The Spectrum of Sound: English vs. Korean Consonants

When I started studying the Korean alphabet, I found many charts that neatly lined up each Korean letter with its English equivalent.  ㄷ= D, ㅌ = T, and so on.  It seemed pretty straightforward.  However, there were certain letters that seemed confusing at first.  For instance, ㄱ = G/K, and ㄹ = R/L.  These Korean letters were described as being “in between” their two English equivalents.  ㄹ is neither an R nor an L sound, but somewhere in between: a sound that simply doesn’t exist in English.  I found this to be one of the hardest things about Korean—learning to hear and pronounce totally new sounds from scratch.  However, I soon realized that this state of being “in between” didn’t apply only to a couple of letters in the Korean alphabet; in fact, it applied to most Korean letters.  Looking at the Korean alphabet as a series of equivalents to the English alphabet really doesn’t work.  I had to change my whole frame of reference in order to pronounce Korean correctly.  That’s when I really started thinking about language sounds as being part of a sliding spectrum. 

Really, all sounds are part of a sliding spectrum.  This is a very familiar idea to musicians, but one which, for some reason, is almost never mentioned in language classes.  For instance, there might be only 88 keys on a piano, but really there are an infinite number of possible pitches within that range.  In Western music, we have chosen to break up the spectrum into half steps and whole steps to form scales, but there is also space between the notes.  A violin can slide between B and B-flat for instance, covering all the pitches in between.  Those unused pitches still exist, even though Western music is not designed to include them. 

The same idea applies to pronunciation and the sounds that make up languages. 

In Korean, for instance, the letter ㅂis often equated with the English letter B.  This isn’t really accurate though.  There is a whole spectrum of sounds that human beings can make with their lips, and ㅂand B actually fall in slightly different places on that spectrum.

Here is my chart showing where letters in the English and Korean alphabets really are in relation to each other.  Each spectrum is divided according to which part of the mouth you use to make these sounds.* 

*I could use linguistic terms for these, like bilabial and aspirated, but I’d rather put this in laymen’s terms.

With all of these spectrums, the middle sound is actually the gentlest.  The farther to the right or left a letter is, the more tension you put into the lips, throat, or tongue in order to produce it.  For example, ㅉ is a harder, over-emphasized version of J, while ㅊ is like an over-emphasized CH.  The ㅈ in the middle is a very gentle blend of the J and CH sounds. 

Really, the difference between all these sounds is rather slight, so at first, you might have trouble distinguishing between the sounds of ㅉ, J, and ㅈ, for example; but with time and practice you can learn to hear the difference. 

Then, of course, there is also the aforementioned R & L spectrum:

A lot of English-speakers find it hard to believe that there’s much similarity between the R and L sounds—I know I did, at first.  But for the Korean ㄹ, just try to imagine it as a very short, gently rolled R.  It’s not quite like the rolled R’s that you find in Spanish or Italian, but the tongue motion is very similar.  You just roll it once, instead of sustaining the roll like you would in Spanish. 

And lastly, there are all these consonants, which really do have English equivalents:

M = ㅁ

N = ㄴ

NG = ㅇ

S = ㅅ

H = ㅎ

I could talk about Korean vowels, but I think that might be a post for another time.  ^_^  Anyways, I hope that if you're studying Korean, or teaching English in Korea, you'll find this article helpful!  

Great leaders

A good friend of mine once pointed out that the entire point of voting in a democracy is to elect someone who can be selfish on your behalf.  Although that might sound like a cynical way of putting it, you can't deny that the whole point of "representative government" is that the government should carry out the wishes of the people and provide for their needs. Basically, you are electing someone to be selfish for you.  If you look at that on a grander scale, then it's easy to see that the government of each nation really exists to look after the people of that nation, and only that nation.  George Washington once said, "It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest."  I agree, and I believe there can be no such thing as a noble government or an altruistic government.  There are, however, good governments and bad governments.  I would simplistically define these as follows.  

A Good Government: One which is selfish on behalf of the nation and the people of that nation.
A Bad Government: One which is selfish on behalf of the people running the government. 

Now, maybe Jesus wouldn't be proud of either one of these, but you've got to admit, living in a country with a somewhat Good Government (say, the United States) is way better than living in a country with an indisputably Bad Government (looking at you, North Korea).  And of course, it would be a lie to insist that any government, the USA definitely included, is completely a Good Government.  There will always be people in every government who abuse their power for their own personal ambitions and desires.  There are certainly plenty of those in the United States government, and I know our country is in a mess right now; but, all things considered, I still think the U.S. is more in the Good Government camp than the Bad Government camp.  I hope it stays that way. 

But I digress.  What I really wanted to talk about here is South Korea.  Not the South Korea of today, but the South Korea of the 1950's, '60's, and '70's--the South Korea of Rhee Syngman and Park Jeong-hee.  

Rhee and Park are really interesting people.  I don't think anyone would say that they were kind or moral people.  One look at their human rights records would dispel any uncertainty about that.  But they did accomplish great things.  They were dictators, but not the kind who use the country purely as their own personal playground.  No, they wanted to make something out of it--and make something they did.   

Rhee obstinately blocked American objectives to build up the Korean economy solely as a support for a greater economy in Japan.  "Korea again to be the hand-maiden of Japan's growth?  Better to be 'another Japan' than a dependency" (Cumings, p. 307).  He set the stage and acquired the props for Korea's industrial take-off.  

"Rhee and his successors [...] wanted a full-blown, self-reliant industrial base with steel, chemicals, machine tools, and the electric energy to run them." (Cumings, p. 305)

Park took power with a coup d'etat in 1961.  "철은 국력(Steel = national power)," he said, and he made it so.  Both Rhee and Park invested hugely in infrastructure and technology.  They sucked in American cold war money for all it was worth (an official total of $12 billion from the America Treasury between 1945-65) and built factories and shipyards.  They insulated Korean companies from foreign competition and allowed them to grow and flourish until they became major world exporters.  

With their consecutive efforts, Rhee and Park industrialized Korea faster than almost any other nation in the history of the world.  South Korea went from a war-torn third world country to being a first world country in barely three decades.  They now have some of the world's fastest internet, best public transportation, astonishingly cheap, yet high-quality health-care, and the world's 12th largest GDP.  Imagine if Rhee and Park had squandered all those resources instead of using them to build up the nation.  Many dictators do simply squander all the gifts they're given--it's no small thing that Rhee and Park chose not to.   (Look at Africa, with its abundant natural resources and pervasive poverty, crime, and violence.  What are their dictators doing with all those resources?)  Rhee and Park make the point that sometimes, dictatorships get more done than the democracies, and that's not always a bad thing.  

But were Rhee and Park good dictators?  Were they running Good Governments?  They jailed and killed thousands of people.  They massacred peaceful protesters.  They brutally oppressed opposing viewpoints.  Their governments were cesspools of corruption, nepotism, and bribery.  So, in many ways, no.  They definitely were not Good Governments.  But if we're going to be totally honest, we have to admit that, in other ways, they were Good Governments.  Whatever their motivations really were, they did use their power to enrich the nation and give South Korea a stronger place in the world.  They got the Korean people out of desperate poverty, and they did it in a fiercely independent way.  I am not pardoning or justifying all the terrible things that Rhee and Park did during their regimes, but at the same time, if Korea had to go through a period of dictatorship, at least they got dictators who accomplished something.  At least, once they finally became a democracy, Korea was left with the fruits of several decades of incredible advancement and ingenuity.  In that regard, South Korea is so much luckier than many, many other countries in the world. 


Sources of inspiration for this post:


Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History, by Bruce Cumings 
(Most of the historical information in this post came from this book.)

The 2012 presidential race in Korea and the election of Park Jeong-hee's daughter, Park Geun-hye.  

Talking with Koreans and hearing the extremely mixed opinions that people still have about Park Jeong-hee.  

My friend, Paul. 

Racial integration in Korea

What do you all think of this?

http://asiancorrespondent.com/69672/seoul-has-nations-first-high-school-for-mixed-race-students/

For more background info, I also strongly recommend reading this:
http://asiancorrespondent.com/66424/skorea-too-many-bi-racial-kids-not-getting-an-education/

When I first heard about The Global School and the Seoul Dasom School, I thought, "How ridiculous.  That's racial segregation.  Those Koreans really don't know anything about eliminating racism."  However, after I read the article, I began to see a lot of very viable reasons behind this.  First of all, the goal is not simply to segregate students of different races, or even to just protect them from bullying.  The main goal is to keep at-risk students from dropping out of school.  Of course, it's no coincidence that so many multiracial children are at risk.  In the second article, they cite the reasons of poverty as well as cultural and language barriers, and bullying.   But when dealing with students who are at risk, it takes a lot of skill and effort, and you need to maximize your resources.  This brings me to my second point. 

Multicultural families in such high numbers are a relatively new thing in Korea, which means that those 'high numbers' really aren't very high.  If you need bilingual teachers to help these students get through school, you'd have to hire some for every school in which there are even a couple or a handful of these children.  In America, the secondary language of the country is Spanish.  In so many communities (like where my dad teaches), 30 or 50 or 90% of the kids might be coming from Spanish speaking homes.  So OF COURSE, it makes perfect sense to hire a significant number of bilingual Spanish-English teachers to help those kids.  But in Korea, I'm betting that the percentage of multiracial kids in each school is still fairly low, and they're not all coming from the same linguistic or cultural backgrounds either.  There are kids who are half-Japanese, half-Vietnamese, half-Cambodian, half-Filippino, just to name some of the more common ones.  There is no dominant secondary language in Korea (well, except English).  The point is, it's simply not practical to hire so many bilingual teachers and spread them across so many schools to help such a small number of students.  I'm sure that the Department of Education can't afford that.  Especially when you start thinking about middle and high school, in which there's a different teacher for each subject.  Can they really hire biligual teachers for every subject?  Bilingual teachers for the Japanese, and the Filippino, and the Vietnamese, and the Cambodian students, who probably number in the single digits at each school?  It's impossible. 

If they're going to address this problem right now, and address it well, I think it makes more sense to do what they're doing.  They are trying for some integration (80% multicultural and 20% pure Korean), and it seems that they are trying to make it a great school where the students can get the extra help and attention they need.  I mean, come on, 15 students per class?  That's awesome.  Who wouldn't want to go to that school? 

Even if this isn't a perfect form of integration, and even if you could accuse them of failing to teach Korean children racial tolerance by mostly segregating the multiracial kids, they are helping the multiracial students to succeed and move forward in life--to move up in Korean society, rather than continually falling to the bottom, generation after generation.  Just look at the 2nd and 3rd generation immigrant children in France.  How many times have we heard of them rioting, burning cars, turning into criminals because they keep failing in school, and can't find jobs, and don't see any opportunities for themselves, anywhere?  Success and upward mobility is in itself is a kind of integration, and if it keeps the multiracial children from falling to the bottom of the heap, over and over again (as poor children often do in America), then I am all for it.