{"id":3011,"date":"2015-06-04T19:32:40","date_gmt":"2015-06-05T02:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3011"},"modified":"2015-06-05T09:13:20","modified_gmt":"2015-06-05T16:13:20","slug":"diary-bae-suah-and-cheon-myeong-kwan-come-to-town","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=3011","title":{"rendered":"Diary: Luminaries of Korean literature come to town"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0091\"<\/a>I had the chance last week to interview Bae Suah<\/a> and Cheon Myeong-kwan<\/a>, two well-known Korean writers, when they came to Los Angeles under the auspices of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea<\/a>\u00a0to make an appearance at UCLA. Not one to miss a podcasting opportunity, I packed up my\u00a0recorder and rode over to where they were staying, a\u00a0medium-size “design hotel” on Melrose I’d never once had reason to notice before. Incidentally, its name, Palihotel, gives me something to talk about with my Korean-English speaking partner: why isn’t it “The Palihotel”? And more interestingly, why do I keep wanting to call it “The Palihotel”?<\/p>\n

Adult English-learners, no matter how advanced, endure an eternal struggle with articles. I’ve spent hours at a time\u00a0trying to break down what we mean when we say “I ride a<\/em> bus” versus “I ride the<\/em> bus” \u2014 and why we never, ever say the version that naturally occurs to them first, “I ride bus.” It doesn’t help that, unless we’ve thought about it before, we rarely understand the distinction between articles with any clarity ourselves. As one young\u00a0lady in the Literature Translation Institute’s crew\u00a0said, “One always just feels right.”<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0084\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Though born and mostly raised in Gwangju, this staffer spent\u00a0ages seven through ten in Austin, Texas \u2014 a period formative enough to somehow leaver\u00a0her with a more convincing American accent than I hear from\u00a0many American-born Koreans. She interpreted during\u00a0the podcast recording, translating my questions into Korean and the writers’\u00a0answers into English. That\u00a0skill, like sight-reading sheet music, never ceases to amaze\u00a0me, and I found myself all the more impressed by it when I understood enough of the original language to follow the answers as the interviewees gave them.<\/p>\n

My own Korean hasn’t yet reached a level where I can interview anyone directly, or even have prolonged conversations of much depth \u2014 when I miss a word, it tends to be the most important one in the sentence, and when I can’t think of a word, I tend not to know any substitutes for it either\u00a0\u2014 but this experience did help fill out my sense\u00a0of what podcasting\u00a0my fast-upcoming life in Korea\u00a0might make possible. The prospect of some kind of multilingual project\u00a0gives me another reason to study even harder (as if the threat of\u00a0falling too far in with\u00a0the\u00a0English-only, culturally apathetic\u00a0section of Korea’s\u00a0foreign population wasn’t\u00a0motivation enough).\u00a0But if I want to accomplish that, I’ve got my own articles to master \u2014 or, rather, particles.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0081\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Students of Japanese might wince at the painful memories this dredges up of struggling to grasp\u00a0the differences between \u306f and \u304c, but the finer points of Korean’s \uc740\/\ub294 and (especially) \uc774\/\uac00 make even less intuitive sense to the English-speaker. You can sometimes get by, more or less, leaving them off entirely, but the aforementioned speaking partner warned me that\u00a0when Koreans want to act out a “dumb foreigner” stereotype, the first thing they do is drop the particles. (Though we, of course, do the same with English articles: “I ride bus.”)\u00a0Another Korean friend let me in on\u00a0something else stressful:\u00a0when his countrymen\u00a0see a\u00a0Korean interacting with a foreigner in Korean, they pay close attention indeed \u2014 more with an eye toward evaluating their fellow Korean than the foreigner, but still.<\/p>\n

I experienced\u00a0that yesterday when, biking down\u00a0Wilshire, I happened to spot Cheon Myeong-kwan having an after-lunch smoke outside (of all places) one of the westerner-oriented Korean barbecue joints outside Koreatown.\u00a0As we chatted about his brief experience of Los Angeles during the trip (too brief, as all\u00a0trips to Los Angeles are \u2014 the flea market fan Bae Suah won’t even have had a chance to experience the Melrose Trading Post, let alone the Rose Bowl) and my own plans in his homeland\u00a0come November, a Korean family passed by. They heard us talking, then stopped in their tracks and simply stared for a while \u2014 taking notice of my particle problems, surely, but Dr. Johnson, dogs, hind legs, etc.<\/em>\u00a0I wonder what they would’ve thought if we’d been podcasting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had the chance last week to interview Bae Suah and Cheon Myeong-kwan, two well-known Korean writers, when they came to Los Angeles under the auspices of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea\u00a0to make an appearance at UCLA. Not one to miss a podcasting opportunity, I packed up my\u00a0recorder and rode over to where they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","category-korea","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3011"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3036,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3011\/revisions\/3036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}