{"id":5269,"date":"2021-01-18T17:51:19","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T01:51:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5269"},"modified":"2021-02-15T05:40:52","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T13:40:52","slug":"korea-blog-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-learning-korean-expressed-by-memes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5269","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: The Agony and Ecstasy of Learning Korean, Expressed by Memes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large is-resized\"><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/KB-Korean-learning-memes-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5270\" width=\"512\" height=\"333\"\/><\/center><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>Worldwide interest in the Korean language has grown to enormous proportions \u2014 enormous, at any rate, compared to twenty years ago, when it might as well have had no proportions at all. Even I felt little desire to learn Korean back then, despite my having given precious megabytes on my Diamond Rio over to several&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/J8-kyjf9uSg\">Korean<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/v3wjTlawmfE\">pop<\/a>&nbsp;songs I\u2019d downloaded through Napster. Now, culturally phenomenized in with the West as&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.lareviewofbooks.org\/the-korea-blog\/k-pop-classic-rock\/\">\u201cK-pop,\u201d<\/a>&nbsp;this music and its performers constitute a hugely popular motivator to study the language \u2014 second only, perhaps, to the more verbally intensive if not necessarily more complex form of the Korean television drama. That both K-pop and K-drama have accrued international fan bases of such striking avidity owes something to the concurrent development of social media. And it is there, on what&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/blog.lareviewofbooks.org\/the-korea-blog\/know-korean-netizens-high-spec-new-paradigm-synergy-koreas-dilbert-era-loanwords\/\">Konglish<\/a>&nbsp;calls \u201cSNS,\u201d that Korean-learners express their collective frustration.<\/p><p>It always starts so easily. Unlike Chinese, written modern Korean uses not logographic characters but a phonetic alphabet, a fact I\u2019d picked up even when I was listening uncomprehendingly to Baby V.O.X. back in high school. (Until not so long ago it mixed Chinese characters with the phonetic alphabet in the manner of Japanese, and now I\u2019ve come around to wishing it still did, but that\u2019s a subject for another day.) King Sejong the Great, the fifteenth-century ruler celebrated for having commissioned the creation of&nbsp;<em>hangul<\/em>, literally \u201cKorean writing,\u201d is recorded has having described it as learnable by a smart man in a day and a stupid man in a week. That claim seems to be true as far as it goes, made though it was without consideration of the far thornier difficulties for those who have yet to understand the language itself \u2014 a subject since addressed by memes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.lareviewofbooks.org\/the-korea-blog\/agony-ecstasy-learning-korean-expressed-memes\/\">at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Worldwide interest in the Korean language has grown to enormous proportions \u2014 enormous, at any rate, compared to twenty years ago, when it might as well have had no proportions at all. Even I felt little desire to learn Korean back then, despite my having given precious megabytes on my Diamond Rio over to several&nbsp;Koreanpop&nbsp;songs [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5269","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=5269"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5353,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5269\/revisions\/5353"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}