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Korean Job Discussion Forums
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TheUrbanMyth
Joined: 28 Jan 2003
Location: Retired
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 Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 4:39 pm Post subject: |
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| JediJenna wrote: |
| . i my mother is korean and my father is japanese and neither can speak more than 20 words of english, which is why it bothered me that people are being mocked and made fun of while they try to learn. so i think YOU need to relax. |
No one is mocking anyone or making fun of anyone here who is trying to learn.
We are talking amongst ourselves as teachers not to students. |
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atwood
Joined: 26 Dec 2009
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 6:05 pm Post subject: |
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| Steelrails wrote: |
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| While Americans may "butcher" other languages, they're not doing it purposefully, as you claim Koreans are doing to English. |
Are you kidding me? Americans delight in butchering other languages. Politicians often do as a subtle tip towards more nationalistic elements. Ever notice how George W. Bush was fairly good at pronouncing the name of non-Americans he liked, but would do some ridiculous mispronunciation of those that were on "the list".
Sorry, but there is a whole strain of folks back home that love to deliberately mispronounce stuff less they come off as some sort of sissified nerd.
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| would be much easier to take if they would extend the same courtesy to foreigners speaking imperfect Korean that foreigners extend to them when they "butcher" the English language. |
What courtesy? You mean the videos on youtube mocking how someone pronounces Coke? Babo T-Shirts? Accented voices and 'Englishee'?
I'd say both sides are pretty guilty of mocking each other. |
You're usually full of examples and little real proof, but for your first statement you have neither.
As for the second part of your post, that's humor. No one is doing it while someone is trying to communicate with them. There's a difference, but then you never get that situations can be different. |
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Steelrails
Joined: 12 Mar 2009
Location: Earth, Solar System
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:52 pm Post subject: |
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You're usually full of examples and little real proof, but for your first statement you have neither.
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Are you seriously suggesting that some Americans don't delight in deliberately mispronouncing foreign words and names?
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| As for the second part of your post, that's humor. No one is doing it while someone is trying to communicate with them. There's a difference, but then you never get that situations can be different. |
Excuse me, but in those situations the people doing those things are not laughing with Koreans, they are laughing at them. One is meant kindly, the other is not.
As for it not being done while someone is communicating with them, it's worse. It's being done either behind their back or in a medium where the party lacks the means to join in the humor or to give back. You can have situations like the "Coke" video and if you are there with the person, it can be laughing with them. Maybe they can mention a bad pronunciation of something Korean and you can laugh together.
Most Koreans and foreigners are equally good at being patient with each other in regards to pronunciation and mistakes. A few on both sides decide to ridicule each other over it. |
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Threequalseven
Joined: 08 May 2012
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 9:34 pm Post subject: |
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I've had some success using hangul to teach the pronunciation of words (or at least the American pronunciation). For example, many of my students would say "boar" instead of "ball". I think this is in part because most English words that are spelled in hangul use the British English pronunciation (such as "bah" for "bar"). So if the students see "볼", they think "boar". I spelled it for a class once as "발르", changing the "oh" vowel sound to an "aw" sound, then adding another "ㄹ" to mimic a proper L sound, and it worked quite alright once I explained that it's pronounced "bawl" and not "bawl-uh".
Usually, though, I avoid using this method, especially for the F, V, Z, th, dz, zh, the soft I, and other sounds. |
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Ruthdes
Joined: 16 Oct 2008
Location: Seoul
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 9:55 pm Post subject: Re: At best, ethnocentric. At worst, completely offensive |
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| JediJenna wrote: |
so, I came to this forum to see what words I could pull together to help my adult class with commonly mispronounced english words and, for the most part, i found this thread to be very helpful. however, there are some posts that are just downright ignorant and assumptive about korean speakers. there is such a display of indignant reaction to, GASP, non-native speakers not correctly pronouncing a strange language, even after trying to undo years of utter wrongness!!! Woe is us.
| Ruthdes wrote: |
I teach mostly adults, so I'm trying to deal with decades of wrong pronunciation! Arggh!
i get that you are irked by how much english has been twisted and perhaps butchered, but that is indeed why you're here; why we're here.
Theme Park (I remember it took me about 5 minutes to work out what a tem-a park was). Vietnam (same story...what the hell is Bet nam?!?).
you know how different countries have different alphabets and phonics that go along with them, right? well, when it doesn't quite translate well, they do the best they can to simplify and make it accessible to everyone with as close an approximation as possible by whomever was responsible at the time. as we know "th" and "v" are not easy to come by for koreans because it is not in their phonic library. and "betnam" probably evolved from "bietnam" because the "i" was eventually glossed over. english does this too, all the time. we get lazy with our language and pronunciation changes over time. they didn't have a lot of access to native speakers helping them with pronunciation until relatively recently so let's not get so judgmental about it.
Any word with an "oh" sound, like wrote or photo.
guess what? koreans don't have nearly as many dipthongs as english does. their vowels are, for the most part, pure vowels (except the 워 and 와 thing, etc). when we as native speakers say "o," we actually say "oh-oo." but when they say "o," they just say "oh," - no slide into a dipthong, because that is the vowel sound they know. so to expect them to say their vowels with an english dipthong without explicitly teaching them what that is, is rather, well, you get it.
"W" words! "ood"! Arggh!. I use "How much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?"
again, understanding their language gives us insight as to why they have a hard time with these words. even though they have words that sound as if they are starting with a "w," they actually don't. it just seems that way because it's been romanized to an approximation, such as the city "suwon." that's not a "w" you're hearing. words that have 워 and 와 may, to us, SOUND like "w's" but they are not. they are more distinct and are "oo-uh" or "oh-ah." they say it fast and it may sound like a "w" but have them break it down for you and they will make those distinct sounds. so yes, it's a little tricky for them but they tend to grasp this one more quickly.
i don't mean to pick on this one particular post in my reply here but it was the one i had read that had the most "oh my god, why don't they say these words the right way?!" type of attitude, which seems to be prevalent. granted, i came to this thread to find words that koreans have a hard time with, but i was rather dismayed at the snobbery that many posts displayed. i doubt we would fare much better or worse learning a language that was so different from ours. very sorry if i come across as a bit angry and mortified. i don't want to come off like a douchebag but i know our students (both young and old) would feel incredibly awful if they knew some of the things that were being written here.
also, to that dude (or dudette, don't want to assume) that didn't know the difference between a vowel, consonant, and article.... i hope you are just teaching phonics here and nothing more. please do your students a favor and review a basic grammar book. please. |
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Wow, I come on here to find that a four year old post of mine has been quoted and I've been accused of being ignorant and dismissive.
I went back to read my post, and I really don't think I was making fun of Koreans. The topic is words that Koreans mispronounce commonly, and I gave examples of it. I never said that I thought they should be able to pronounce them properly, and yes, I do understand why those mistakes are made. Your sarcasm, JediJenna, while explaining this to me, was condescending, insulting and unnecessary. The fact that there is a logical explanation for the mistakes, doesn't make them any less wrong, nor did it make it any easier for me to understand when I was brand new to Korea. By the time I wrote that post, I did understand why, but explaining that was irrelevant to the topic.
My "argh!"s were about the frustration of trying to undo so many years of bad habit. Maybe you misinterpreted my "what the hell is bet-nam" comment. This was my genuine reaction in my head when I first heard it: literally, "what the hell does that mean?". Not, ha ha, stupid Korean mispronouncing Vietnam. You said I had the biggest "oh my god" attitude, but then equate that to being judgmental and snobbish. I can see why you got "oh my god" out of my post, but I don't agree that I was being insulting. I've often thought about how I am so lucky to be born in an English speaking country, and what a difference it can make to one's opportunities in life. I try not to take it for granted. I'm trying to learn Korean because I don't know another language, and I find that embarrassing. It's a struggle every time I try, and I have a lot of respect for those Koreans who choose to learn English, study hard, and persevere. It's a freaking hard language.
Back to pronunciation, I'm actually pretty patient with it in class and it's one of the things that I really like to work on with my students. I'm sure that most of us are guilty of having a laugh about a particularly amusing mistake, just as Koreans laugh at me when I mispronounce Korean. It's human, and as other replies to your post have mentioned, this is a place teachers come to vent. Expressing frustration about a problem is not the same as judging the person with the problem. |
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Threequalseven
Joined: 08 May 2012
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 10:12 pm Post subject: |
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Also, I don't know if these were mentioned yet:
Pencil = "Pen Sir"
Eraser = "E Lay Sir"
Ruler = "Rurur"
Wig = "Weeeg"
Lynn = "Lean"
Hot Dog = "Hot Dough Guh"
Cheese = "Chee Juh"
Sausage = "Sausagey"
Water Park = "Wha Da Puck" *(almost punished a kid for that one  )
Book, Cook, Look = Oo sound is like blue.
There are probably a ton of examples of these in-between vowels in English. |
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le-paul
Joined: 07 Apr 2009
Location: dans la chambre
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| Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 10:25 pm Post subject: |
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or;
iraq ( with an eye instead of an ear)
iran ( with and eye instead of an ear)
herb ( with no h so it sounds french and then give it the prep. an)
espresso (with an ex)
candidate (without the d)
Ku lux klan ( ku as clue)
federal (so it sounds like fedral)
van goch (urrggh...)
cant (so it sounds like can)
etc.
oh wait, thats not the Koreans, wrong thread... |
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Threequalseven
Joined: 08 May 2012
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