Korean Letters, Grammar, and My Wild Accusations

I am sick of Korean. Not the country of Korea, mind you, but the Korean language (known here as Hangul). I have always had problems with foreign languages, but at this point I am entirely fed up. I guess it’s worth beginning with the good points before really digging in, though. First off, it’s not a tonal language. This is a very good thing as it means that I’m less likely to inadvertently insult somebody’s dead cat when trying to ask for a beer. Another good thing is that there is a real alphabet, and it wasn’t a total afterthought. I’ve heard that to read a Chinese newspaper you need to know 30,000 characters. Koreans will tell you that you only need to know the 24 Korean letters in the Hangul alphabet. This is a boldfaced lie. It’s hard to decide where to start with this ridiculous statement (their ridiculous statement, not mine). First off, Koreans are inordinately proud of their language. It was allegedly invented by their most intelligent and benevolent King Sejong in the 15th century. This mirrors what Russians will tell you about how Peter the Great invented surgical tools and giant pianos, and no doubt how some old Germans will tell you about the great Kaisers and their fantastic invention known as the deli roll. Most cultures make incredibly outlandish proclamations about their ancient leaders, but some of the Koreans seem to have taken it a bit further. I have to admit that it is a fairly brilliant alphabet, made entirely of circles and straight lines; very easy to look at and read. Despite these facts, I will not accept the whimsical concept that the letters were meant to mimic the shape your mouth makes while making the intended sound. This is utter baloney. But it is only the first in a long line of lies you will be told about the Korean language. Another lie is that while they claim to only have 14 consonants, they are not counting the double letters. “Double letters?” you might ask, but calm the fuck down and I’ll explain.

It turns out that many consonants can be doubled up. These double letters are very important as, for example, most swear words start with a “double S” sound. Koreans will explain to you that to make this sound you should say the letters with a deeper breath, allegedly making a different and distinguishable noise. I call shenanigans. The only distinguishable bit is that they just say it much louder, and you are more apt to get spit on. I attempt to explain that the only difference is that between saying “sah” and shouting “SAH” but they just don’t seem to get it. “No, no, can’t you hear the difference?” they ask, while thrusting their face towards mine and yelling “S” sounds at me from within what Kindergarten teachers would call my “private bubble” and spraying spittle this way and that.

In addition, they also double or even triple up vowels. Unfortunately, these are even more difficult than the consonants. It turns out that you can combine nearly any vowels to make new sounds. One of the issues is that people will teach a fairly insane way of figuring out what these new vowels should sound like. First off are the simple combinations of vowels. These would theoretically be easy, except for the fact that they make no sense. For some reason, the combination of an “O” vowel and “Ah” vowel makes a “Wah” sound. My teacher acts as if this is the most reasonable thing in the world. The theory is that by saying “O-Ah, O-Ah, O-Ah” very quickly it starts to sound like “Wah.” This would be far more reasonable if you had 5 seconds per vowel to figure out what they should sound like. It turns out it is far easier just to memorize that a vowel with that line configuration makes a “Wah,” and similar looking ones make “Wuh” and “We” sounds. In a similar manner, doubling up an “Oo” sound makes a “Yoo.” Why this is the case is I may never know. I just try to remember what they look like as best as I can, and think curse words at the letters as loudly as mentally possible.

Another fairly annoying point is the difference between L’s and R’s. There is a myth in America that Asians, be they Chinese, Korean, Japanese, or other, do not distinguish between the two. This is only partially correct. Koreans do not, in fact, have a different letter for the two, rather, they have a sort of backwards block 5 shape that takes the place for both. The annoying point is that at different places in different words it makes either one sound or the other. In certain words it is a very distinct “L” sound, while in others it is a distinct “R” sound (honestly, they have a burger joint called “Lotteria”). It gets frustrating in that when you ask the person responding is inevitably unable to tell you which one it is. It’s the opposite of the Spanish letters V and B, which are written differently but sound exactly the same. At least in that situation you can ask the inane question “v de vacca, o b de burro?” which roughly translates to “I speak Spanish very poorly. Please speak more slowly.” In Korean, there is no equivalent way of figuring out what the sound you are supposed to be making. You just sort of guess and hope that eventually people will stop brining you soup when you ask where the nearest hospital is.

Another extremely frustrating issue is that the Koreans have somewhere between 4 and a million different kind of O-ish sounds. Normally, this would not be much of an issue, except that they tend to sound very similar, and screwing them up can cause fairly serious communication errors. While attempting to get to rugby practice one day, one of my teammates told the cabbie that we wanted to go to “Chong-day Chong-moon.” The cabbie then began happily driving across town in a very unfamiliar direction, and eventually stopped the cab in front of a convenience store across the street from a forested area. At this point we realized that we must have made some kind of mistake and called the captain for help. After hearing my teammate yell into the phone “I TOLD him Chong-day Chong-moon” for about the fifth time he handed over the phone to the cabbie, who after a brief back-and-forth began laughing, hung up the phone, and started driving. At this point he turns around and says “AHHHH, ChUUUUUUNg-day ChUUUUUUNg-moon. Bleep bloop bleep bloorp Chong-day Chong-moon. ChUUUng-day ChUUUng-moon.” I took this to mean that whichever sadist designed the city had intentionally made different districts with nearly identical names just to swindle foreigners out of cab fare, but I was unable to confirm my suspicions. I honestly can’t believe that if you told a cab driver in New York to take you to the “Umpire-State Building” he would drive you to Yankees Stadium and then be utterly bewildered with his mistake. Well, maybe if he was a native New Yorker he would, but certainly not a cabdriver from out of state.

Finally, I hate Korean Grammar. You need to mark everything in some way with a suffix to explain what kind of word it is. Are you using a word indicating time? BOOM, suffix. How about a place? Suffix. Maybe you were going to use somebody’s name. Suffix. Maybe you’re just going to use a boring, run-of-the-mill noun. SUFFIX. You end up spending half of your time determining whether or not you need to add a suffix, and the other half of your time figuring out which suffix to add, depending on if the word ended in a consonant or vowel. You may think that with all of these rules the language would at least be unambiguous, but you would be entirely incorrect, because they leave out the pronouns in a sentence. Who is going to buy a book tomorrow? Tough shit if you thought it was Mina, because it was clearly Sora. Moron. And it’s not only the language that is ambiguous. Try learning Korean names. They all have the same number of syllables, and because of how they are constructed, they are all made up of around 60 different pieces thrown together. In fact, Korean names are so similar to each other, and last names are so common place, that their baseball jerseys have 2 initials before the last name. Imagine the embarrassment if you were to mix up H.K. Park and H.J. Park. Some Korean last names are so common that it is like how it must have been in Southie in the 50s, where you couldn’t swing a whiskey bottle without hitting an O’Brian, a Murphy, or an O’Sullivan.

You may at this point think to yourself that I have gone a little bit over the top with some of this. Well, I will respond the way my father would. Perhaps YOU’VE gone a little bit over the top. Think about that for a while. You could fairly point out that I’m probably just bitter because I’m terrible at learning foreign languages. You could say I’m just lucky that I was born to English speaking parents, because I’m far too lazy and inept to learn it otherwise. And I’d say you’re right. And God bless America.

Being Overweight, Exercise, and "Diet" Food

I’m overweight. This is not a feeling due to cultural or media pressures. This is not a self confidence issue. This is not even something one of the mean girls at school wrote about me on a bathroom stall wall. This is simply a medical fact that I was alerted to after my check up. I recently got my results back, and in the back of the very long list of numbers and acceptable ranges were the problems that they found with me. Apparently I am in need of diet and exercise. I do not feel bad about this. In fact, I was not overweight before I stepped off the plane and onto Korean soil. I’m 6’3”, and when I first got here I weighed about 190 pounds. While this is the heaviest I’ve ever been it’s a far cry from overweight in America. But South Korea is not America. There are no fat people here. This is not really hyperbole, more like an engineering approximation. You can go for days walking through Seoul and never see an Asian person over 200 pounds. And there are some good reasons for this. One of them is not exercise.

When I first got to Korea, I realized my workload mirrored what people expect from a semester abroad. Because of this, I found that I needed to find other activities besides homework to fill my time. While sleeping, watching movies, reading, and drinking certainly do succeed in this endeavor, they’re not appropriate all the time. Occasionally getting out of bed for something besides class, food, or whiskey-cokes is generally accepted by many self-help authors as one of the most important habits of highly effective people. With this in mind, I found the gym in the basement of my dormitory. Back home I can use the gym at the school next door, where a noticeable portion of the students seem to spend more time working out, gelling their hair, and popping their collars than they do on homework. This means that I am blessed with using a gorgeous gym donated by a gracious family of benefactors that also believes, in line with the beliefs of many of the students, that well shaped pecs are an integral part of a good college education. The gym in Korea is noticeably lacking in comparison. Much of the equipment is rusty, the floors are so dusty and slippery as to make wearing sneakers on them the equivalent of wearing socks on a linoleum floor, and is unheated, in what can only be an attempt to scare off many of the students into the adjacent ping pong room. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for the ping pong magnates of our day) this seems to be a successful venture. Much of the time spent in the gym is spent pleasantly alone, or, at worst, in fairly sparse company. It is this company, however, that gives me a great deal of joy.

Watching some of my classmates work out is an exercise in keeping a straight face. The first thing one will notice in my gym is a complete lack of proper attire. The first time I noticed it was when one student was wearing a black, puffy, Northface vest while running on the treadmill. This, by itself would almost certainly win the award for most unlikely gym clothes. On that day, however, it wouldn’t even warrant much notice, as walking next to him was a kid dressed in a wind breaker, Dockers khakis, and most astonishing of all, flip flops. I understand that there is something to be said against the exclusive nature of many exercise groups. Bicyclists wear prohibitively expensive and prohibitively ugly cycling gear, and then shoot nasty looks at people in regular shorts riding by. But I think that sometimes these emotions come from an important place. Flip flops are not acceptable on a treadmill. This is not due to snotty elitism or some overblown sense of exclusivity. This is due to the fact that anybody who goes to an elite engineering school, or for that matter an elite preschool, should be aware that you are not intended to run in them. However, even this is not the most entertaining thing I’ve seen. The winner by far would have to be the person I saw one day wearing jeans with a belt, flip flops, and a button down shirt. Ordinarily this would be an amusing thing to see, but he managed to take it to a whole different level. Most of his workout consisted of standing in front of the mirror while making sure to keep what my friend refers to as his “Playmobile haircut” perfectly in place. He would then occasionally do a few sit-ups, and then return to petting down a few strands of hair on the side of his head. Finally, he swung a stick around like a golf club for a bit before retiring back to his room after 30 minutes. I don’t mean to sound like a jackass, but it was one of the funnier things I have seen in this country. I am a simple man and I believe in some simple things: the right to earn a living wage, to a decent education, to privacy, and that wearing a belt, a button down shirt, or flip-flops in a gym should be punished by a mild flogging.

As exercise is clearly not the reason for the amazing lack of obesity in this country, the clear frontrunner for the reason that people here are so skinny has to be the food. It is all things diet food should be, while at the same time tasting immensely better than anything in America labeled “Light.” That is not to say that it tastes particularly good, just that I would pick Korean food over a microwavable diet TV dinner any day of the week. There are very good reasons that this food is good for losing weight. The first is that it contains very little actual food. I don’t care what you say, but seaweed soup is not a breakfast food. It is hot water with fish food thrown in. Judging from this, I would say that the concept of calories escapes Koreans. Beyond this, Korean food is physically difficult to eat. American food is designed for easy consumption. Most cheeseburgers are greasy enough that with minimal chewing you can slide whole chunks of meat and cheese down your gullet. Korean food is the exact opposite. It is always hot and spicy to an unbelievable degree. Eating it wears you out. You end up finishing your meal not because you are full, but because you are tired of trying to force sustenance into yourself. On top of this, they have devised perhaps the most ingenious dieting device of all time. This device is known in the Western World as chopsticks. If you ever decide to crash diet I would suggest eating noodle soup with chopsticks for a week. Trying to eat noodle soup with chopsticks is akin in difficulty to a Korean making it in the NBA as a center. In fact, feeding prisoners of war noodle soup with chopsticks is banned under the Geneva conventions. As nearly all of the food in this country is difficult to ingest for one reason or another, you are almost guaranteed to lose weight as soon as you get here. In the first month I lost about 10 pounds without even trying. I believe it is this semi-masochistic diet that does the trick for the Koreans. Nearly everybody in this country has the body of the geeky kid with huge glasses who, in high school, spent too much time on the computer reading about the latest graphics cards (and I would like to point out that I only did that before high school). They are skinny, but certainly not in shape. But what do I know? I’m overweight.