Except l, r, f, v, z, th, or short i, I guess. It looks like they have the beauty of hangeul locked down, so perhaps next week they can work on their English, especially if they have the arrogance to try and preach in it.
I posted on a similar display back in January, "Apparently Hangeul is the best Asian writing system to use if you want to fuck up English words the least." A video at the National Museum was also using "Hamburger" as a demonstration of the superiority of rendering foreign words through Hangeul.
Other lofty claims were made by a textbook for foreigners trying to learn Korean.
Language is the first precious intangible cultural properties in this world.
Writing is the first valuable tangible cultural propertie in this world.
Amog the rest, The Korean Language and Korean Writing are the greatest cultural inheritance of everything in the world.
Of course, there are only their language and writing in other country, too.
But their language and writing cannot express perfectly each and every.
The Korean Language and Korean Writing can express perfectly everything, everysound, all of thinking, and all of feeling of this world.
Like this, The Korean superior culture be Known to the general public, the foreigners are learning The Korean Language and writing, is getting more and more many.
This book is wrote for the sake of them.
Likewise this Korean blog entry looks at the "Hamburger" example. And here's an anti-Japanese rap song in which Koreans make fun of the way Japanese people pronounce English words.
I am Korean! (I am a Japanese!)
Hey, you, try saying “Al lo byu!” (I rob you!) *1
No! It’s “I low byoo!” (I rob you!)
Are you retarded? Can’t you even pronounce that? (Hai!)
Are you really retarded? (Hai!)
Isn’t your country just fundamentally retarded? (Hai!)
Hangeul has many good points, but its precision at rendering foreign words isn't one of them. It's all a pointless discussion anyway, because the Japanese pronunciation of "hamburger" or "coffee" suit the Japanese language just fine, as the Korean pronunciation suits Korean. But that there are so many English words used in Korean is one reason why Koreans' spoken English is so poor. About the last thing Koreans should be taking pride in is any perceived relative skill in pronouncing English. Hey, you know how painful it is for you to listen to terribly mispronounced Korean?
Yeah, that's what it's like when you do it.
14 comments:
Argh! I hate when waeguks overdo the falling intonation like that white guy in the video.
Totally agree with you, sonagi92. I had to stop the video after his first sentence.
Utterly ridiculous and of course if Korean culture is so perfect then why aren't they discussing this whole subject in a Korean restaurant?
I also hate it when expats here refer to themselves as 'waeguks'.
Actually... McDonald's is a good example that they say it "the best" between those three languages.
But ask them to say "straight" and you'll hear a 5 syllable word.
Mostly I love the propaganda spewed out on "hangul day" which is the only national holiday I'm aware of that celebrates a language created by foreigners hired by a king.
That last video is so smug and happy with itself that it makes me want to kill women.
Saying something is so does not make it so. They can easily sell this bullshit to their own people. The Koreans will not question it as they will be filled with pride and unable to see the truth. Like ravens attracted to a shiny piece of garbage, they see the shiny and not the garbage. Everyone else sees right through this bullshit and there is a collective eye roll throughout these tired attempts to get everyone in the world to think Korea is the number one culture property and language of this world.
잘인척하지마세요. (Did I spell that right?) Can anyone give a better translation of this than "stop trying to be cool." I use this phrase whenever I get a Korean using a (unwarrented) superlative about how great the country is.
"The Korean Language and Korean Writing can express perfectly everything, everysound, all of thinking, and all of feeling of this world."
The funny this is, the statement above was probably true when it was first written. It wasn't too long ago that Korea had almost no contact with the outside world. Therefore, it would have been a relatively easy thing to describe "everything, everysound [and] all of thinking."
Brian mate, this is a really good piece. It's clinical, precise, and strong, valid points; heaps better than the verbose vitriol of that other recent piece any day.
Thanks, Julian.
How embarrassing. Please let this be a spoof.
In addition to the new statue of King Sejong the Great at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul there is also an underground area (mini-museum?) dedicated to his life and achievements. I stopped by there for the first time today and found one particularly interesting section that relates to this topic:
(Photo here)
"Hangeul can be quickly and easily into a computer, etc, enabling it to shine more brightly still in this era of information technology. Hangeul, which was so scientifically created by King Sejong 500 years ago, enables its users today to build better-quality digital information faster than the users of other characters. As such, Hangeul is the most scientific and suitable writing system to combine with digital technologies."
I will admit that I prefer sending text messages in Korean over English (syllabic clusters take up less space), but is that sign trying to suggest that Hangeul is the best language system for data entry, programming, etc.? I'd like to see someone explain that vis-à-vis the high reliance on Active-X and IE-6 (only) compatible websites that seem so common here.
Here's another interesting aside: in Umberto Eco's book Serendipity he talks about the 19th century (or was it 18th century?) efforts to figure out what 'language' people spoke before God created the Tower of Babel. Apparently there were a few Irish folks who made a big fuss about how their language was the original, spoken as far back as the Garden of Eden. Is that one more similarity between Koreans and the Irish? *insert eye-roll here*
Interesting, An Acorn. I was there on Sunday, too.
And I, too, prefer texting in Korean because it saves space. That's not always the case when you're typing English words in Hangeul, though, which makes me wonder about the ease of using it for computer programming or rendering other languages. I mean, the letters in Hangeul don't correspond exactly to what's in foreign languages, and there's always some difficulty figuring out how to spell words in Hangeul. Some, including Domino's Pizza, spell my last name 도이치, though I prefer 도이츠.
And I admit I'm ignorant on this point (which is why I'm asking), but what do they do with words in languages that use tones?
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