Good Words

My taekgyeon master is already a very hardworking man, but lately his schedule has veered toward slightly insane territory. Since he began working toward his doctorate in sports psychology, he's had to drive to Daegu, one and a half hours away, each week to attend classes. But now he has to complete the English language requirement, which has taken the form of a three-week long intensive English course that meets Monday through Friday. So now, every morning, he drives to Daegu, listens to a lecture he barely understands and takes notes in a language he barely knows how to write, and then returns to Changwon for the start of afternoon taekgyeon classes that run until 11pm. It's an insane schedule, and after just one week, I can already see how fatigue is taking its toll.

At 11pm each night, after my taekgyeon class, I tutor him for an hour on whatever the day's lecture covered. And I'm almost appalled by the difficulty of the content of this English class. It's a crash course on formal grammar that covers things like SVO word order, past perfect versus past participle, and the different varieties of subject complements. Today, I had to explain the six forms of the English subjunctive to him... in Korean.

I'm not surprised so many people have an aversion to English. If this is the way it's taught, if this is the English that aspiring academics are required to master before even knowing how to ask for the time, then how can we honestly expect anyone to enjoy learning a second language?

What's worse than the fact that my taekgyeon master is being forced to sit through this no-holds-barred, all-or-nothing course for three weeks is that his English level is very low to begin with. Imagine that you have a basic grasp of the American Sign Language alphabet and knew a few popular stock phrases, like "I love you" or "Thank you." Now learn the structure of ASL in three weeks in a class conducted only in ASL. There are two exams. If you don't pass them, you fail the course and can't get your doctoral degree. Capiche?

My taekgyeon master is visibly stressed and probably feels a little bit hopeless. I've realized over the past week that not only is he a complete novice at English grammar, he doesn't have a firm grasp on Korean grammar, either. I find myself explaining why a word can be both a noun and also a subject at the same time -- or at least, trying to explain in my very limited Korean. It's a struggle for both of us.

On the bright side, he's making measurable improvements. Sometimes he comes across something that he knows he's studied before, and it clicks perfectly. Also, his reading fluency is progressing nicely. It's sheer desperation that's doing it, I think.

And as for me, well, my Korean is getting lots of practice, and I'm learning useful terms for grammatical concepts, like verb infinitive (원형) or prepositional idiomatic expressions (전치사 숙어). Of course I'm glad to be helping my taekgyeon master, but it's nice for me to learn from this, as well.

At the end of our tutoring session tonight, as the clock struck midnight, my taekgyeon master sighed and expressed his concern about his first exam on Wednesday. "힘들어요," he said. "It's hard."

"Right," I replied. I then paused as I searched for the right grammatical form to use, one I'd just picked up fifteen minutes prior as we reviewed the subjunctive. "하지만, 쉽더라면 할 가치 없을텐데요?" I said. "But if it were easy, it wouldn't be worth doing, would it?"

I probably made some errors in that statement. (Correct me if that's the case.) But my taekgyeon master nodded his head thoughtfully. "고마워요. 좋은 말이예요," he said. "Thanks. Those are good words."

제 생각에는, 사람이 예전에 할 가능 없다고 믿었는 것에서 성공하면 가장 좋은 성취감을 들 수가 있습니다. I think our greatest sense of achievement as human beings comes when we accomplish that which we were once certain we could not do.

Now if only all my English lessons could double as character-building lessons...

Wishy-Washy Korean Onomatopoeia (의성어) and Mimetic Words (의태어)

I'm no expert in Korean linguistics, but I have noticed something strange about Korean onomatopoeia (의성어) that I'd like to share with you. Aside from being astoundingly creative and multifarious, Korean onomatopoeia is intriguing because it takes the linguistic idea of iconicity and runs far, far away with it. There are thousands of ideophones in the language: onomatopoetic words that describe not just sounds but also certain kinds of sensory perceptions that don't necessarily make a sound.

nomz. Hi, Pusheen!

To begin with, common Korean onomatopoeia include: 냠냠 (nyam-nyam), which is how they write the nomz (eating), 음 (eum), which is their "hm", and 똑똑똑 (ddok-ddok-ddok), for when somebody knocks on the door.

Of course, linguists argue that not all onomatopoeia are iconic. How exactly does 쩌렁쩌렁 (jjeoleong-jjeoleong) sound like a shrill voice? Which sounds more like a heartbeat, lub-dub or 두근두근 (dugeun-dugeun)?

In any case, where Korean (and Japanese, as well) excels at onomatopoeia is their wealth of words that describe sounds that aren't actually sounds. For example, 따끈따끈 (ddaggeun-ddaggeun) is the "sound" of warm, fuzzy feelings. 빤짝빤짝 (bbanjjak-bbanjjak) is their version of twinkle. In Korean, these ideophones are called 의태어 (mimetic words), and their definitions always include the word 모양 (moyang), which means "shape" or "form".

Well, this is where things get confusing, because Korean 의태어 tend to be quite fickle. It seems that not everybody has been able to agree on just how to say -- or, more accurately, write -- the sound of a shimmering star, for example. This particular onomatopoeia is cited equally often as 빤짝 (bbanjjak) and 반짝 (banjjak), the difference contained in the first letter: ㅂ or ㅃ. The sounds are very similar, of course, as the second is simply a tense version of the first, but they are still considered separate phonemes.

As for meaning, some say that 빤짝 is a stronger shininess than regular old 반짝, due in part to the tensed phoneme. But what I see is a simple lack of standardization in these onomatopoeia. As in English, we may wonder if the sound of a train is really "choo-choo" or "toot-toot". Does a dog say, "woof," "ruff," or "arf"?

Another Korean example can be found in the aforementioned heartbeat: not only 두근두근 (dugeun-dugeun) but also 두글두글 (dugeul-dugeul).

When I first began noticing these rather murky boundaries surrounding onomatopoeia, it reminded me of a Korean adage my co-teacher taught me. It goes like this: "아 다르고 어 다르다." It roughly translates to "ah is different from oh," meaning that you must pay careful attention to how you say things. You wouldn't want to meet a cool guy (멋있다/meoshitda) and tell him you think it's he's tasty (맛있다/mashitda).

But how this figures into the difficulty I have in learning Korean onomatopoeia is that it seems that the rules for altering them are quite arbitrary: sometimes the vowels can be shifted, sometimes not. Sometimes it's unclear if the way someone pronounces a word is due to their regional dialect or if they're just saying it wrong.

Take a look at the sound of drizzle, which I learned as 보슬보슬 (boseul-boseul). I must take care not to accidently say 버슬버슬 (beoseul-beoseul), because according to the dictionary, that's the texture of crumbly pastries. So is 바슬바슬 (baseul-baseul). What I can say, though, is 부슬부슬 (buseul-buseul); it appears to be acceptable even though I have literally never heard it before.

For good measure, I just checked out the remaining possible vowels to insert into the first syllable and found that 비슬비슬 (biseul-biseul) means to take tottering steps, 배슬배슬 (baeseul-baeseul) and 베슬베슬 (beseul-beseul) mean to do something weakly and passively, or to shirk, and 뱌슬뱌슬 (byaseul-byaseul) is yet another variant of this. 브슬브슬 (beuseul-beuseul) was not in the dictionary, but I can't help but wonder, "Well, why couldn't this just be another way to describe mizzle or goldbricking?"

(One more: 벼슬하다 (byeoseul) is, in fact, not one of these 의태어, but it means to take up a public office.)

At lunch the other day, a teacher was trying to describe a former student whose face I was having trouble bringing up. "He was short and skinny, didn't wear glasses..." he struggled to use a descriptor that didn't apply to roughly half of our school's population. Finally, he said, "Well, he was 반질반질 (banjil-banjil)," and at that the teachers around us laughed and nodded in agreement.

My co-teacher tried her best to explain. 반질반질 is a word (an 의태어, in fact) used to describe the smooth or slick surface of a stone, but when applied to people, it paints a picture of someone who never wants to work and can think of a hundred ways to avoid responsibility without taking the blame. They're shirkers, charmers, and, well, now that I think about it, they're also 배슬배슬. That can't be a coincidence, can it?

반질 as a baby's bottom.

I offered the translation of "slippery" or "cunning", and also mentioned Ferris Bueller.

Anyway, as my co-teacher went on, another teacher offered that 반질반질 was the same as 밴질밴질 (baenjil-baenjil). When I looked this up in the dictionary, I discovered that 빤질빤질 (bbanjil-bbanjil) was also an option. So were 번질번질 (beonjil-beonjil) and 뻔질뻔질 (bbeonjil-bbeonjil). All of these words mean greasy, glossy, sleek, or smooth. And at that point, my search history on Naver dictionary looked ridiculous.

The common definition among all of these words happened to include another word unfamiliar to me: 빤빤하다 (bban-bban), which means "brazen". Unsurprisingly, 뻔뻔하다 (bbeon-bbeon) and 뺀뺀하다 (bbaen-bbaen) are acceptable variants. But don't get too far ahead of yourself: 반반하다 (ban-ban) means to be good-looking, and 번번하다 (beon-beon) means to have a fair complexion or to be... smooth.

Sometimes I feel like the dictionary is taunting me by sending me in circles.

It played one last trick on my co-teacher and me by telling me that "brazen" meant someone who had no 염치 (yeom-chi). When I asked my co-teacher what that was, she told me that there must have been a mistake: the word they should have used was 얌치 (yam-chi). As it turns out, 염치 and 얌치 have the same meaning, only my co-teacher had never heard of the former.

아 다르고 어 다르다! Does a small difference in pronunciation actually matter? If you look at Korean onomatopoeia, you might think that it's not important at all!

- - -

P.S. I found this fun list of cross-linguistic onomatopoeia during my "research".
P.P.S. Talented graphic designers Dom and Hyo made a infographic of some common Korean onomatopoeia, which I've reproduced below. Have fun studying!

O long-awaited nerdy grammar post...

Every day I receive dozens of messages on the school computer messaging system, and I skim them without really reading, because they're all in Korean, obviously. Sometimes my co-teacher will send along a message in English, especially if she wants my opinion on a question of English grammar. From time to time a non-English teacher will try their hand at English, too, to remind me about teachers' volleyball in the gym after school or ask about the teachers' English class I run.

But I disregard almost all of the Korean messages. If they're short and I have a spare minute, I'll translate them for the purpose of practicing Korean. But the information is usually mundane: administrative stuff, our school in a local newspaper, whatever.

The other day, however, I got a message from one of our secretaries, whose short message included lots of emoticons and an announcement about a new shipment of botttled water for us to take at our convenience. It had been a while since we'd had bottled water, for some unknown reason, so understandably, the secretary was excited. But I couldn't make head or tail of the very first phrase of her message:

아기다리고기다리던 물
a gi da li go gi da li deon mul

The last word, 물/mul, means "water". The rest of it was gibberish to me. If you can't read Korean, it's probably also gibberish to you. But I was mystified: it looked like one very long, nine-syllable word that had some crazy internal rhyme. Having studied Korean for two years, I wondered if this was a new word I'd never seen before, or really just some nonsense sounds thrown together to represent excitement onomatopoetically.

Agi... dali... gogi... dali... deon? 고기/gogi means "meat"... 다리/dali means "bridge"... and I know that 던/deon is a grammatical particle that marks a verb used as a modifer in the past tense. But this still made no sense to me, and I almost laughed out loud because of my confusion and the apparent absurdity of the phrase.

Then Google Translate came in to save the day! Google Translate generally does not work very well for Korean, but I gave it a shot this time, and the algorithms spit out, "Oh awaited". Suddenly, it clicked! Let's break this down:

아 = ah, oh, "O"
기다리고 = from the verb kidalida, which means "wait"
기다리던 = from the same verb, this time with the modifying particle

The sense, then, is that the water is something we have "waited and waited for". O long-awaited bottled water! I can brew tea in my office once again!

I realized that what confused me about the message was not just the unexpected (but completely normal in Korean) repetition, but also the fact that the secretary had neglected to use proper spacing. I see my students do this on Facebook from time to time, and it makes an already difficult-to-decipher wall of text even less compelling to try to read. I mean, imagineifijuststartedwritingmypostsonfacebooklikethisjustbeacuseiwasreallyexcitedoremotional! Um... no thanks! I'm glad that English has CAPSLOCK for that very purpose. AT LEAST WRITING IN ALL CAPS STILL PRESERVES SPACES BETWEEN WORDS.

This Syntax Needs Studied

A few weeks ago, my co-teacher asked me a question about English grammar. This happens several times a week, but around final exam period the questions came more frequently. This time, she asked if "The car needs being washed" was an acceptable grammatical construction (as a variant of the standard "needs to be washed").

As far as I'm aware, no native speaker of American English will say that, but her question did bring up the issue of the interesting "needs washed" construction that has some syntacticians scratching their heads. In some parts of the Midwestern United States, notably western Pennsylvania, the infinitive "to be" will be left out of an utterance following the modal verb "need" and sometimes "like" or "want", and only the passive particle ("washed") is said. Thus, you may sometimes hear, "The car needs washed."

Here is an article from Grammar Girl about the construction, and here is one from the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. According to their research, the "needs washed" construction is apparently derived from patterns in Scottish and/or Irish. The basic conclusion is that it is part of the regional dialect, and furthermore, it is used widely enough that many people actually aren't aware that it is considered incorrect by standard grammars.

My co-teacher was intrigued by the idea that a small population would be oblivious to what to her was clearly a gross syntactic error in their everyday speech. She asked me, "So is it wrong?" I hesitated. If there's anything I've learned from my linguistics courses, it's that we are not to pass judgment on the way humans communicate. A linguist's job is to study language and try to understand the reason why something is said a certain way, not impose any rules determining what is or is not correct. So I told her, "No, I wouldn't say it's wrong. It's merely uncommon. It's not something I would ever say or even teach, but... it's not wrong." There are, I added, many Englishes.

She chuckled and told me about how when she was being trained as an English teacher, there was a large reference book of English grammar that all teachers were expected to consider the final authority on issues such as this. "It's like our Bible for English grammar," she said. But this tome never mentioned anything about "needs washed". "It seems," she continued, "that Americans are very lenient about grammar and don't like to say that something is wrong."

Is that an appropriate generalization? Well, it's true that there's no Academy of English (either in the US or the UK), nothing on par with the illustrious (and/or stuffy) Académie française to dictate what does or does not fly in our language. But there are plenty of American language enthusiasts who find it perfectly acceptable -- if not necessary -- to point out and fix every grammatical error they spot. They are the ones who endeavor to overhaul and improve grammar education in English classrooms and lament the ever-quickening changes to English such as "I wish you would've told me" (gah!) and "a historical event" and "it was funner last time" and "let's dialogue about it" and "the reason is because" and "ain't" (gah!).

You can probably tell that some of these things still bother me. The grammar nut in me -- the linguistic prescriptivist who used to correct my friends' utterances mid-sentence (so rude!) -- has refused to go quietly. It's especially difficult for me as an English teacher to efficiently triage my students' mistakes: which ones do I correct and reinforce? What do I let slide? What do I praise as linguistic creativity and what is just plain wrong?

At least in one sense, I feel fortunate that my co-teacher has me pegged as a grammatically lax American (if this is a thing), because it means that the descriptive linguist in me is finally starting to show his stripes. My hope is that the two sides will work together in my classroom, not against each other, so that my students will be allowed complete freedom of expression while still learning the traditional rules.