Tag Archives: pronunciation

Language Training in the Missionary Training Center

Posted by on June 2, 2009 6 comments

Before I write this post, I should give you a disclaimer. Although I was a LDS/Mormon missionary in the past I have since removed my name from the church for reasons I talk about in this post called “물몬교의 숨은 역사”. I am not bitter or angry against the church or the members, I simply have come to believe that it isn’t true. I loved my time as a missionary and am very happy that I went. Heck, I wouldn’t know anything about Korea if I didn’t go on my mission. Now that y’all know where I’m coming from, let me give quick overview of what a mission entails.

Just some quick facts about LDS missions, unmarried men 19 to 25 can serve two years while unmarried women 21 to 25 can serve one and a half years. It’s expected that all young men in the church serve a mission (though it’s technically voluntary) while completely voluntary for women. All missionaries around the world pay $400 US dollars each month to cover all expenses. During those entire two or one and a half years missionaries dedicate their entire life to preaching the gospel. The only contact they have with family is through letters once a week and two phone calls a year. There are also a lot of rules that make it so missionaries don’t play around, but we did get time to do what we wanted (not everything) once a week from morning until 6. The rest of the week missionaries either proselyte out on the streets (oh many do I have stories there) or teach in appointments. Okay, let’s look into the MTC. Here I am entering the MTC (no name tag yet, so it actually looks a little weird lol), bright-eyed and eager to learn!:

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For missionaries, this is the last time you will see your family for two years regardless of how close you serve to them. They have a little presentation and then the parents go out one side of the room and the missionaries go out of the other, so it’s a very emotional time for many.

As many of you know, missionaries always travel in pairs (called companionships). Well, missionaries even stay in pairs in the MTC. You go back to your new dorm and meet your new companion who you’ll be with 24/7 for your entire MTC stay. For English missionaries, they stay two weeks, Spanish six weeks, and for harder languages like Chinese, Japanese or Korean it’s twelve weeks. That’s all the time you have before you’re thrown into the field to find and teach investigators with nothing more than up to an hour of personal language study every day. For companions who don’t click well, the MTC can be a living hell, but my companion was really fun and not totally uptight. Here’s us trying to escape from the MTC (which missionaries can’t leave):

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Everything is organized exactly how it is in the field. Missionaries are always in companionships of two or three people (called threesomes) if there’s an odd number. Those companions are in groups of about four companionships called districts. Districts are part of zones (in the field it’s all geographically based, in the MTC it’s all language based). Teachers teach one district each, so we get a lot of individual attention. Here was my awesome district:

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Our group of Korean missionaries actually was quarantined for a few days, you can read that post over here.

If you’ve ever called a phone number from an LDS commercial or from one of the cards the missionaries give out, you’ve probably talked to a missionary. In the MTC we did service by answering phone calls to the church about sending out pamphlets and free books. It also helps us get out of our shell in case we’re super shy or anything like that. Out of all the missionaries there, I always got the long calls for some reason. I guess it prepared me for my mission since I had many ‘interesting’ conversations out in the field. Anyways, here’s me at one of the desks in the call center:

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Now to get into the beef of the MTC: study time! Our daily schedule was pretty much the same every day. We would have three study sessions every day that lasted three hours, one session which was personal study. Each session would be about half language and half gospel.

The first thing we learned do to in Korean, after spending a one day on Hangeul, was to pray. We prayed when we woke up, when we started and ended a study session, ate food, before we worked out, at night before going to bed, and numerous other times. We were encouraged to say our prayers in Korean anytime possible to practice. As you can imagine, our prayers were fairly repetitive since we didn’t know much Korean. It was always pretty simple, things like ‘thank you for giving us our families’ and such things. We also did things like sing hymns in Korean, read scriptures in Korean (even though we didn’t understand it, it was mostly pronunciation practice), etc. Most, well pretty much all, of our vocabulary was attained through learning it in the context of teaching about our church.

Instead of using a regular Korean textbook, we had a special book put together by the church which taught how to teach about the gospel in Jesus Christ. It was kind of funny, because we couldn’t talk about a lot of simple topics but we could talk about advanced gospel topics. Not only that, we didn’t even practice middle form. In order to be respectful, we only learned the highest form used in normal conversation (-합니다/-합니까). Korean missionaries are never allowed to use low level language (-해) and are expected to use high form when they teach out in the field.

The teachers in the MTC were returned missionaries who had served in Korean speaking missions so they pretty much knew how to prepare us for the field. The teachers are generally students from Brigham Young University (BYU), the university next door which is also owned by the church. Here’s one of the teachers who was a second generation Korean from Hawaii:

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We played some games that helped us have some fun.  We did things like 3-6-9 (funny video of that game here) and some others that I can’t remember the name of.  We also had weekly sessions where we taught fake investigators for 20-30 minutes twice with a scenario and another session where we taught another teacher other than our main teachers.

All in all it was pretty good training for teaching about the gospel and provided a good root for learning Korean.  I cemented my love for studying Korean in the MTC and so was infamous for studying Korean every free minute of the day.  Now that I’m home I’ve found a lot of joy in continuing my studies, hoping to finally get to Korea.  As missionaries we weren’t allowed to watch TV or listen to music, so I’m still filling up on those right now =).

Seven reasons English sucks

Posted by on May 24, 2009 1 comment

Here’s why:

  1. dough
  2. tough
  3. hiccough
  4. bough
  5. ought
  6. cough
  7. through

Source: Futility Closet

English Language Issues

Posted by on February 17, 2009 1 comment

Just some humor from the English language department:

Hyundai Super Bowl 2009 Spot … finally (almost) pronounced right!

Posted by on February 2, 2009 4 comments

“It’s Hyundai, like Sunday.”

I guess Hyundai is strutting it’s award for the 2009 North American car of the year.  I have always found it amusing that pretty much no one knows how to say Hyundai (현대) and so they pronounce it the way it looks and the way it would sound like if you translated it from English into Japanese (something Koreans would find appalling).

Yeah, that’s why I wrote a previous post about how much I truly hate romanization of Korean into English.  Chinese and Japanese both have great translations into English pronunciation but some Korean sounds (like the -ai on the end of Hyundai) just don’t translate very well.

Common English Mistakes Made By Koreans #1

Posted by on December 19, 2008 12 comments

Is the video broken?  Please comment so I can find a new copy.  Thanks!

In this video I explain about some common mistakes made by Koreans speaking English. It’s all in Korean so I hope I didn’t make too many mistakes =). Here’s a summary of what I talk about:

1. 약속 (promise / appointment / meeting friends)
2. r/l pronunciation
3. yes/no response
4. 시 (sit / shit) pronunciation
5. church(y) pronunciation
6. konglish (open car / convertible, eye shopping / window shopping)

If I find some more things to talk about, I’ll make another video on the same subject. Don’t worry, I’m going to talk about an embarrassing mistake I made in Korean too…

English Transcript

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about common mistakes that Koreans make when they speak English. First, I  want  to talk about the word yak-sok. In Korean, yak-sok can be used in many situations. For example, if you are meeting someone you can say “I’m going to an appointment” You can use it like that and you can also use the promise yak-sok. But in English, both have different meanings. First, the yak-sok you go to is appointment in English. So, if you want to say ‘I have an appointment that I have to go to’ in English, you have to say: Oh, I have an appointment I have to go to. Occasionally Koreans say ‘I have a promise.’ But, that promise is a mistake. If you want to say promise, and say something like: ‘I promise to try really hard to speak Korean.’ You need to say: ‘I promise to try to speak Korean.’ That yak-sok is promise.

Also secondly, when Koreans speak English the hardest pronunciation is r and l. It’s because Korean has the re-ul pronunciation. But re-ul is kind of between r and l. l is the re-ul from chin-ri (the truth chin-ri). The r pronunciation doesn’t exist. So just learn it from someone who speaks English. But the most important thing is that if you switch r and l it’s really strange. For example, ‘I like to eat rice’. In English it’s, ‘I like to eat rice.’ But when Koreans first speak English, They say ‘I like to eat lice.’ That means something like I like to eat bedbugs. So learn the r and l pronunciation well! Also I attend college right? One of my Korean friends told me something last semester. She said: ‘everyone stood up and started crapping.’ When I heard it, I thought what? what did you say? what? Because in English, it means everyone stood up and started pooping. It means something like that. But she should have said: ‘everyone started clapping.’  that means everyone stood up and started clapping. So the r and l pronunciation is very important. Don’t make a mistake like that!

And third, when people ask questions, the answer is very important. For example, in Korea if you say yes when someone asks: “Are you not going to speak Korean?’ It means ‘yes, I won’t speak Korean.’ But that’s wrong in English. When people say: Are you not going to speak Korean anymore? Koreans usually say yes. But when you answer in English it means: ‘Yes, I will speak Korean’. But if you say no it means ‘no, I’m not going to …’ If you say yes in English, It means: Yes, I’m going to do that. But if you say no it means: ‘No, I’m not going to …’ So use yes and no well!

Fourth, the s-i pronunciation is really hard for Koreans. It’s because Koreans have the ‘she’ pronunciation. But they don’t have a si pronunciation. But like r and l, the si sound is very important. If you say it wrong, you’ll swear. In English we have s-i-t, sit. In English, it means sit. So don’t use the s-h pronunciation. If you use s-h, it’s s-h-i-t, shit. poop. So: ‘I’m going to go sit on the chair’ means I’m going to go sit on the chair. But: ‘I’m going to go shit on the chair’ means I’m going to go poop on the chair. So please say the s-i pronunciation well!

Also, when Koreans speak English Sometimes they add an e sound at the end of words. Church is church in English. But, I’ve heard a lot of Koreans say churchy. Please don’t add the e sound to the end of words. Just add ‘uh’. So if you have to use konglish, don’t say ‘Chyeu-chi’. Say ‘Chyeu-chuh.’  That’s really important.

Lastly, Koreans sometimes use konglish when speaking English. Remember what the konglish is in English. For example, when my friend came here she said … <sorry, just junk> Some guy gave my friend a ride. But when my friend saw his car, she said: ‘Nice open car!’ But in English, open car is convertible. So if you say open car to someone who speaks English, it’s strange There’s also eye shopping. People who speak English don’t say eye shopping, they say window shopping. But since I learned konglish sometimes I say eye shopping even though I speak English.

Those are mistakes that Koreans make when they speak English. But those aren’t all. There’s a lot of other things but this video is a little long isn’t it? So if I think of something new I’ll make another video. If you have a question, go to my blog or comment below Well, have a good day! Bye.