The article mainly talks about the detailed explanation and classifications of phones. Last time I was confused about the difference between phones and phenetics but after reading this, I have a deeper understanding of phones and make it pretty clear, so Phone is mainly about production and perception of speech sounds in any language, while Phonetic is about the sound pattern that occurred in one language. In the article, the author mentioned Nasals, such as [m] or [n] in English, which reminded me of my Cantonese studying process in Hong Kong. In Cantonese, there are lots of words ending in Nasals while Mandarin words are not, and the nasals in Cantonese are very unique and really hard to pronounce exactly correct. For example, the word “Hong Kong” in Cantonese pronounces [hoeng gong], so two words all end in Nasals and I could not pronounce these sounds at the beginning. Lots of people think Cantonese is very similar to Mandarin, but the truth is the pronunciations differ a lot. However, my Cantonese professor said that young people in HK loved to ignored those Nasal stops and made the Cantonese pronunciations nowadays became closer to Mandarin, which is much more simplified. Also, the article mentioned vowels, which is a tough problem I met recently in Turkish studying. There are 9 forms of each word because of the 9 combinations of vowels in Turkish, and it is very easy to be confused since I have never seen these many changes in a word in any languages because of vowels. I might need lots of practices of it to find the pattern.
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The Korean alphabet -- Hangul, consists of 14 simple consonants and 6 simple vowels. The letters are combined together into syllable blocks. For example, Hangul is written: 한 (han) = ᄒ (h) + ᅡ (a) + ᄂ (n) and 글 (geul) = ᄀ (g) + ᅳ (eu) + ᄅ (l). When compared with American English, several English consonant sounds do not exist in Korean. The most significant of these are the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds in words such as “then”, “thirteen” and “clothes.” Additionally, there’s the /v/ sound, which is produced as a /b/ in Korean, and the /f/ sound, which leads to “phone” being pronounced “pone.”
Interestingly, you could also find trace of Chinese and English in modern Korean phrases. Because the Korean language borrowed some elements from both languages and adapted. I think it’s important to first learn the structure of Korean syllable blocks, as the sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. It would be helpful to repeatedly listen to a native speaker reading a sentence, in order to gain a better idea of how to follow the sound structure.
My friend and I recorded a conversation about each other’s favorite Korean dramas and movies. Since I was talking to someone with proficient hangul skills, I was able to advance immediately to the subject at hand.
I started the conversation by asking her about her favorite Korean drama. She answered hesitantly because she had an extensive list of shows that she watched. I told her that she used to love this Korean drama called “Sky Castle”, and she agreed. She said that she likes the drama because it sheds light on the rigid education system in Korea.
“Sky Castle” is a satirical soap opera about a community of wealthy doctors, professors, and lawyers that ruthlessly secure the success of their families by making their children attend the top universities in Korea. While the drama exaggerates the culture of education in Korea, it sheds some light about the difficulties of entering some of the top universities. In order to even enroll in the top universities, students must achieve excellent grades at school and high scores for Suneung, which is a national graduation test that asks all the contents students learned in high school. This is no easy feat.
Students prepare for Suneung during their early years of high school, attending additional study sessions on top of their regular school hours. From an early age, they are conditioned to believe that exams are both objective and reliable for assessing a person’s capabilities. This belief stems from Korea’s commitment to education during its developmental period. One of the main reasons that Korea was able to rise and compete globally is because highly educated individuals were at the forefront of economic development and innovation. However, overemphasis on education and examinations has their drawbacks. First, students’ social lives and mental health are affected due to extreme pressures from society to pass the Suneung. Second, students are conditioned to believe that examinations are the center of their lives. According to an article I read online, most young Koreans are disillusioned when they realize that the real world is not a multiple-choice exam and that most of the problems in the world are morally, financially, and technologically ambiguous.
This conversation compelled me to research further about Suneung and create possible solutions for the future. First, Korea has to reduce their emphasis on standardized testing as this will relieve pressure from the youth. This will allow them to allocate their time into extracurricular activities that build their leadership skills and other technical capabilities that involve activities such as sports. Second, the country should allow students to change their majors in college. This will relieve the burden of committing to an area of study that students are no longer motivated to succeed.
In order to get more exposure to the Korean language and culture, I chose to read one Korean proverb every two days and try to understand the context behind it. I’ve picked out a few of the proverbs which helped me learn a lot about Korean culture. A proverb that I found fascinating is ‘개천에서 용 난다’ (a dragon rises from a small stream). Mythological stories always have dragons rising from the depths of the sea; therefore, it is unexpected and astonishing to have one rising from a shallow stream. Hence, this proverb is used when referring to a great person who arose from humble beginnings. In Korea, one of the things that can play a role in whether you’re a great person of not is your appearance as noted in the proverb ‘옷이 날개다’ (clothes are wings).This proverb is used to emphasize the importance of dressing well. Its English equivalent is ‘clothes make the man’. Another proverb which I thought was interesting because it references a staple dish in Korea is ‘남의 떡이 더 커 보인다’ (other’s rice cakes always look bigger). It means that anything that you do not have always looks better than what you do, even when it really is not. Its English equivalent would be ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’. Since rice cakes are a staple food item in Korea, they showed up in a quite a few of a proverbs that I read. One other example for a proverb as such is ‘누워서 떡 먹기’ (eating rice cakes while lying down). Rice cakes are easy to make, and can be held in the hand and eaten by themselves, so eating them while lying down is considered to be easy. Hence, this proverb is used to refer to something that is very easy to do. Its English equivalent would be ‘piece of cake’. While it makes sense that rice cakes keep popping up in proverbs because they’re considered staple food in Korean, there are other proverbs that involve other Korean food items. ‘콩 심은데 콩나고, 팥 심은데 팥난다’ (beans come out from where beans are planted, and red beans come out from where red beans are planted) is a proverb that uses beans as a metaphor to say that you are what you surround yourself with and what you put your time towards. Its closest English equivalent is ‘you reap what you sow’. Another proverb that references Korean food is ‘김치국부터 마시지 말라’ (don’t drink the kimchi soup first). Apparently, kimchi soup is had at the end of a meal to aid digestion, so you should wait till the end of your meal to have it. The proverb uses this fact to imply that you shouldn’t get ahead of yourself. Its English equivalent is ‘don’t count your chickens before they hatch’. The use of food items in so many proverbs gives me a sense of the importance of food in Korean culture. I’ve seen a couple of videos which involved making Korean food that hinted at how making food is a joyous process. Even in a conversation with Professor Kim a few days ago, she told us about how eating food is an intimate activity. I would like to dive deeper into Korean food next time.
--Edit--
Current sources for proverbs (picked up from random google results):
https://seoulistic.com/korean-culture/wise-korean-proverbs-to-live-by/
There are two videos about Turkish culture that shaped my understanding of Turkish culture, one of which is about a female Turkish writer and another about a Turkish transgender.
In the first female writer’s TED talk, she talked about her life experience. Growing up in a single-family, she is always the outside in her neighborhood, since, at that time, divorce is not common in Turkish and she lived in a small city when she was a child. She was lonely and had no friends. In order to help her, her mother encouraged her to write down her daily life. However, the lease thing she wanted to do it to face her boring everyday life again, and she began to write fictions. She created many characters from different nations and background. After she grew up, she went to Boston and began to write in English. She felt that writing in English provided a brand-new feeling. According to her, writing in English is more rational and discipline, whereas writing in Turkish is more emotional and imaginative. However, there were some critics assaulted her since her characters did not represent the Turkish culture, and they thought that since she grew up in Turkish, it is her responsibility to embody the Turkish culture into her books. Facing such an absurd requirement, she was determined. She said fictions are fictions. Even though she would write a Turkish woman one day, she would not write a pathetic woman who suffers from an unhappy family and social judgment as other people expects. I was deeply touched and motivated by her TED talk, she showed an amazing woman who is brave enough to challenge the cultural stereotype other people imposed upon her and insisted whatever she believed is right.
Another impressed video is a documentary about a Turkish male to female transgender. Growing up, she loves makeup and floral dresses and regarded herself different from other boys. She lived in a remote small village, and residences there are relatively conservative. In the beginning, no one talked to her because she is different from their traditional perception. She spent a lonely time for several years. One day, she could stand other’s discrimination any more, and burst into a bar and shouted at everybody. Since then, people’ attitude began to change and they realized that she had feelings and emotions as well just like everyone else. Also, he was always willing to help others. She helped the chef to cook for busy hours. She helped women to do house cleaning. She even helped men to renovate the houses. Residences there began to accept her as one of them because of her kindness. They invited her to have dinner and danced with her. They even offered her job opportunities to help her make a living. However, she was still pessimistic about love. She said no one would love a person like her except for trying to steal her money. After watching this video, I was really impressed by her bravery and kindness. Although she received unfair treatment at the beginning, she is still kind to people and willing to help.
I read a scholarly article named “Aesthetics of Korean foods: The symbol of Korean culture”. Food is definitely a symbol for many cultures, and Korean is one of those. An old Korean proverb says “What looks good tastes good.” It means, ancient Koreans carefully considered both the taste and visual appeal when preparing food. This is similar to a lot of other Asian cultures. In China, there is a similar say that means a good meal combines color, taste, and smell. Today I want to simply discuss a few famous Korean dishes mentioned in this article.
First, Bibimbap. This is probably one of the most widely known Korean food in the world. Bibimbap is a very colorful dish with various colorful vegetables and eggs, which
are mixed with the addition of gochujang (red chili paste), making its texture very different from what it was in the beginning. Its taste is very unique because the mixture of the ingredients gives this dish a taste that is of a different dimension altogether, and yet, also the tastes all of its individual ingredients. This dish truly reflects the character of the Korean people---mixing and harmonization. Some people summarize this Korean character of combining many elements and mixing them into one in an expression “Korean culture is of a bundle culture.” Koreans like to carry any contents in a bundle. Also, the paste gochujang that combines all these ingredients together is an
extraordinary food item. It is impossible to imagine bibimbap without gochujang. The beauty of gochujang is that it not only unites different vegetables into one taste, it also actually combines a variety of tastes with one another. In just this dish, we can see how it represents the collectivism and harmonium of Korean culture.
Next, I want to cover the one food that can represent Korean food----Kimchi. To make kimchi, cabbages need to be mixed well with all kinds of vegetables, Korean red pepper, and jeotgal (fish seasonings). When it produces beneficial elements such as Lactobacilli through the process of fermentation, it can then be called kimchi. Kimchi is food that embodies the concepts of mixing, a leading principle of Korean food. Vegetables are mixed with various seasonings and fermented anchovy or shrimp to make kimchi in a totally different form of food. That is why kimchi is called the best vegetable dish ever invented. Remarkably, only Korean red pepper, among hundreds of kinds of red peppers, can be used to make kimchi. Korean kimchi does not require a lot of salt because it uses red pepper powder to control harmful and beneficial growth. Kimchi could not be stored for a long time in ancient times, even though it can be stored for a couple of days. However, it can be now stored for a long time in kimchi fridges.
In both of these dish/food I cover and many other Korean dishes, we can see that the concept of mixing emerges. It coincides with the major themes of Korean culture: collectivism, community, harmony. So, the food in culture can often reveal what the culture is like.
The pronunciation rules are really interesting to me since each language has a different rule, but they share some similarities at the same time. Different from many other counties which use the international phonetic alphabet, Chinese use totally different rules, Pinyin. Basically, you need to remember the pronunciation of every Chinese character. In English, each word is composed of letters, and each letter has its pronunciation. When those English letters are combined together to form words, you could pronounce the words based on some pronunciation rules even though you do not know the meaning of the words. However, it is totally different in Chinese. In Chinese, if you do not know a character, there is no way that you could guess the pronunciation of the character based on some pronunciation rules. This is the reason why even some Chinese do not know how to pronounce some really unusual and difficult characters.
From this viewpoint, Turkish is more like English. In other words, both Turkish and English are phonetic language, which means that they are spoken hey way they are written, and vise verse. To accomplish that, in 1928 Atatürk introduced a phonetic variant of the Latin alphabet. The letters Q, W, and X were removed and 7 new, rather exotic looking characters were introduced: ç, ğ, ş, ö, ü and ı (undotted i). As a result, the Turkish alphabet consists of 29 letters — eight vowels and twenty-one consonants. Thus, the Turkish pronunciation rule is not overall unfamiliar to me, since the pronunciations of Turkish letters are similar to those of English letters. Actually, the pronunciations of Turkish letters are actually even more easy than those of English, since each English letter may have several different pronunciations, depending on the combination. However, every Turkish letter only has one pronunciation, and they pronounce every letter.
The phonetic inventory of Korean is very different from English. Korean has two parts to a basic word--a prefix and suffix. A Korean word has to have both elements and cannot have just one of the characters. There are many sounds in Korean that are not pronounced in the English language. Similar to the letter "V" to Koreans, there are many characters in the Korean language that does not exist in the English language. ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ, ㅊ (kk) (tt) (pp) (ss/t) (jj) (ch). All of these characters in Korean are sounds that the English language does not have. It is important to understand that pronouncing new sounds will be very hard and will take a lot of time to master. Since your mouth is not used to moving in a certain way, it will take muscle memory to learn to pronounce the characters correctly. In order to acquire the ability to discriminate differentiated segments in Korean listening, I will have to listen to native Koreans speak. This will allow me to become accustom to the sounds and voices in the Korean language. In order to pronounce the characters correctly, I will keep using new mouth movements to practice speaking the different characters I am not used to. My student tutor will be able to help me correct my pronunciation and become more familiar with the characters in Korean that are not in the English language.
Last week, we watched a video about the story of a Turkish man, who has seen himself as a woman since he was little and loved making up and wearing feminine clothes. He lived in a relatively under-developed village and people living in the village are pretty conservative. So for a very long time, every one tried to stay away from him as far as possible and he lived alone, because people considered him as a big weirdo or even a psycho and his parents died when he was around 26. However, he never gave up himself and began to let people accept him by helping all the village people no matter when no matter how as long as he can be helpful. From that time. People began to talk to him and find out he is a really outstanding person, because he is very ebullient and kind person with a soft and sensible heart. Then, many people, including old grandpas, considered him as an important part of the village, or even a member of their family. They invited him to have breakfast every day and they found he is such a perfect person. Afterwards, he got the chance to do a surgery which can turn him into a “real woman” physically, but he refused to do so because he believed it is not necessary anymore and everyone has already accepted him as a woman. He believed those who did not like him before would still not like him even after he did the surgery, which I agreed a lot because some people just would not change their minds in lots of reasons. I was pretty shocked at the beginning when I saw this video, because I’ve been in an environment for a long time that every individual is respected and accepted no matter how different you might be from other people. The public would even stand out and speak for those people who did not earn enough respect because of the difference. I never imagined the situations in some places can be that worse. However, I began to understand the circumstance after further thinking, because in China, LGBT group still cannot be accepted by most of people in China especially people in my parent’s age or older. When browsing some online social medias, you can still see some people would say bad words to this group of people. But with the society making progress, lots of people began to accept and respect the individual difference, because we can see that Chinese people in our age has a really open mind toward LGBT group and we even argue with our parents about whether we should respect the difference. Lots of people, like those village people in the video, were growing up in an environment that they were taught to behave similarly and were not allowed to do things that seemed “abnormal”, so they cannot easily change their perspective or values since they has lived in this environment for half of their lives and they felt “safe” in it. Also, they did not have chances to know a person well since they refused to get any tough with people who look different from the very beginning. However, if they got to know these people, they would find that they did not have any difference at all and they could be really great people. And the glad thing is more and more people in this world began to have respect to this group of people and central cities in Turkey actually really respect the transgender people. The situation in the video only happened in small villages or remote places.
On the first day of class with Professor Kim, she asked everyone their names, and told us how they would be pronounced within the Korean sound system. My name, Sreya, would be 스레야 in Korean which is different from how it is meant to be pronounced. A difference that is easy to spot is that Sreya has 2 syllables and 스레야 has three syllables. The other differences are tough to explain because I don’t know the phonetic alphabet. I also tried really hard to find a way to write how 스레야 is pronounced in English but it’s tough to find the right English transcription for the pronunciation of 스. This itself shows that the Korean sound system has sounds that the English sounds system doesn’t and vice versa. Another example for this would be how the japanese word ラーメン [Rāmen] is pronounced as [ˈrämən] in English (ramen) and as [lamyeon] in Korean (라면).
Another thing that’s different about the Korean sound system is how two sounds can sound very similar but the difference in aspiration is really important otherwise you’d be saying a different word; for example, 게 means crab and 개 means dog. Luckily for me, Hindi and Telugu have sounds which are very similar to Korean sounds; for example, 에 and 애 in Korean are like ఎ and ఏ in Telugu, and 다 and 따 in Korean are like द and ध in Hindi. The sounds that I find difficult to pronounce are the ones which involve ㄹ or ㅡ because these sounds are new to me. I think that listening to Korean dialogue (possibly in Kdramas) more and trying to repeat them would really help with getting me used to hearing and speaking words which involve these sounds.
One of the most mentioned food in Korean TV shows, radios, and dramas is ramen. It is easy and fast to cook good ramen. There are five biggest ramen brands in Korean that everyone knows about, and their brands are Shin ramen, Ansung Tang Myun, Neoguri ramen, Samyang ramen, and Jin ramen. In a Korean TV show named “New Journey to the West,” one of the MCs identified the brands just by looking at the cooked ramen pots and smelling them, not even tasting. It shows how much Koreans love ramen and how popular and developed ramen is in Korea. When I traveled to Korea last winter, there are at least ten different brands of ramen in a small convenience store. Most of the restaurants I went in have different kinds of ramen for us to choose from.
(Picture from google by typing in "Korean ramen brands")
What differentiates Korean ramen from that of other countries is the things they put into the pot. First of all, Korean ramen packages always have a special seasoning pack in them. A majority of Korean ramen has a slightly spicy flavor in their seasoning pack. One of the reasons behind the spicy flavor is the geographical location of Korea. In the fall, Korea has a lot of typhoons or rain storms that cool down the weather. During the wintertime, the temperature goes pretty low in Korea, and it snows. Because of the weather, people tend to stay indoors. The spicy flavor will warm up people’s bodies and feel less cold indoors. Moreover, many Koreans love the refreshing feeling in the food, especially if the food is served hot. This is also the reason why they love to have kimchi, a Korean traditional food that is made of fermented vegetables, as their side dishes for almost every meal. The spicy flavor in ramen brings up a refreshing feeling and makes people more addicted to the food.
One of the famous and popular Korean chiefs is named 백종원 (Paik Jong-won). He is on many TV shows right now, where he teaches his audience how to make good food on their own with simple ingredients and steps. On his YouTube channel called “백종원의 요리비책” (Chief Paik’s Cuisine), in 7 out of 64 videos, the chief talks about how to make ramen taste better in a kitchen. He uses a lot of vegetables or additional spicy sauce to make the broth deeper and thus brings the ramen a better flavor. A lot more videos on this channel talk about how to cook noodles and such. In one of his videos, he put kimchi slices and Gochujang (a Korean red chili sauce) into the ramen to make it taste refreshing. In another video, Paik shows how he mixes two kinds of ramen from two brands and make the dish better with vegetables such as onions. It’s been three months since he started the channel, and now he has 2.84 million followers. Half of his ramen videos reached one million watches, and one of them got 2.4 million watches.
Reference:
Clip of the MC guessing ramyun taste: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI4Fb0qmJ90
Posts about Kimchi flavor(I used google translation): https://kin.naver.com/qna/detail.nhn?d1id=8&dirId=8020112&docId=329044218&qb=6rmA7LmYIOunmw==&enc=utf8§ion=kin&rank=1&search_sort=0&spq=1
“백종원의 요리비책” (Chief Paik’s Cuisine): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyn-K7rZLXjGl7VXGweIlcA
Chief Paik's 2M-view Ramyun video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YISYMu2Txp4
While I would love to write about Nasi Goreng or Kari (hopefully in my next post), I have been studying Malaysian politics lately and feel obliged to address the 1MDB scandal and the groundbreaking 2018 elections in the country. Though not entirely contemporary since this happened over a year ago, my first artifact, seen below, is a good encapsulation of how the Malaysian public mobilized and voiced their discontent with the corruption their country was facing following this scandal. Its importance should not be underscored.
(Photo Credit: Strait Times https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/signs-malaysians-are-shrugging-off-1mdb-saga)
The above sign, which reads "Save Malaysia, Catch the Thief," is referring to the Malaysian financier and current international fugitive Jho Low. He is alleged to have taken, with members of the government's consent or active participation and with the help of Goldman Sachs, upwards of $3.5 billion USD from the Malaysian taxpayers in a front that was housed under the Ministry of Finance. When news of this monumentous scandal and breach of trust broke out and developments in the story that included Prime Minister Najib Razak's alleged involvement and profit were made, the Malaysian public took to the streets in protest and, through the general elections in 2018, overturned the ruling party (UMNO) for the first time in the country's history. The elections not only signified the ability of the Malaysian voter base to overturn a corrupt regime democratically, but also resulted in this turnover in political power to the country's previous 4th Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who, in addition to being 93 years old at the time, left the UMNO and ran under an opposition coalition. The return to the country's longest serving prime minister (1981-2003), while resurrecting a contentious legacy, displayed how formative and impactful he was in the creation of modern Malaysia.
While the above protester is unnamed, the significance is that largely symbolic: the effectiveness of the Malaysian populace voicing discontent and taking to the streets in a democratic way. Malaysia is a true multiethnic society in many senses, and the aforementioned demonstrations penetrated people from all different cultural backgrounds and walks of life in the country. This scandal not only impacted the Malaysian economy and put the taxpayers' money into the pocket of a few corrupt officials, but it also embarrassed many Malaysians on the world stage. Regardless of who exactly was culpable, keeping the ruling regime in office posed too unlikely of a risk to Malaysia's future. Mahathir has signaled his intention to only serve as prime minister for another year or so, after at least some attempts have been made to clean up the political mess that he and his party inherited. Trials both in Malaysia and by the United States Department of Justice are currently underway, with Najib Razak claiming no responsibility and Jho Low hiding in a currently unknown location avoiding trial. Anyone attempting to understand contemporary Malaysian affairs should familiarize themselves with the details of this scandal, and this cultural artifact is an effective way of witnessing the protests and their reach in the aftermath of the scandal's unearthing.
그림의 떡이다
길러 준 개 주인 문다
누워 떡 먹기
하나를 보면 열을 안다
This week’s cultural post was a collection of idioms that are frequently used in Korea. These idioms usually have an equivalent idiom across different cultures and languages as well. I found these to be interesting because I have always heard them when I was growing up in Korea. I also chose this list of idioms since many of these idioms have an American equivalent and should be recognizable for most Americans as well. The first idiom on my list is “그림의 떡이다”. This is pronounced as “geulim ui tteog ida” and the literal translation just means “rice cake in a picture”. However, the actual metaphorical meaning of the idiom refers to something that is desirable, but you cannot have it. The “rice cake” in the picture is referring to what is desired but since it is in a picture, it is not attainable. The American equivalent of this idiom would be something like “a pie in the sky”, since it also refers to something that is desired, but it is not attainable because it is in the sky. The next idiom on my list is “길러준 개 주인 문다”. This idiom is pronounced, “gilleojun gae ju in munda”. The idiom literally means a “dog biting the owner”. The true meaning of the idiom refers to someone who antagonizes the person he or she is indebted to. The American equivalent of this idiom is also something similar which is close to “bite the hand that feeds you”, which also refers to the act of forgetting who you are indebted to. Another idiom on my list is, “누워서 떡 먹기” and is pronounced, “nuwoseo tteog meoggi”. In literal translation, this idiom means, “eating rice cakes while laying down,”. Because one can assume that eating rice cakes laying down is an easy task, you can assume that this idiom refers to a task so easy that it is similar to eating while laying around. The American equivalent of this idiom would be “a piece of cake” and is used very frequently. The last idiom I learned about was, “하나를 보면 열을 안다” and is pronounced, “hana leul bomyeon yeol eul anda”. This literally means you learn ten things from observing one. This one is pretty easy one to decipher since it is fairly literal. This idiom refers to someone who is very perceptive or intelligent since he or she can see one thing and learn ten more things from it. For this idiom, I could not think of an American equivalent idiom since it was literal enough for most people to know what they are talking about. While the majority of the idioms I picked had a popular American equivalent, it was interesting to find one that seemed unique to Koreans. Another cultural aspect I noticed was the frequent usage of a rice cake to represent something that is desired. Since rice is a staple food in East Asian cultures, it made sense that they would use rice cake in the idioms. In the American idioms however, rice cakes were replaced with things like pie or cake. It was interesting to observe cultural differences even in idioms despite having similar meanings.
I have mentioned some of the phonetic inventory of Bahasa Melayu in previous posts, but it is helpful to go over it again. Malay has a host of loan-words from (British) English and Arabic (as well as from other languages like Mandarin and Hindi), meaning some sounds are quite familiar while others are not. Orthography-wise, there are some distinctions, e.g. /ʃ/ (voiceless palato-alveolar fricative) written 'sy' instead of English's 'sh', /tʃ/ (voiceless postalveolar affricate) written as 'c' instead of 'ch', and /ð/ (voiced dental fricative) written 'z' instead of "th" as in "father." Apart from these, the sounds that are distinct from American English or less common in it are listed below:
- voiceless velar fricative of /x/: e.g. the Malay word "akhar" (often found in Arabic loanwords)
- voiced velar fricative of /ɣ/: e.g. the word "loghat"(also often found in Arabic loanwords, and pronounced differently in several different dialects)
- velar nasal of /ŋ/: e.g. the word "ngarai" (found in English in the word "sing", but otherwise somewhat unusual)
- glottal stop of /ʔ/: e.g. "tidak" (seldom found in English, apart from "uh-oh")
- alveolar trill of /r/: e.g. "dari" (found in Scottish English and several Romance languages)
For my study of Malay, it is most important for me to be comfortable with these distinctions and practice the non-English sounds as much as possible. From my study of Mandarin, I know it can be difficult for me to master sounds not found in English and I admittedly still make some mistakes, however if I know from the start that these sounds exist and do my best to address them on my own and with Melissa, I think I can avoid this mistake. Orthography of other phones is simply an adjustment I'll have to make, such as remembering that 'c' in Malay has a 'ch' sound. Ideally, I would like to work with my language partner and make recordings of these difficult sounds for myself to listen to and go over. The more I practice and the more I hear a native speaker using these sounds, the easer it will be for me to master them.
When we talked about korean restaurants in the class, we all shared our favorite Korean food. I actually knew a lot of Korean food’s name, so I introduced some unique hansik(Korean food) to my group members.
First one is my favorite food, 육개장, which means spicy beef soup. It is a spicy-soup like Korean dish made from shredded beef with scallions and other ingredients, including bean sprouts, garlic and sweet potato noodles, which are simmered together for a long time. It is believed to be healthful and is popular due to its hot and spicy nature. It is actually a variety of thick soup, which was formerly served in Korean royal court cuisine. However, in the contemporary society, people usually can find it in every Korean restaurant. It becomes an indispensable dish in every Korean family.
I also introduced a really unique food from Korea which is called 게장(Gejang). It is a variety of salted fermented seafood in Korean cuisine, which is made by marinating fresh raw crabs either in soy sauce or in a sauce based on chili pepper powder. The term consists of the two words; ge, meaning "a crab", and jang which means "condiment" in Korean. I watched one Youtube video about how to make Gejang. The lady washed the crabs first and dried them in order to bring out the natural flavor. And then she placed them in the jars with the crabs’ jelly facing up. Because that was where the roe and intestines were, and people would not want them to spill down. And then, the soy sauce was boiled and cooled repeatedly with medicinal herbs and vegetables to enrich the flavor. Hot soy sauce was able to cook the crab. In light of this, it must be cold before use. After cooling down, the soy sauce was poured over the crabs completely submerging them. The last step was adding onions, pepper and garlic to the jars. In the past, people often would wait for 5 days. But the crabs would be too fermented in this way. Instead, after waiting for two days, the crabs would taste really good and would be perfect side dish for rice.
Then, we talked about where the best place to find delicious food is. It is Korean fish market which is called Noryangjin. Although it is fish market, people can find all different types of street food there, including rice cake and other common street food. You can also find special street food here and you are able to try them by spending little money. For example, live octopus.
We watched one video about Korean people eating live octopus. Korean eat it with 고추장 which means chili sauce. It looked kind of scary to me because the octopus was still moving. But my group member said it tasted really delicious. So I am really looking forward to try it in Korean seafood market.
Link to the K-pop song:
