Outside of my regular language learning, I spent this past week preparing for my second presentation for SDLC 105. The purpose of this short presentation was to teach something new to my classmates about my target language. I decided to focus on something that had been a goal of a mine for some time now. For some reason, I have never been able to remember my days of the week, which is probably partially due to the fact that I never received a formal lesson about it. I thought it would be interesting to create a lesson based on this because of how the words were originally derived from Chinese. I was able to find a few websites that also shared some historical information about the origin of these words.
Similar to English, all days of the week in Korean share the same suffix in each word– this would be -day in English. In Korean, -day translates to -yo-il -요일. To work on memorizing them, I decided to memorize the prefixes in a sequence, kind of like a mini chant to remember the proper order of the days. From Sunday to Saturday, the order of the sequence is il-wol-hwa-su-mok-geum-to, which in hangul looks like 일-월-화-수-목-금-토. So, Sunday is 일요일, Monday is 월요일, Tuesday is 화요일, Wednesday is 수요일, Thursday is 목요일, Friday is 금요일, and Saturday is 토요일. By repeating the sequence multiple times, I have been able to recall the order of the days of the week much easier. I also use Siri to tell me what day it is, so that I can get verbal reinforcement.
I also learned some of the history behind the days of the week. Like a lot of Korean words, it has been derived from Chinese characters, specifically the five Chinese elements of nature, as well as the moon and the sun. I also found out that Japanese days of the week are based on the same characters, so it sounds pretty similar to Korean. Starting with Sunday 일요일, 일 means sun or day; Monday 월요일, 월 means moon; Tuesday 화요일, 화 means fire; Wednesday 수요일, 수, means water; Thursday 목요일, 목 means wood or tree; Friday 금요일, 금 means gold; and Saturday 토요일, 토 means earth. Something to note is that these prefixes are usually not used by themselves in native Korean, they are simply derived from Sino-Korean, or Chinese Korean words.
In addition to learning days of the week, I decided to add the months of the year, which I already knew and are much easier to learn. If you know how to count from one to twelve in the sino counting system, then you are basically halfway there. Similar to the days of the week, all the months share a common suffix, -wol -월, which just translates to -month. Once you know that, all you have to do is add the corresponding number of the month as the prefix. So, January is 일월, February is 이월, March is 삼월, April is 사월, May is 오월, June is 유월, July is 칠월, August is 팔월, September is 구월, October is 시월, November is 십일월, and December is 십이월. I also found an infographic with this information, as well as important Korean holidays for each month, which I discuss in my lesson.
Comments
Hey Annabelle! This is a really interesting post. I remember learning about the days of the week when I was younger, and I had a difficult time remembering. I thought it was really cool that you put the historical meaning behind each day. I can see why Friday is my favorite day.