"Only a person with a candid mind, who is usually bored by intrigues, can appreciate the full fun of an intrigue when they begin to manage one for the first time. If there are several intrigues and there is a certain danger of their getting mixed up and spoiling each other, the enjoyment is even keener"--Cold Comfort Farm
I've decided to learn some Korean. Why? I guess I want to leave my comfort zone. Churchill said that clever boys should learn Latin as an honor and Greek as a pleasure, and I've learned Chinese as an honor and Japanese as a pleasure. But I'm learning Korean as a thrill!
I'm really fascinated by Korea's alphabet, which a civil servant developed about 500 years ago as an alternative to Chinese writing and is really well-suited to the spoken language. At the time some Korean kings tried to suppress it because the idea of writing being easily accessible to the common peasants frightened them!
One bit of Korean I've already learned is "Annyong haseyo," which means "Hello." (Why say in two syllables what you can say in five?) Just add a question mark and you get "Annyong haseyo?" which means "How are you?" While "Goodbye" is "Annyongi kaseyo"! Also, polite phrases like "please" and "thank you" tend to have "hamnida" added to the end.
I've also managed to add a typeface for Korean writing on my computer, along with Roman, Chinese and Japanese. I've already learned most of the letters, except that stuff like "wa" and "wo" are still a challenge because they don't get used as much.
Yesterday the Classic Book Club met at Robarts Library and we discussed Gulliver's Travels. In the evening I went to a Literary Travel Meetup, where the others discussed a collection of Rohinton Mistry stories set in India, except I didn't have much to add because I hadn't read the book! But we met at Banjara's and I like Indian food.
1 comment:
Well yes, James, but you are learning Korean as a curiosity. It is quite a different thing to live in Korea, as I did in 2006. I found the Koreans quite xenophobic. Certainly they live in an impossible situation geographically, scrunched between Japan, China and North Korea. It is amazing that they have survived at all. In the high school in Seoul where I taught, I finally had the students -- and administration -- confess that the only reason I was there, as an anglophone, was because it was a state requirement. They had no interest in learning English. I think there are very difficult as a group, as I learned to my sorrow when flying from Amsterdam to Seoul. Anyway, none of this matters, does it?
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