Romanizing is very hard! We can just make our best shots at the phonetics.

What a blissful time. I go around frightening people who might be Korean asking them if they are watching any k-dramas.

@jorobertson “blissful time”,perfect description. I think I know what you mean, I frightened my tutor and her co-teachers when I pulled out a Hyun Bin Kleenex holder on my first day of class. 😮

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 you just cracked me up – a Kleenex holder, just for HB – the best way to frighten people. 😨😨😨 I sourced a Korean restaurant and let drop to the owner that I knew Hyun Bin had been in the Marines, Some people think I’m odd.

@jorobertson Yuh. I was in a Korean costume jewelry/accessories store and dropped “eepodah!” when the lady showed me a scarf. She just ignored it. ☺️
Then again, I was in a meeting in Seoul when the Compant President joined us and I gleefully greeted him , “YABOSEYO, MR KIM!” The whole room dissolved in laughter because it turns out you only say yaboseyo on the phone to acknowledge that you’re answering, it is in no way a version of “hello” ☺️

It was great that they all laughed. So brave of you. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

LOL I’m monolingual from generations back. I joke that I’m still learning English, but when I worked in the UK, I discovered that I truly had been speaking in a borrowed language. The English wield their language like a sharp sword. It can be cutting, and it does not depend on your class. The working class use it equally efficiently, if not more so. My biggest regret is that I have not acquired a swathe of other languages. I learnt French at school and worked in Geneva on and off for a couple of years doing some research. I discovered that the French there sounds very different (to my ear unrecognizable) to what I heard in Paris, although they hotly claim it’s the same. (dialect perchance). I am not fluent in French but I can stumble through docs written in French. The dogs of Geneva knew more French than me, and I amused my landlady by speaking formally to them. I wish I had Portuguese and Spanish, and now Korean. Korean is my project. I’ve only been watching dramas since 2019, and I am recognizing some isolated words, and I can read Hangul phonetically, but because my vocab is less than a newborn child’s, I don’t yet know what the words mean. (BTW Tree With Deep Roots was so wonderful and said such profound things about the power of language. I consider it amazing that it was the women and the poor uneducated who kept it alive until after the war.) At the risk of being a koreaboo, who also still loves their own culture but resents the Americanization of it, I am fascinated with Korean culture.

I love writing and find dbs an outlet. I detest editing, but I consider it a mark of shame to have a typo in my own writing, although I’ve let it slide on dbs, sometimes. Usually I delete and redo. Having said that I edit my writing obsessively because it helps me find what I’m wanting to say. I’m in awe that you edited scientific papers for Albanian scientists. I edited a dissertation on the history of medicine in Angola for a Portuguese student once. It was hard going. Is it a myth that some people are just good at languages? They are usually good at music and mathematics too. It seems like that to me, while some of us have to take the hard road. Anyway that’s where you’ll find me, toiling uphill on my motor scooter, swotting vocab and sentence structure between deliveries.

@jorobertson, one of the things I enjoy learning with new languages is how they “turn a phrase”, and localized slang/idioms. It’s also part of why I do remember bits I do because the word play when roughly translated is amazingly hilarious. (“Hurry, but wait,” is a favorite, and one I can’t recall about where that either doesn’t have a word for no or it’s rude to say no, I forget which. So you get conversations like, “Are you on fire?” “Not just yet.”) I do know a few folks that truly are polyglots, but of them, many also have the opportunity to frequently use the languages they know so they don’t lose bits over time. The others, they might not speak a language in years and have no trouble falling back into it. I am not a true polyglot, but I was amazed at how much French I did remember after not using it for over a decade when I had a short visit in France when I was visiting Europe one time.

Related, one thing I do have is the “ear” for picking up dialects and accents when with a given community for a time which has caused all manner of interesting situations. I grew up in a resort town and one year in particular, I wound up work with Irish folks on work visas and we hung out a lot outside work as well while they were here, which in this case was hilarious because they were all from different counties, so my “Irish accent” I’d slip into it from hanging around them was a mess. I didn’t even realize this was a thing because they’d never pointed it out until I happened to meet another Irish fellow while I was taking a ferry, and as soon as I heard his accent, my brain kicked into Irish mode and after we had chatted a bit, he paused and said, “I cannot place your accent, what county are ya from?”, and that’s when I had to break the news to him that I was actually an American but had picked up random bits from other Irish folk I’d been working with. His face was priceless after hearing that, especially because I had to force myself to say so without that mangled mess of Irish counties coloring my words, so it was quite clear that I was indeed an American. Similar, in my freshman year at college, when I hung out with a particular group which were all from the Finger Lake area in NY State, and I had no idea I’d picked up the vowel shift that differs from where I grew up in southern NJ until I went back home for Thanksgiving and my family asked why I was talking so weird.😆 Currently, I live in MA where I had lived prior for work and school for short bits. Whenever I talk to a native with the heavy accent for a bit, I do slip into it!

There was a time I did start learning the Hangul alphabet, and if I go back to the one site where it has a test of what each character is, I’d probably still do pretty well I think. I did download the file so I could type Hangul on the laptop I had then so I could try to actually learn to type words to help me learn, but other things happened and I stopped spending so much time trying to get better at it.

@jorobertson, Oh! And about the scientists–one of them was my landlord at the time, the other was his friend. So right place, right time because I typically did not do that sort of specialized work. It was challenging because I had to research a lot to make sure I knew what some words really meant and of course spelling, but it was a great experience!

@lilyleftthevalley My second-generation father swore that a Czech phrase he employed to say “oh, you’re full of it” translated as “you talk like a sausage “. It cracks me up just typing that.

@bbstl Love it! Thanks for sharing that. 😊 Now I’m trying to remember the Korean idiom that I often see subbed as “You’re blowing air/full of wind”, but I seem to recall someone once saying in a live chat that the rougher translation is “You’re full of **it”. It’s in a few sageuks, but my brain just won’t give it up right now for me to badly Romanize. (Tried to look it up and closest I could find was ba-rahm-eul nuh-da but my brain is rebelling and won’t confirm or deny. Maybe this is a modern variation? Now that would be interesting if so. Translates to “put wind”, as in to help something happen (like helping a boat sail), but can be used in a more negative fashion that something is ridiculous/overblown.)