Since my Korean isn’t perfect either, the editor always polishs it for the final draft. There’s also the editorial direction that they have to follow. It seems to me that the editors prefer Korean word to foreign originated words.

I also thought that netizen is a Korean neologism, but according to foreigner’s reference it may not be.

Personally, I prefer the word ???????!

Ah, okay, I stand corrected. Although evidently, the term got a lot of play in Korea. I wasn’t sure if June wrote that article or not, but evidently she did (?). I guess it’s her choice whether to use ???????¨ or not…if the term is gaining currency in Korea these days, then perhaps it’s the right word to use.

In Naver, under the ??????? category, ???????¨ is getting 34,811 hits, versus ???????’s 1,957,212. So it’s still got a way to go….

new things i learned today. Brenden Carr is a lawyer and Kushibo=95.

Before anyone passes judgment on this, there is a long history of attempts not only in Korean but in other languages to replace borrowed words from other languages with native words (not always successful, of course). There have been attempts over the years to replace Sino-Korean (hanja-derived) words with words of native Korean derivation. That said, why not just stick with ???????? (Is “netizen” itself from Korean? I never encountered the word until it got publicized after Roh’s election win in 2002. Or maybe I just wasn’t hip to the term….)

LOL…I’m there. I’ve asked a few Korean native speakers, but no one has yet to tell me what a ???????¨ is. I’m guessing that’s what we keep hearing as “netizen”.

I stopped teaching in Korea for the most part in early 2000, and I was back in Korea for 2002. I’ve also spent a good bit more time concentrating on Korea and studying about it. My Korean language skills remain my biggest handicap. I just don’t learn languages as well as the average person. I can’t use it well enough to do research. I have been using more Korean language media articles the last 6 months.

On the site http://www.usinkorea.org, the majority of my information offered to prove my points come from the mainstream Korean media and the kinds of quotes from politicians and others you mean.

I think the experience teaching adults of different ages was a great source for understanding what was going on in Korea. Just teaching each day cleared up a lot of questions I would have from personal contacts and from reading and from the press. To me, it was like having a finger on the pulse of Korean society. The fact that what I was hearing in class didn’t jar drastically with what I was getting from the media seemed to give validity to what I was picking up in classes.

And if you came to the US and spent a few years teaching or working with a lot of different adults, and you watched the network news and read the major newspapers, I don’t think you would have little ground for giving a general idea of what American society was about on big ticket issues.

And one big point — America is a much bigger country with a much more diverse community and geographical spread.

I think what I got to see teaching Koreans matched well with what I’ve read or seen elsewhere about it. It might be something more to dig into and explain if my opinions were incredibly different from what the quotes, media, polls, and other such evidence were pointing to.