SDLC 105 Learning Journal #6

[Jessica Crouser]

Since most languages are at least somewhat interconnected, it can be very beneficial to know a language's history. Languages in the same family often share many roots and cognates, which can give you a big advantage when learning another language within that family. Languages will oftentimes adopt words and sounds from other cultures that it has historically interacted with, whether it be through geographical proximity, colonization, etc. This can give you, as a language learner, an insight into why certain words are borrowed or why the roots of words are similar across languages. Korean has its own Koreanic language family. However, like most languages, it does draw from others. For example, Korean has two forms of counting, the Korean one and the Chinese one. The Chinese one is much simpler to learn, in terms of pronunciation, but Koreans use both number sets just for different purposes. Also, I've learned that a lot of words were adopted in Korean after already being translated into Japanese. This adds an extra element of difficulty in understanding these words because they've been slightly altered along the way. Some words, for example juice, apartment, Spain, France, dragons, and more are pronounced in English, but with a Korean accent. This means that "juice" is spelled in Hangul, and ends up being pronounced "joo-sah."