Just Hang It Up . . .

“Innostel”? Innovative + Hostel? God help us all…That pretty much sums up the English language communication problem in Korea. Other notable butheries of the English language: Officetel (Office + Hotel), Saladent (Student earning a salary as a side job).

I became painfully aware of this ridiculous trend of combining accepted words to arrive at new ones when I first heard the expression “taekbae” (taek for house + pedal) to describe home deliveries.

What’s downright sad is the clueless, solipsistic Korean attitude toward such ridiculous expressions. I can’t tell you how many times I was tripped up by the inaccurate adaptations of English where there is already a perfectly fine Korean phrase that can explain the concept. What happens is that the original meaning of an English term gets lost and when the phrase is communicated to a non-Korean, misunderstandings result. At Samsung, this was not only a trend, but one that was encouraged in the official reporting manual which mandated that a certain number of Chinese and English phrases be used in all reports.

I guest lectured one time at Kyeong Nam University in Taegu in the 1970s, when one of the students, in an attempt to sound educated dropped the name “Gwaetae.” When I asked who this person was, he actually called me ignorant in front of the entire class. I do not believe that he would not have said this to a regular non-Gyopo Korean lecturer. I later discovered that he was using a Koreanized pronunciation of the German name Goethe. The problem is, I had learned the proper pronunciation of that name and couldn’t understand his unrecognizable version.

I sat in numerous meetings at Samsung mulling over an English phrase to attempt to grasp the concept the reporter was actually trying to convey. Sometimes people would ask me for clarifications, and I would politely defer the explanation of the term to the presenter rather than embarrasing him by explaining that the phrase was either made up or misused. The majority of the time I learned that the phrase was deliberately intended to be vague so as to convey the impression that the speaker was privy to special knowledge that the listener lacked.

The problem is that the use of English in Korean has been identified as a means of affecting sophistication rather than accurately conveying a concept. As long as English is viewed as a means to obfuscate rather than elucidate, there will be a dearth of bona fide attempts to properly learn English as a means of communication.

That sort of rampant bulshitting, my friends, is one of the reasons that Koreans do not (as opposed to can not) learn English.

Something similar can be said of Chinese characters as well. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to lecturers attempt to reinterpret Chinese words to explain or even justify a concept they were attempting to convey.

JW:”As far as I know, Japanese is easier and cheaper for Koreans to learn than English. Probably for Mandarin too. Is it possible that Korea will be better off economically by focusing more on Japanese and Mandarin rather than on English so much?”

You appear to miss the fact that national sensitivity/intellectual laziness prevents Koreans from learning English or Japanese properly. I’m not sure how much time you’ve actually spent in Korea, but in the nearly 20 years that I lived there, I did not observe any demonstrable improvement in English language skills since the 1970s. In fact, I believe second language skills have grown worse. Given the amount of resources devoted to language skills, there must be a root cultural cause for this (see my post above for one of them).

Japanese and Chinese are indeed good second languages to learn, but the need for English remains primary, given its general acceptance as the international language (apologies to French).

Korea is a good language in Korea, and there is no need to overcomplicate it with needless foreign phrases. However, the improper English that Koreans do learn just happens to serve them poorly outside Korea.

BTW, pardon me for referring to all cultures in the 3rd person – I am equally critical toward all of them. Americans, too, generally lack 2nd language skills. The difference is that they are not a small, export-driven nation that depends on a foreign language for communication and that studies it intensively throughout their school years and in private academies as well. I know of no other nation on earth that displays such resistance to learning a language that they acknowledge to be essential.

SomeguyinKorea: “…there is no clear correlation between the similarities (or differences) that exist a first and second language and fluency acquired in the target language. Simply put, just because Korean, Japanese and Chinese share the same word order and some lexical items doesn’t mean that Korean learners of Japanese or Chinese will be able to learn these languages (faster/more easily) than a native speaker of any other language.”

Actually, I found it extremely easy to pick up basic Japanese sufficient to (gasp) actually communicate in Japan.

1st, aside from a few phonetic differences such as the z sound in Japanese, which Koreans often use a j for) it is intuitively easy for us Korean speakers to pronounce Japanese words.

2nd, Koreans have the advantage of having already learned Japanese characters in school and can read and sound out Japanese words.

3rd, the cultural touchpoints are often similar if not identical. Some things are just not translatable on an East-West cultural level.

However, if the horse won’t drink, it doesn’t really matter how good the water is…

“As far as I know, Canadians have been getting on my ass every time I post. My guess is that Canadians don’t like Americans much. Unless maybe they are Canadian American.”

They all are, as they share the same continent. FYI, Yanks and Canuks get along just fine.