Naver.com, probably the most popular portal site in Korea, has a section called “enjoyjapan” where things related to Japan are discussed. That site also provide machine translation service between Korean and Japanese. I’ve used them before a few times and found it pretty good and is better than other machine translation tools such as BabelFish or Google Language Tool.

Anyway, from the Naver.com main site, I clicked on a item, which brought me to a discussion thread on a Korean drama by a Japanese person. If you don’t know either Korean or Japanese, then you won’t be able to read what they are talking about. But what they talk about is not the interesting thing.

It took me a few seconds to realize what was going on. But the original poster posted her message in Japanese, on a counterpart Japanese site, “enjoykorea”. The Japanese version of the same thread can be seen here.

So, one can post in Korean on the “enjoyjapan” site and another can post in Japanese on the “enjoykorea” site on the same thread! People can participate in the discussion in their preferred language!

I just find it pretty interesting. I guess the machine translation for certain segments are pretty good these days (Japanese and Korean belong to the same language family and share the syntactic structures).

The show being promising is not my concern for this article. :p

When we were watching the episode, we noticed an Asian girl and initially wondered what her nationality was (my wife said she was Korean, and I said either Japanese or Chinese although she kinda looked familiar). And then there was an Asian male character who I immediately recognized as Daniel Dae Kim. So, I already realized I lost the bet.

However, the surprise came when they started talking to each other. Their dialogs were in Korean (Daniel, who was born in Pusan, was faking a Pusan accent), and not only that there was no subtitles!

So, I started digging up the Internet, and it turns out the actress was Kim Yunjin (also spelled Yoon-Jin) who have appeared in several Korean movies (including “Swiri”). Her Korean was authentic, which was another first in the U.S. TV/movies.

The rumor is that Ms. Kim initially auditioned for the role of “Kate” (the main female character), but they didn’t think she was right for it. But they liked her enough that they created this role for her (and the role of her husband).

The series is into its first pilot episode, so it’s difficult to judge, but Korean dialog was okay, not perfect (I would have preferred omitting “당신을” from Sun’s lines and substituting “싫어요” with “안 돼요” or “어어…” for Jin’s lines). They are playing a typical role of a chauvinistic husband and a subservient wife, which I have a bit of a problem. But there is a rumor that the couple is actually hiding their English skills, so it may change.

The show looked beautiful in HD. The story may not turn out to be great, but I think it does have a potential. I’ll be keep watching it.

Anyway, I hope they don’t end up just speaking Korean till the end of the series. I hope they can get some other roles after this. It could be a good thing for Asian American actors, after all (just don’t play some typical ethnic roles).

There is something I’ve been noticing recently about how some Koreans write their names in Roman alphabets. Some of them started writing Korean names with their family name first without a comma. This seems to be more common for the names of Koreans in Korea (as opposed to those in the U.S.A.).

The norm for most Western cultures is that you write your family name last (John S. Smith). However, in most East Asian Cultures, the family name comes first.

It used to be that when the Korean name needed to be written in Roman alphabets, the western rule would be followed and write the family name last (Younghong Cho). At least, in Korean names there is no such thing as a middle name, but sometimes people would put spaces between each syllable to make each sound clearer (Young Hong Cho [I hate it when someone calls me "Young"]).

Another western rule is that if you want to put the family name first (for sorting and indexing, I guess), you would put a comma after the family name (Cho, Younghong) to note which is which.

But these days, I’ve noticed that when a Korean in Korea writes names of Koreans, they just write as one would say in Korea (Cho Younghong [my family name is "Cho"]). I do see this in BusinessWeek articles by Moon Ilhwan [his family name is "Moon"] for example. He writes the name of the Korean president as Roh Moo Hyun ["Roh" is the family name].

Actually, I’ve been doing the same when I write quick reviews about the Korean music CDs I bought for a while.

I was leaning toward the idea that it’s better to write people’s names as they want them to be. But when I don’t know what they want, I was inclined to represent the names as they are most commonly used. So, for most musicians in Korean, I started to put the family name first with a comma following it (Cho, Younghong). However, it started to get too cumbersome and confusing (Cho, Younghong, Hong, GilDong, and Kim, Chul Soo [how many names are there?]).

So, I started dropping the commas. But without them, it’s difficult to know which is which (well, for most Koreans, it’s fairly easy to recognize the family name). So, I did something in the middle by capitalizing the family name (CHO Younghong). It looks a bit awkward sometimes, but at least you know which is which.

I think some Chinese also have been doing this as well. When I was reading about Leslie Cheung‘s death, I noticed that some of the news articles were writing his name as “Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing” ["Kwok-wing" is his Cantonese name]. To me, this was interesting because it kept the “right” order for the both systems.

Some may argue that this is pointless and ask why even bother. That might be true (there are much more grave and important issues in the world) and it might have been fine to do what was done before. But these days, a lot of people, in the world, are questioning the idea of the proverb, “When in Rome, do as Romans do” since increasingly many different cultures seem to get integrated even for “Romans”. I think being familiar with different cultures and respecting them might be a good idea for everyone.

Anyway, I am somewhat intrigued to see that some Korean reporters find it okay to assume that people will recognize a Korean name and know where the family name is.

[2004-02-09] Those interested might want to take a look at the Hangul romanization page that I created.

[2005-02-24] BTW, I normally do not put my replies in the comments below. When a valid email address is given (it is never posted on the site), I do try my best to reply to the comments and/or the questions, though.

Also, I do review the comments posted before allowing them to go on the site. So, don’t even try to channel some of your misguided ethnic anger either.

[2005-09-01] I just created a crude page to convert romanized korean pronunciation into Korean characters. Try it.

[2007-06-12] The site had some issues and all the comments are lost and the comments are disabled for now. If you have a question, please send it to “hangul at sori dot org” (without the quotation marks).

[2007-10-25] I’ve created a page to collect Korean spellings of non-Korean names. Take a look.

This newspaper article (in Korean) talks about a Korean language instruction booklet that has been circulating on the Internet. This Korean language book was made about two years ago by a Vietnamese company who exports labor outside Vietnam. Almost all the Vietnamese workers in Korea are supposedly carrying this instruction book.

Some other phrases found in the book:

“We must get a written promise from him.”
“We can’t forgive such behaviors.”
“How can a man like you hit a woman like me?”
“I will go work for another company if you hit me again.”

I don’t know what to say. I mean, I’ve heard that there are human rights violations going on in Korea (and I must say similar things happen in the U.S., Japan and wherever there are workers who are under compromised positions, usually in a illegal status), but the fact that some actually have instructions on how to say such things in Korean, goes to show that how frustrating and serious the situation is.

Is it inevitable that one human will take advantage of another whenever possible? What makes us regard another human being and think they are not the same as I (or we)?

I wonder how big the human rights organizations are in Korea (or whether one exists). We, Koreans have been, for so long, regarded themselves as victims that maybe, it’s hard to imagine that we have gained such a powerful position these days after so much hard-work over the past several decades. I guess we need to grow up.

On the book, A Beautiful Mind… I shouldn’t have been really surprised, but again, I find the difference between the Hollywood version and the biographical accounts, having a significant different feeling. A lot of the detailed episodes in the movie to depict the various situations aren’t even mentioned in the book (e.g., the insight at the bar, the nightly delivery, etc.). Maybe those stories were from a private exchange between the movie makers and the Nashes, but still, I found it interesting. Also, the movie does not mention that Alicia and John Forbes are divorced (I think they still are) and didn’t see each other for more than a decade, although she eventually took care of him. Nor does the movie mention that John Forbes had a son outside the marriage (before the marriage to Alicia).

I am not saying what Alicia and John Forbes has gone through is anything less just because of those missing facts from the movie. Actually, I can admire them as human beings because of them. I think it’s almost always more interesting to have your own interpretation of the events than to be fed with someone else’s interpretation.

I don’t have much accents in my English even though I spent the most of my first 24 years in Korea. This often puts people around me and myself in a bit awkward (?) place.

For example, at a wedding reception of one of my friends recently in Seattle, I was talking to one of the guests I just met at the reception. We were talking for a while and since she was doing a sociology research on Asian immigrants, I mentioned that it has been 7 years since I came to the U.S. Her response was, “Really? So did you attend an international school there?” No, I didn’t, I said. An expression of surprise continued for a while.

Anyway, the thing is, because of my English and my shallow, but broad knowledge of some segments of the popular American culture, even some of my American friends seem to often forget that I didn’t grow up here. So once in a while, I am often faced with a perplexed expression. On the same weekend, Sanjeev (who grew up here) and I were talking about something and he mentioned a children’s story that every American kid should know about. I had no idea, and he looked at me funny. I had to explain that I didn’t grow up here and there are certain things I have no idea about.

And recently I realized that not only this happens to people around me, but also to myself. Because I am not a typical Korean and I am fairly comfortable with English, I often seem to think that I would act as any American would. The thing is, I may not be a typical Korean, but I am not a typical American either. When it comes to my feelings and instincts, I am following what I am used to, a lot of which happens to be quite “Korean”. Also I don’t have any reason or intention to deny that fact. It’s just that I am often surprised at myself for being such a “Korean” (whatever that may be).

Maybe I am having an identity crisis at the ripe age of 31. :p

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before, but one of the things that I really enjoy learning is foreign languages (it’s one of those things-that-are-different-from-my-own categories). And one of the surprising things that I’ve come across from early on is that a lot of the languages (or cultures) have similar sounds for “mother” or “father” in informal forms.

For example, “mom”/”mama” is “umma” in Korean and Hindi. And “dad”/”papa” is “abba” in Korean. Of course, I didn’t do an extensive study on the subject, but it seems the phoneme “m” is associated with “mother” in most languages and the phoneme “bb”, “p” or “d” with “father”. Does this mean all humans somehow share a prehistoric “knowledge” contained in the genes? Or does it mean that we all had a common language?

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I don’t think we have to go that extreme to come up with a simple one. I call it “the theory of eager parents”.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed (I am sure you did), but the first articulate “sound” or “consonant” that a baby makes is usually “m” sound. It’s because that’s probably the most simple phoneme to reproduce: you try to blow air out while the lips closed. And when you part the lips, the sound becomes “ma”.

So a baby innocently makes a noise, and who’s most likely to be there to hear it? Its mother, of course! And you already know how proud parents can get about their child (I think it’s quite true that most parents think their children to be the smartest). And what does this “eager” mother think? She, along with all other family members who were present, think the baby was calling out to her.

Besides the “m” phoneme, the next easiest sound you can make are “p” or “bb” (stronger “b”) and “d” (the “d” phoneme is a bit more difficult, I think, because you need some control of your tongue). And when the baby finally (or accidentally) makes that noise, who else is most likely to be there? Of course, its father. And the “eager” parents will gladly accept, without any doubt, that the baby was calling out for its papa. Even if the father wasn’t present at that moment, a very happy mother will inform the father, as soon as possible, that the baby called out for him (if it isn’t “ma”, who else?).

And another thing I would like to mention is that after that, there is a reverse feedback to the baby to associate “ma” with its mother and “pa”/”da” with its father. And this completes the description of the origination of words for mother and father.

So do all of human languages come from a “root” one? I don’t know. However, I can quite confidently say that regardless of the ethnicities and the cultures, all parents are “eagerly” expecting their babies be smart (so that they will have a better chance of surviving the world).