♪♪…now I know my ㄱ,ㄴ,ㄷ…♪♪
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008Alphabet.
Man, we didn’t exactly put our best foot forward in creating the English alphabet, did we? I know firsthand what it’s like to try to teach a child the English alphabet.
“Okay, this little guy is called an “E” and he says a lot of different things. Sometimes he says his name /ee/, sometimes he changes a preceding vowel from short to long so long as the word is relatively small, and his friends “C” and “I” don’t get along so he has to stand in between them so they don’t fight, but if “C” isn’t there, “I” likes to be in front of “E” because “I” is bossy. And please note that when “E” is next to “R”, he is controlled by “R” because “R” is even more pushy than “I”. Oh, and sometimes “E” says nothing at all. Come to think of it, most of the time “E” likes to sit down; when he does that he looks different but sounds the same. Don’t worry, it’s only the most frequently used letter in the alphabet so you’ll be seeing it quite often. Questions?”
The English alphabet has 26 letters divided into 5 vowels and 21 consonants….wait…not exactly. “Y” is sometimes a vowel. So then 6 vowels….well, actually, “W” sometimes acts like a vowel too……English has 26 letters, 알았지?
The Korean alphabet has 24 letters divided into 10 vowels and 14 consonants. Really, that’s it? There must be something wrong. No crazy exceptions? Well there are some, but there are relatively obscure and rare - the few high-frequency words that contain them are easy enough to remember simply because of their colloquial use.
The Korean alphabet (and language for that matter) is the only one in the world to have a (somewhat debated) date of origin - AD 1446. Although bitterly opposed at first and even almost eradicated, 한글 is alive and well today and enjoys even its own day - October 9th!
Well, ummm, English has a really catchy song! What? it has the same melody of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”? Copyright infringe much, Mr. Alphabet?
Speaking of which, there has been a strong push by many early childhood educators in America to lengthen a specific portion of the Alphabet song in order to make it more clear for young learners. The part in question is the ♪♪ …L,M,N,O… ♪♪ part which many times becomes ♪♪ Ellemino ♪♪ - its own new Franken-letter!
I wonder how long did it take my fellow KoreanClass101.com students to learn 한글? I mean the basics - not including super fast visual recognition but simple, time-constraint-free letter recognition? For me, it took a little longer than most - 3 days (하! try learning the English alphabet in the same amount of time). Most people I’ve met learned it well enough to sound out all vowels (simple and compound) and consonants with minimal errors in 2 days time.
I can say for me that the most confusing part of learning 한글 was the shear logical nature of it. What I mean is, the names of each 자모 correspond to how they are pronounced at either the beginning or end of the cluster. Has anyone ever seriously sat down and thought about how insanely smart that is? Even moreso, the letters were originally designed to mimic the physical shape that our mouth makes when producing the sound (although ㄹ is a bit questionable).
I don’t mean to turn the English Alphabet into the red-headed stepchild of the linguistic world - but it kind of is. It was scraped together from various Latin, Greek, Anglo-Saxon roots. Furthermore, it developed simultaneously in different regions and thus incorporated different ways of spelling and saying the same thing (think 제주도 사투리). And some letters got 86′ed altogether.
Although traditionally Korea boasts a slightly higher countrywide literacy rate when compared to America, currently the difference is negligible - wavering around the 99% range. Not bad Korea. Excellent work America!!! You really put in the hard work!
My father-in-law once answered my question of “Why do young children in Korea learn English?” with “Because after 3rd grade, there’s no more Korean to learn!”. While I partially agree with him, it does make you wonder just how much more there is to learn for college students who study contemporary English.
Thoughts?
Posted by Matthew in How Koreans Do It |
July 8th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I suspect that Koreans are on average literate at a far earlier age than students of English. In American education circles, age 9 seems to be the critical deadline before all is lost in a child’s chance of being a competent reader. When I first heard that I was blown away. 3rd grade seems a bit late, don’t you think? But maybe that’s less about mental/linguistic development and more about the ominous statistics of children who don’t learn to read by 9.
Either way, in my limited anecdotal experience Korean children are reading at an earlier average age.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
I must say that the Korean alphabet is simply beautiful– elegant, aesthetically pleasing, efficient, and, best of all, relatively easy to learn. Yes, one must study and review in order to get really good at reading and writing the Korean alphabet. But really, if you compare 한글 to the English alphabet, as Matthew said, there’s no competition!
Part of me wonders what the world would be like if somehow Korean, instead of English, had become the “hegemonic language” that everyone was itching to learn. It might be the same, but part of me wonders if things wouldn’t be just that much more efficient…
July 8th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I’ve studied English (duh) Chinese, Japanese and now Korean, and I have to say that Korean isn’t as logical as everyone says. Every time I type 으막 instead of 음악, 조아 instead of 좋아, it reminds me that the logical nature of 한글 is a little bit exaggerated sometimes.
In Chinese pinyin, and Japanese kana you never have to “spell” things out at all. If you ask someone how to spell something, all they actually have to do is say the word slowly, and you can write it down.
It didn’t take me long to learn all of the 한글 and their pronounciations, but I’m tripping up on them even now, almost a year since I first learnt them. It took me much longer to memorise the pinyin (Chinese) writing system, but I can write anything in pinyin without any spelling errors.
July 8th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
It took me about two days to learn 한글, but the diphthongs gave me problems for awhile. I still have a hard time with 외 and 의 because I don’t seem them as frequently. But compared to the hodge-podge that is the English alphabet, I won’t dare complain. I never realized E suffered from such a severe multi-personality disorder!
I agree with Max, though. Some of the spelling really frustrates me! I don’t understand why some syllabic blocks really need four letters, sometimes when one doesn’t even get pronounced. There might be a reason? (someone please fill me in if so!) But when I stop and realize how frustrating spelling in English is…I quickly calm down. Teary—> material. Eyes—>realize. Fish—>superficial. Sadly, English seems to be a lot more memorization than logic.
July 9th, 2008 at 3:01 am
There is a reason for the “extra letters” - in most cases, it’s just a case of having the right environment (i.e. surrounding sounds) for all the sounds to be expressed. For example, 읽, the root for “read”, has two batchim (or in linguistics-speak, codas). Now, I don’t know if Korean ever allowed the pronunciation of two coda consonants in a single syllable, but presently Modern Korean does not, so the citation form “읽다” is pronounced as [일.따] or [익.따] (. = syllable boundary). So, do we get rid of the extra consonant? Well, no, because we do have conjugated forms that involve a following vowel, e.g. “읽어(요)” [일.거(요)], 읽으세요 [일.그.세.요), and so on. Notice that the second batchim, ㄱ, is included in the following syllable and is therefore preserved.
Besides that, one could make the argument that leaving the spelling, double consonants and all, make a number of (native Korean) single jamo words/roots almost like logograms (e.g. Chinese characters) in a way, e.g. 꽃 will always be recognized as flower (or concepts related to flowers), 칡 will always be recognized as “arrowroot”, 많 will always encapsulate the notion of “many”, 앉 for “sit”, 않 for negation, and so on.
So, for the average layperson language learner, the spelling may not be as “logical” as people report it to be, but for linguists, 한글 is a dream come true! (Now, Brahmi-based scripts - lots of fun, but a whole ‘nother thing altogether - thank your lucky stars 한글 was not based on any of those systems.)
July 9th, 2008 at 4:36 am
I do remember from my History of Korean Language class though that “Medieval” Korean had complex syllable onsets (i.e. consonants in the beginning of a syllable).
The most well-known example of this is 쌀 ‘polished uncooked rice’ - before, this jamo had a ㅄ onset (no jokes, please), i.e. *psal (I don’t know how to make the input work with Korean IME since it places the vowel immediate in a separate jamo after typing ㅄ). This is why we presently have compounds such as 햅쌀 ‘newly harvested polished rice’ with a seemingly mysterious [ㅂ] appearing from within: it was *hae-psal before.
(Just like in English “apron” was “napron” and “newt” was “ewt” [from ‘eft’] a couple hundred years before, i.e. “a napron” became “an apron” and “an eft/ewt” became “a newt”).
July 10th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Thanks for explaining, Ed! I looked up Brahmi sript. It’s very aesthetically pleasing. If I have any room left in my brain after tackling Korean, I *might* try to learn another alphabet.
July 11th, 2008 at 4:03 am
Yeah, Brahmi scripts (especially Balinese, hehe) are quite aesthetically pleasing. However, traditionally the majority of systems using Brahmi scripts did not include spacing between words (made possible by regular vs. subscript conjunct forms for each letter), soanaveragesentencewrittenwithaBrahmiscriptwouldlooksomethinglikethis \o\
July 12th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Am I the only one who found this blog to be extremely funny? ㅋㅋ Well it sure was to me! Honestly, the English alphabet is just impossible. After learning 한글 (which come to think of it, didn’t take very long) I realized that spelling and reading in english is just crazy!
And I really liked your alphabet story ㅎㅎ
July 12th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Another satisfied blog reader! Thanks for checking in rooraa!
July 14th, 2008 at 4:05 am
I agree, Hangul is very easy to learn, while written English is harder. English used to be pretty close to the pronounciation, but now it isn’t. An extensive change in long vowels is one of the culprits. I think a lot of problem is that written English has not been updated, as I think e.g. Italian must have been and as I suspect Korean has been.