[KS] Korean edge: Japanese learning Korean and Koreanbecoming Japanese?

[Dennis Lee]

I  agree with Professor King. Desire to learn/maintain the language matters 
much more than language similarity.

I think Mr. Lee is implying that Korean and Japanese should be close enough 
that language maintenance should be relatively easy.  However even with the 
simliarities between Korean and Japanese, there are enough differences 
(especially in pronunciation) to make it difficult for a native Japanese 
speaker (including ethnic Koreans in Japan) to learn it. From talking to 
students at Yonsei Korean Language Institute, the Japanese and jaeil kyopos 
had a very difficult time in Levels 1-3. But after learning grammar and 
switching to learning hanja vocabulary in Levels 4-6, the native Japanese 
speakers had an advantage over everybody else once they discovered the magic 
rules to switch Sino-Japanese to Sino-Korean and vice-versa.

Certain aspects of Korean such as the counting system and the subtle 
differences between -hako issta versus shite imasu causes confusion for 
native-Japanese speakers. This is only eclipsed by their pronouncing 
problems with finals and o^/u^. Understandably the Chinese had a worse time 
with the grammar. However I was surprised that the native Chinese speakers 
(choso^njok included) did not learn to convert the Korean pronunciation of 
hanja into hanyu as fast as the Japanese did with kanji. I would've guessed 
that having the -ng  and closer-sounding intitials would have made things 
easier (e.g. "wang" for king instead of Japanese "ou").

In any case, the learners at KLI represented a small fraction of the ethnic 
Koreans back home; the general consensus being that most of the 2nd/3rd+ 
generation Koreans were happily assimilated and not actively interested in 
pursuing Korean except for business or a fascination with Korean pop 
culture.

Dennis Lee



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "jrpking" <jrpking at interchange.ubc.ca>
To: <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>; <jblee6952 at hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 23, 2004 11:56 AM
Subject: [KS] Korean edge: Japanese learning Korean and Koreanbecoming 
Japanese?


> Dear List:
>
> Lee JooBai, in his inimitably impenetrable style, posed a number of 
> interesting questions in this posting.
>
> He found the two articles (thanks for the links) "striking" and somehow 
> mutually contradictory, but the meteoric rise in popularity of Korean as a 
> second/foreign language recently in Japan is well known (and DOES contrast 
> with its status in North America, where it seems doomed to languish for 
> the foreseeable future), and surely it comes as no surprise that fewer and 
> fewer ethnic Koreans in Japan actually speak (or study) Korean anymore. 
> Ethnic Koreans pretty much everywhere outside of Korea seem to abandon 
> their heritage tongue at a rate significantly faster than other ethnic 
> groups (and there are plenty of Koreans even in Korea working very hard to 
> divorce themselves and their children from any appreciation of or 
> long-term commitment to knowledge of Korean in favor of a "globalization" 
> interpreted as English-mania...).
>
> But the real "condundrum" for me (apart from divining from Mr. Lee's prose 
> what the conundrum is for _him_) is why, as Lee JooBai seems to imply, 
> "grammatical similarity" or "drilling in Chinese characters" should have 
> anything to do with language maintenance at all. All the research in this 
> field shows that language maintenance has most to do with language 
> attitudes and language ideologies (as well as language policies and 
> societal ideologies), if it has to do with anything.
>
> As for the postings by Bart Mathias, all those linguistic facts are true, 
> but again, language maintenance is not a problem that can be reduced to 
> linguistic formulae and correspondences. In fact, it is a subject about 
> which linguists (in the current, academic commonsense meaning of this 
> word, which is desperately narrow, indeed) have little to say at all. And 
> this is why Mr. Lee's attempts to relate, in turn, the loss of Korean 
> language by ethnic Koreans in China to facts about Sino-Korean 
> pronunciation, seem fundamentally misguided.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
>
> --
> Ross King
> Associate Professor of Korean, University of British Columbia
> and
> Dean, Korean Language Village, Concordia Language Villages
>
>
>