending 으. [I've romanized ㅡ as "eu" for lack of a better way, and that's how they do it on the subway system for stops like 대흥 (Dae-Heung)].

There are a few irregular verb names:

ㄱ: 기역 gee-yuk
ㄷ: 디귿 dee-geut (diggit)
ㅅ: 시옷 shee-oat

The English glosses are more accurate if you say them quickly rather than drawing out each syllable.

Finally, there are the double consonants, and for these, you just add the word 쌍 (meaning 'double') in front of their single counterparts.

ㄲ: 쌍기역 ssang gee-yuk
ㄸ: 쌍디귿 ssang dee-geut
ㅃ: 쌍비읍 ssang bee-eup
ㅆ: 쌍시옷 ssang shee-oat
ㅉ: 쌍지읒 ssang jee-eut

That takes care of the consonants. Be sure to look at the last post on consonants to make sure you're pronouncing them correctly.

The names of the vowels are much easier than the consonants. To name a vowel, you just make its sound, so the name of ㅏ is just "ah", the name of ㅜ is "ooh", and so on.

Now that you know the names of the letters, you can verbally communicate how a word is spelled in Korean. So 강 (river) is spelled "gee-uk, ah, ee-eung". This should be moderately useful if you're learning new Korean words verbally and want to know how they're spelled to help you remember.

This post was so easy that I wrote it while drunk. :)

Some Recent Photographs

It's been a while since my last post (I think perhaps the longest stretch since this blog's inception) so I want a quick post to catch up. Of course, I have quite a few ideas in the works but not the time to do them, and I may let them die for fresher thoughts.
Here are a few mood pictures from my journey home today from work. The first is near Sinchon station in Seoul; the others are closer to where I live.

Somehow on the bus ride home I was fascinated both by light and by lines. It is ridiculous how many surfaces reflect the many lights of a moving city and the interior of a full bus at night, and how much that light can shift and change with such detail. In this picture I like the dominance of the lines over the distant crowd of small people, the unidentifiable white splot (new word, somewhere between spot and splotch) on the first stripe, and the perspective provided by the lines.
I also thought of something I was told once, that psychologists have shown that lines do not exist out there in the world but are made by our brains. The person who told me this was incredulous about it; I'm still not sure precisely what it means. (What would it mean for lines to be "out there" in the world?) But we certainly make plentiful use of guiding lines in cities. Sometime during the ride, however, it started raining softly and stopped again, so that when I disembarked everything had more of a haze to it. The streets were also shining.


There is a book by a Proust scholar and philosopher called the Art of Travel in which he explains the appeal of lonely night-time scenes of transitional places like roads, train-cars, and hotels using the art of the Edward Hopper, whose paintings invite you to wonder about the solitary figures they depict. Most of his paintings are in transitional travel places that many would see as mundane; for instance, a gas station, an automat, and a hotel room. The man in the first picture passed me walking up the hill in this late night rainy scenery with a business suit and briefcase. It was probably the last leg of his day's journey from his apartment to work and back again, a period of involuntary introspection and quiet when there is nothing to do but put one foot patiently in from of the other to bring himself home. Who knows what is going through his mind - something in Korean, most likely. ;)
Photography is one of the most introspective mediums, but I don't pretend to be an artist in it. The pictures as shown here are as high quality as they're going to get; they were taken on a whim with my cell phone. I also noticed that the pictures don't end up framed as they look on the phone's screen when I try to take the picture, so when I get a picture I like it is usually pure luck. This last one is most like that; I just stuck the phone out of the window of a moving car this weekend during my trip to the southern coast of Korea. I was really lucky to get some of the Korean letters painted on the other lane, which is one of my favorite parts of the picture. I believe those are rice fields and a small bridge in the background.

And we'll end with some pictures near the ocean; I will soon be crossing that beast again at 30000 feet, though to the east, not in this direction, which is south. Those are islands that you see in the distance in the first one. There are quite a few of them in that direction, and many are developed just as the mainland.


Goodnight.

Stay Home

I want to share a poem by Wendell Berry. It is the first one of his collection called "A Part", published in 1980. I have a copy of it that was given to my dad from his professor as a wedding present. The poem is called "Stay Home".

Stay Home

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

I will be standing in the woods
where the old trees
move only with the wind
and then with gravity.
In the stillness of the trees
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.


Does this poem have any resonance with you? Berry is really a poet of the country, a farmer-poet who loves the land. Right now I am also reading a book by him called Andy Catlett: Early Travels, in which a grandfatherly voice narrates a trip he took as a nine year old boy to visit his grandparents in the fictional town of Port William. It is all about the old ways retreating under the advance of modernity, and Berry seems to me an intelligent advocate of simple conservatism - preserving a known good and settled way of life - without any of the intolerant social views associated with that term.
I remember being really impressed with an article of his that appeared in Harper's earlier in the year. It was called "Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits", a cry for us to realize and live within our limits, for example in natural resources like oil. He wants us to realize that limits are not confinements but allow for fullness of feeling, elegance, and that within the limits of, say, a small farm or a short poem, there can be inexhaustible lessons. He wants us to recognize that we live within certain self-imposed limits in society and in personal relationships - in love, in family for instance - and that our happiness and freedom lie more in this voluntary self-restraint than in the absence of any obligations or barriers to our desires.

I like this poem partly because the agrarian message does resonate a little with me. That lifestyle sometimes seems more simple, more fulfilling, more physical, more real. But I mainly like it for the sentiment of its refrain: "Don't come with me. You stay home too." While it pulls you in to his love of the country, it also pushes you away and tells you or reminds you the importance of staying with what you love.

It's interesting in this context to see how farming is treated by Thoreau. I don't know if there can be a bigger contrast. He seems to think the farmers he sees are stuck with it to their great misfortune, and it's only ignorance that keeps them toiling away:

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labour in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot!...But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and theives break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.

I think both Thoreau and Berry value nature in some sense, but it is very different between the two of them. Berry wants to participate in the land responsibly, to work in it and feel it. While Thoreau wants more to be able to wander through it freely, observe it, and let it inspire him and be a mirror for his exploration of himself. His is a more leisurely appreciation.

In the future I hope to have a post on the contrasting ideas of freedom in Berry and Thoreau - for Berry, living within the limits of place, relationships, and society and indeed seeing them as voluntary self-restraints, and then finding the inexhaustible meaning within those; for Thoreau, getting away from all relationships and obligations and experiencing true leisure and self-exploration. I'll maybe approach it through sociology and bring Nietzsche in for commentary. But right now Berry's attitude seems more mature to me, whereas Thoreau's is more extreme, Romantic, self-absorbed, and childish. It reminds me a little of how he is quoted in Into the Wild. Because of this current leaning, I'll let Mr. Berry of Kentucky have the last word, though it's not one that has to do with this particular topic. This poem is from later in that same collection, and it is called "Woods".

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

I like that poem, too. I'd be interested in any comments about these poems, whether you like them or don't get anything from them, as well as anything about the limits/restraints/freedom issues that I mentioned that might be relevant to a future post.

Korean Consonants

In my first post about Korean I introduced four consonants: ㄱ, ㅇ, ㄴ, and ㅈ. I explained the first two in some length already; the last two are just [n] and [j] sounds, respectively. This post I want to introduce some more consonants and talk about consonant symmetry. Korean consonants are related in such a way that make them easy to remember.

The Korean alphabet was invented by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Korea's Joseon Dynasty as a way of transcribing the common speech of the people. At the time, the class of literate elite used Chinese characters. The project was completed in December of 1443 or January of 1444 and published with an explanatory manual in 1446, five years before Christopher Columbus was born, around the time harpsichords were being invented in Europe. Sejong organized the consonants by place of articulation and manner of articulation and tried to model the characters on how the lips, mouth, or tongue looked in making that sound. The manners of articulation included plain, aspirated, and tense, and these are what we'll look at in this post.

Plain consonants:
ㄱ [g], ㄷ [d], ㅂ [b], ㅈ [j], & ㅅ [s].

The first four of these have corresponding aspirated versions: consonants that are articulated in the same place but are said with a puff of air.

Aspirated consonants:
ㅋ [k], ㅌ [t], ㅍ [p], ㅊ [ch]

The English letters in brackets are not exact, just approximates to give you an idea. Sometimes ㄷ is romanized as a [t] rather than a [d] and the ㅂ as a [p] instead of a [b], but this way of romanizing makes the aspiration part more clear. Just remember that the aspirated versions are said with an added puff of air.

Finally, there are 'tense' or double consonants, which are like the plain ones but are said with more muscle tension:
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ.

So for our symmetric consonants, we have:

ㄱ ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ ㅅ (plain)
ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅊ -- (aspirated)
ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ (tense)

The consonants in each column all of the same place of articulation and are based on the same basic character, which is meant to reflect that place of articulation.
ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ are velar, and ㄱ is meant to show the back of the tongue touching the soft palate of a left-facing speaker.
ㄷ, ㅌ, & ㄸ are alveolar, and they are actually based off of the nasal consonant with this place of articulation, ㄴ, which shows the tip of the tongue at the ridge behind teeth of a left-facing speaker. (Both of these examples were in my first Korean post).
ㅂ, ㅍ, & ㅃ are labial, and they are based off of the nasal labial [m] sound, ㅁ, which is an abstract representation of the lips or the outline of the mouth.
The remaining five are all dental, and are based off of the character ㅅ, which is an abstract representation of a tooth.

I've already introduced ㅇ, and since there are only two more consonants after that I might as well finish it out. As a reminder, ㅇ has no value and is kind of a place holder when it appears as an initial consonant. As a bottom, syllable final consonant (or pach'im, as they call it), it has a [ng] sound as in sing. ㅎ is an [h] sound, and I suppose it can be thought of as the aspirated version of the place-holder ㅇ, though that's just out of my own head. Then there is ㄹ, and I'm quite honestly not sure how it fits into this. I'd have to do some research on it. It is written as if it is a combination of ㄱ on top and ㄷ on the bottom, but I'm not sure if that has anything to do with its sounds. Like ㅇ, its sound changes depending on whether it appears as an initial consonant or as a pach'im. As an initial consonant, the sound is somewhere between [l] and [r], most similar to the flapped r of Spanish. I think it's actually misleading to gloss this as an r sound because the tongue actually makes contact with the ridge behind the teeth, so especially when it comes between syllables it sounds to me more like a "d". So for example, in Korean, head is 머리, which sounds more like "muh-dee" to me than "muh-ree". When ㄹ appears as a pach'im, as in 물 (water), it sounds like [ll] as in full. So 물 is pronounced "mool". My only guess as to the relation of how it written and how it sounds is that (ignoring the ㄱ on top), it seems to be based off the ㄴ character, like ㄷ, and it seems to have that same alveolar place of pronunciation. To get the more authentic answer, I suppose you'd do best to research what King Sejong actually said about the character in his explanatory manual well over 500 years ago. Hopefully there's a translation, because I imagine it would have had to have been written using Chinese characters. Incidentally, how about a picture of me with a statue of King Sejong? eh? eh?


Some final notes. You already know how ㅇ and ㄹ sound as pach'im. ㅁ and ㄴ sound exactly the same whether initial or pach'im. As a rule for the rest of the consonants, you don't release the sound when they appear as pach'im. To get what I mean, say "Bob", then say it again but this time keep your lips together at the end. That's how it should sound in Korean. This means that ㅂ & ㅍ sound exactly the same when they come at the end of a syllable, as do ㄱ, ㅋ, & ㄲ (for some reason, the only tense consonants that appear as pach'im seem to be ㄲ and ㅆ; I never see ㅃ, ㅉ, or ㄸ used as pach'im). Finally, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㅅ, ㅆ, ㅈ, ㅊ, and ㅎ all sound the same as pach'im: the sound is stopped but not released at the ridge behind the teeth (it can still make a difference which letter is used, but I'll save that for another post). And lastly: there's no separate character for [sh] in Korean, but sometimes ㅅ sounds like [sh] rather than just [s]. Basically, whenever it is followed by an ㅣ vowel, it takes on some of the palatization of the "ee" sound and sounds more like [sh].

With that, I'll leave you with the list of Korean consonants, along with their English approximates, in their alphabetical order. The tense double consonants don't appear here because they begin few enough words that those words are just added to the end of the section of the plain letters. For instance, you can find ㄲ words at the end of the ㄱ section.

So here you are. The Korean consonants:

ㄱ - "g"/"k"
ㄴ - "n"
ㄷ - "d"/"t"
ㄹ - initial: a flapped "r", pach'im: "ll"
ㅁ - "m"
ㅂ - "b"/"p"
ㅅ - "s"/"sh"
ㅇ - initial: no value, pach'im: "ng"
ㅈ - "j"
ㅊ - "ch"
ㅋ - "k"
ㅌ - "t"
ㅎ - "h"

(You can see all 3 posts about Korean so far by clicking the 'Korean' tag below.)

Spoon Guitar

Some days you just want to watch the spoon guitar guy.

Harvesting Persimmons

A typical Korean countryside autumn scene is that of bright orange persimmons (감) hanging alone from the branches of a persimmon tree (감나무), the leaves of which have already fallen. Fall is also the time to pick the persimmons and eat them, leave them to ripen, or string them together vertically and leave them hanging to dry. Unlike with an apple tree, however, it's not a good idea to climb a 감나무 to try to pick the persimmons - its branches are too brittle. In fact, an old Korean saying or joke upon seeing a child who has broken his arm is to ask if he was climbing a persimmon tree. So how do you get to the persimmons that are so way up high?

I suppose you could just move around a very tall ladder and pick them by hand. But because the branches are so brittle, you can extend your reach and break a branch off for yourself with a simple tool like this:

To break the branch, you just catch it in the nook and twist.
Now, recently my mom came to visit from Oregon and took me to her friends' country home, which is where I took these pictures. One of the first things I did when I got there was to learn how to pick persimmons from their tree since they had so many to harvest. But rather than climbing a ladder with a sack and using the branch-breaking stick, I learned to use a much niftier device that works on the same principle. It looks like this:

So you can see that this is a stick with a sling-shot shape that has a very ratty looking bag hanging from it. This stick is tied to a very long piece of bamboo, which has the advantage of being relatively light and very sturdy. To use this - and this is the fun part - you lift up the stick and enclose a persimmon in the bag from the bottom. Then you push the stick forward and up until the twig that is holding the persimmon is right in the nook of the V shape, the persimmon right under it. There has to be tension between the bamboo stick and the tree for this to work. When you twist the bamboo (and sometimes you have to twist a couple times), the twig breaks and the persimmon plops right into the bag. Like so:

This may seem like a strange post, but for some reason, this was one of my most satisfying and even relaxing experiences in Korea. It's very simple and easy, but it takes some degree of attention and a little skill to guide the stick up past the lower branches and to get it situated right in relation to the persimmons you're trying to get in order for the twisting to work. I liked the simple ingenuity of the tool - which is just a branch, a piece of bamboo, and some cloth and string - and the actual sensed experience of picking fruit this way: the snap of the twig and the increase of weight in your hands as the persimmon(s) fall into the bag fifteen feet up in the air from you, the balancing act of lowering it to the ground while moving your hands under each other to bring the other end of the stick closer so you don't have to walk as far to pick the fruit out of the damp bag, the sounds of the branches and persimmons that sometimes fall unintentionally, the holding of each success in your hand, watching the pile of fruit grow. It could make for another good persimmon-related poem for someone more poetically ambitious than I. It also probably helped my experience that I wasn't really obligated to do any of this work, only as much as I wanted, and that on the day I did most of the picking (unlike when I took these photos, the next day) the weather was great and the persimmons were brighter against the backdrop of a clear blue sky.

David Karsten Daniels

"Jesus and the Devil"



This guy did a residency series at Mississippi Studios. Though I didn't buy his CD at the time some of the songs stuck with me and he's worth checking out on the net. I'll see him again if I get the chance and probably buy some of his stuff.