Learning Journal #5 and Cultural Post #2

[Tanjila Islam]

I'm really interested in learning more about how interpersonal relationships work in Korean culture. During our last study session, my learning partner and I talked about how age plays a huge part in determining social relations and hierarchy. More specifically, Korean culture emphasizes an individual's birth year more than their real birth date, which is conventional for Americans. Birth years determine which grade year someone is going to be in -- a lot of the time children start school early or late just to be in the same grade as others who share the same birth year. This ensures that people build social relations with others in their age group, and helps to eliminate confusion and social tension later in life when people go into the workforce. Age also determines how Koreans interact with one another -- when talking to someone older we have to use formal language and pronouns. This isn't the case in English; however Bengali does have similar language rules when it comes to formal/informal language. Although age groups don't play as big a role in Bengali societies, because of the similar rules in most Asian languages, I want to learn more about how informal/formal language plays a different role in the different cultures. 

[Michael Marsh-Soloway]

Formality plays a very big role in Korean. Whereas most Indo-European languages, e.g. French, Russian, and others, have special pronouns (tu et vous, or ты и вы) for informal and formal designations that agree with corresponding differences in verb conjugations, Korean has entirely different lexical items. This would be an interesting discussion to have when we get to our unit on semantics and culture. I'd be interested in hearing what you've learned about the situation in class.