Discussion Post #4

[Ethan Han]

I was born and lived in Georgia for my whole life. As a kid, I learned to always respect my elders. I had to say yes ma’am and yes sir to all my elders. I would say thank you to everyone everywhere. I would say thank you to the Publix cashier and always thank my mom after making dinner. But I was also raised as a Korean too. Similarly, I was taught to bow and say hello whenever I met older Korean people and say thank you to speak formally to all adults. I never really thought about it because there were formalities in the way you spoke and acted to elders on both sides of my life, American and Korean. But it wasn’t until I started to learn Korean that there was a reason why I spoke a different way when addressing my Korean elders. While other languages have things such as gender that dictate a large part of the language, Korean emphasizes formal and informal speaking the most. Words are written and spoken completely differently when speaking formally compared to when you speak informally. Anytime you speak to an elder or stranger you must speak formally or else you are seen as rude. People will even apologize profusely if they accidentally say something informally to an elder, and sometimes elders will even get mad if you don’t speak formally. For example, you wouldn’t call your siblings brother or sister, you would call them Korean older siblings or younger siblings. However, everywhere in the world people tend to speak formally towards elders, so it’s nothing crazy hearing that Koreans also have a deep sense of respect towards their elders shown through their culture and language. However, something different about Korean compared to English is that In English there are different words you use when speaking formally. For example, a formal way to address someone in English is to say hello. An informal way would be to say something like what’s up or yo what’s going on. There are completely different words used in English. In Korean, the same root word is used. It’s just conjugated differently. For example, the formal way to say hello would be 안녕하세요, and the informal way to say hello would be 안녕. Even if you don't speak Korean you can see the same characters are used. It just looks like the formal one has more characters added to it. So for almost every word in Korean, without changing the word, there is a formal way to say it and an informal way.