One of my learning goals for last week was to learn the names of family relationships on my father’s and mother’s side because it was Chinese New Year this weekend. I conducted research about this topic by finding charts and diagrams that display these connection. Then, my learning partner and I went over these relationships together by drawing it out on a whiteboard. I learned that it was very easy to make these connections messy because even if the root word was the same, there were different names for the first part of the word, which indicated if it’s on the father’s or mother’s side. I thought it was interesting that there are so many different names for the same type of relatives in Korean, when compared to English, For example, you can only say aunt or uncle in English, but in Korean, there are ways to denote age by saying younger aunt (jak-eun umma) or older uncle (kkeun appa).
It got especially confusing when you had to account for marriages because there were different names that you call your aunt’s husband and uncle’s wife. Although it was confusing at first, it was very fun to draw these diagrams to learn about these different connections.My goal for learning these names is to better understand the relationships between my family members and also to apply this to my own family with my future husband because I need to know how to properly addess his side of the family!
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