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Published: January 29th 2010
Since I had personal connections with some people in Seoul, the trip was for sure off the beaten tourist track. And thus this blog entry could be more personal, and serves less to the purpose of a travel blog.
Never at once in my life have I ever had the confidence in writing. I often wonder, If I had always lived in environments that allowed me to speak the same language my whole life would my cognitive development be different? In another word, I was taught Cantonese and Vietnamese as my mother tongues, switched to Mandarin when I was old enough to attend kindergarden, then moved to Canada at the age of fifteen. Now I'm in Japan. Every time the change of environment uproots me from one culture to another, and that includes language uprooting. I would have to relearn a new language from scratch. What impacts does that shift of life have on my intellectual development will remain mysterious.
If languages are merely just tools to facilitate communication, that would have been easier. And I used to think that if I can be hexalingual by the age of thirty that would be so cool. But the fact is
language learning is so closely intertwined with one's intellectual maturity. As we learn a new vocabulary, a new concept forms, and thus our understandings of things are built on the ability of language. I start to feel like by the time that I had built up enough foundation for me to really start creating my own thinking, I was switched to grow another language roots. There were gaps of time when my cognitive thinking started to wither until the acquisition of a new language.
Because of this, I seem to have funny connections with languages.
The pride of multilingual ability is demolished by my inferiority complex with languages at the same time. I lack the intimacy with any languages. That leaves my thoughts floating unable to anchor to the right places sometimes. Korea used to adopt the Chinese (hanja) writing system. During mid-fifteenth century Sejong the Great (세종대왕) created new Korean letters out of the Chinese characters, called the Hangul. Korean people are proud of their own alphabets, and the fact that it is thought to be "the most perfect phonetic system devised." People have different views on Hangul, most of them cherish the simplicity of Hangul. However
Andy Warhol Exhibition
Seoul Museum of Art
앤디 워홀 특별전JianYi has a different opinion. She said since the phonemic Hangul replaced the meaning-rich logographic Hanja system, the language is gradually losing its roots of meaning and thus its ability to recreate new words. I think this is such an intelligent observation.
I guest most things happened have pros and cons. King Sejong explained the need for the new script he said the korean language was different from Chinese, Hanja was too difficult for the common people that only privileged aristocrats (usually male) could read and write fluently, and that the majority of Koreans were effectively illiterate before the invention of Hangul. Now I start to understand what he meant. Japan also adopted the Chinese writing for the language. Have lived in Japan for more than five months now, the use of Kanji (Chinese characters) here is quite interesting for me. In Chinese, one Chinese character is always pronounced as one syllable, and most of them have no variations. However, one Kanji in Japanese usually has multi-syllables, and two or three variations in pronunciation. Though the use of kanji in Japanese is positive, it is still very complicated that it's not uncommon for educated people to
frequently encounter Kanji
산촌 -- 인사동
Monk food that they can not pronounce. My co-worker Noble said, "After 10 years of learning the Japanese language, I still won't be able to read newspapers, the complexity of Kanji will take too much time away from me that I could have use that time to learn other knowledge." As far as I observed from my senior high school students, some of them rather write in the simply Hiragana form instead of Kanji.
I've taken away a lot from this travel. The deeper understanding of the languages matter is one of them. I believe that travel is meant for one to enhance one's understanding of oneself, time and money well spent.
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Lao Jie :P
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I am In!
I think I have a lot to say. But I wanna mention only one thing this time(otherwise I wouldn't be able to leave for library later :P ). What Korean troubles me the most is the use of jondaenmal (존댓말) and banmal (반말) coz it relates to the classification of people. Though I am educated in a somehow Wesern way, I respect their culture and dun give a damn if elderly use banmal to me. However, after getting into KC' family life more, I realized the use of banmal has another bearing to my very existance in this still-conservative Korean society--- yes, I am a woman, namely, someone to be looked down on in family matters, and this can be seemed from the way people in the family use banml to me. I must say, I hate it. I have never realized being discriminated as a woman is such an unbearable thing in my life. Not to mention I hate classifying people. In my opinion everybody should be treated equally regardless of age, gender, educaional background, social status... in Korea's context, it's not only a matter of culture, but also a matter of language. And the use of Korean language deeply hinders the road for cultivating equality in the society. But so what? I don't think Koreans love this notion, they enjoy looking down on people and showing off themselvs. Funny thing is, I don't trust what Korean people say anymore, most of the time. Seems that they are double faced. Those who criticized others are because they are looked down on by others. But whe they gain something with which they can look down on others they do exactly the same things they used to criticize. As to the hanja dispute. My idea is that, in general it doesn't matter that much. And of course learing only those alphabets is handy, for beginner's level. But if someone really have to understand this language more, hanja is a must. It's the same with other languages. Very few lanuages are developed solely on its own. So when it comes to building up new words or whatever it has to refer to/rely on other languages which had influenced itself. Korean is very handicapped in this way nowadays since they stopped using hanja. And the funny thing hey now realized and begin to teach hanja in school again. But if you talk about this with other Korean people (including KC), due to the "face" problem, they would denied the fact that Korean is handicapped. To some extent they are right, because it doesn't require ordinary people to be so intellectual in their language. Last but not least, hope there's no typo :P