#i really think i should open a koreablr

[magistralucis]

5, 6, 27, 46, please

Target Language(s): Russian, Korean (native)

5: Do your friends speak other languages?

Online yes 😂 Offline, it depends where I am. I am not currently near anybody who speaks more than one language, but my MA cohort had about twenty languages between them. Perfectly normal in these circles to know five dead languages and speak five other living ones fluently.

Medievalists are still the best language learners I know, by necessity

6: What’s the most difficult word for you to say in your native & target languages?

Korean: 통팥빵 (tong-pat-bbang, ‘red bean bun’). Quite unusual to see a word with three fairly strong syllables like that. Even for native Koreans it will usually come out like topappang, which is... not correct. 철창살 (cheol-chang-sal, ‘iron bars’) is another. Korean tongue twisters often rely on the fast repetition of heavy sounds like this, or else a lot of sibilance. Might write a post about that sometime.

Russian: взгляд killed me dead when I first encountered it. I’m not very good at sliding between в and other sibilant sounds, I think: всплыть and вспоминать are hard. I have a pretty good grasp on щ, I think, but rapid repetitions like in защищать is still difficult. If it goes over six syllables I stumble. I’ve a long way to go 😭

27: How do people usually react when you mention that you’re studying your target language(s)? Do their reactions annoy you? Make you happy?

There aren’t many Russian learners in the UK, I’ve discovered. It must've been different once upon a time, but it’s basically forgotten now. People seem to think I’m cool for learning it, or else quaint, but there’s not much in the way of detailed feedback. There’s been a huge rise in Russian learners in Korea, though, so their responses would be interesting to see.

(From what I can gather, Koreans find Russian just as difficult as they do English, or any language except for Chinese/Japanese. But the current generation is the first to be able to access Russian resources freely (and without NK associations), hence the popularity.)

46: Are there any cognates between your native and target language(s)?

I don’t know. It would be very difficult to find out.

Cognates show best where there’s been a huge spread of a language family, e.g. Indo-European. It’s easy to find cognate words all across the European continent, but the same doesn’t really apply to Asian languages, except in their far smaller language families. (Oftentimes, a concept/word will sound similar across languages with Han characters, but that’s more of a ‘we pronounce the same Han characters differently’ problem.) Korean is an isolated language, which makes it very difficult to find cognates with any language. There could have been Slavic influences, or from the minority languages of Russia, but I’m not sure how to search for that.

We do have words directly borrowed from Russian, however. In South Korea, Russian loanwords are still mostly used to describe Russian concepts, but in North Korea they’re a part of everyday life. For example, the NK word for ‘pencil’ is 가름다시; it’s pronounced gareum-dasi and borrowed from карандаш (karandash). Other examples are:

‘Pin’ SK 핀 (pin); NK 물라께 (mul-la-kke, from булавка/bulavka)

‘Bucket’ SK 양동이 (yang-dong-i); NK 마드레 (ma-deu-re, from ведро/vedro)

‘Pocket’ SK 주머니 (ju-meo-ni); NK 가르망 (ga-reu-mang, from карман/karman)

And so on. A troubling amount of South Koreans struggle to understand what North Koreans say, so knowing Russian comes in handy there. And as SK-Russian relations continue, similar loanwords will also enter the South Korean language - and with time, who knows? We’ll have to find out. 👀