사랑해요 김현중 I love Kim Hyun Joong

I live a double life. If you didn’t know me very well, you wouldn’t think I’d be into KPOP. In fact, a classmate of mine once approached me and said, “My perception of you totally changed after finding out you like kpop. You actually have a life!” - - Huh? What’s that supposed to mean? I have a life outside academics! In fact, it’s the other way around: my addiction for Korean dramas and music have got me so caught up that it’s eating the life out of me, for real! Instead of hanging out with my friends, for example, I’d rather just stay home, stalk and watch Korean dramas! Not just any Korean dramas and news though, just those related with Kim Hyun Joong oppa. Aigoo (Oh my), what to do? You see, ever since last semester, my “love” for this 24-year-old Korean sensation has escalated to idolizing heights I did not expect. I wouldn’t consider myself a true fangirl, as I have never spent for him. However, regularly watching his dramas, reading news about him in the internet, listening to his songs and knowing that he came to the Philippines last August to hold an outreach and afterwards go on vacation was enough for me to shed tears of joy. I fancy him so much it makes me go ‘cuckoo’!

As I search through fan sites, one problem persists: I can’t understand or read Korean! It frustrates me, for example, to go through his drama previews, commercials and music videos (e.g. MBS’ Mischievous Kiss) and not understand a thing! I simply derive what they’re trying to say through their emotions. How I despise language barriers! Why can’t we just have automatic language processors similar to the ones we have for detecting unpalatable foods and pain, huhu.

Unless I give up more time spent for my medical dreams (not like I haven’t been doing that) and invest them in learning Kim Hyun Joong’s language, I highly doubt I’ll be able to speak fluent Korean. The least I can do is search for items about him with English subtitles and use this opportunity to uncover similarities between Korean and English speech. Understanding a language, after all, involves accurately perceiving speech (Goldstein, 2007). And, similar to the atoms of our cells, we start with morphemes and phonemes. While morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language, phonemes are the smallest units of sound in language¹.

When we were young infants, we had the power to tell the difference between sounds that create all of the speech sounds used in the world’s languages. By the age of 1, however, we unfortunately lose this distinguishing ability (Kuhl, 2000, as cited in Goldstein, 2007). As the experience-dependent plasticity phenomenon suggests, a child loses his ability to tell the difference between sounds if the he doesn’t have experience discriminating them. I wish someone spoke to me in Korean early on. Good news though! Despite the discrepancies in English and Korean phonemes, the following about it were discovered: English /i/ and Korean /i/ completely overlapped, merged Korean mid-front vowels /e e/ overlapped with English /I/ and English /u/ and Korean /u/ overlapped in both vowel height and frontness for children, but only in vowel height for the adults (Baker and Trofimovich, 2005, as cited in Lee & Iverson, 2009). Moreover, seven vowels typically transcribed with the same IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) for both Korean and English were compared by Yang (1996). For vowels /i e e a u o V/, Yang (1996) discovered that (1) English male speakers produced lower F1 values (a linguistic property) for /i u/, but higher for /o/, than Korean speakers while English female speakers produced higher F1 values for /i a u/ than Korean female speakers, but lower for /e/ (2) Both English male and female speakers produced a higher F2 (another linguistic property) for all vowels than Korean speakers except for /a/ in male speakers and for /i e/ in female speakers and (3) The vowel /u/ showed the greatest cross-language difference. These findings are quite challenging to visualize as I don’t exactly know when Koreans actually say the aforementioned vowels. The absence of speech segmentation as I listen to Korean makes it hard for me to realize when they’ve said the vowel.

One thing that helps us tell when one word ends and another begins is knowledge of the meanings of words. In a study by Wang, Ko and Choi (2009), it was discovered that morphological awareness predicted word reading and reading comprehension within both Korean Hangul and English over and above phonemic awareness. This means that knowing the meanings of words based on its morphology is more important than knowing based on phonology (for obvious reasons that there are only a handful of sounds that overlap, as proven by the previous paragraph). In fact, morphological awareness for either Korean or English language may help contribute to word reading for the other language. What’s the result of having this kind of awareness? Well, you can efficiently read both Korean and English.

Omo omo omo (Oh my gosh) to be able to finally relate my Korean addition to academics makes me so happy I can cry! 감사합니다 (Kamsamnida, thank you) Sir! 아자아자 화이팅 (Aja aja Hwaiting/FIGHTING)! :D

References:

¹ OLPC Morphemes and Phonemes. (n.d.). Retrieved from the OLPC: http://www.chinese-lessons.com/conversion/morphemesPhonemes.htm

Goldstein, E. B. (2007). Sensation and Perception (7th Eds.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth

Lee, S. & Iverson, G. (2009). Vowel development in English and Korean: Similarities and differences in linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Speech Communication, 51, 684–694. doi:10.1016/j.specom.2009.03.005

Wang, M., Ko, I., & Choi, J. (2009). The importance of morphological awareness in Korean–English biliteracy acquisition. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 34, 132–142. doi:10.1016/j.cedpsych.2008.12.002

Yang, B., 1996. A comparative study of American English and Korean vowels produced by male and female speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 24, 245–261.