Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
pri.org
pri.org
So one of the coolest co-workers my father had was a recon pilot during the Viewnam War. Not doing the high altitude picture stuff, but SIGINT and comm monitoring over the radio stuff.
He volunteered and went to Nam for the Navy. He was sent to schools stateside to study Vietnamese first, since he did well on the ASVAB, or whatever the hell it was then. While studying with Vietnamese, in DC I think, they would play cards and learn to talk. His first mis-step was crossing his legs, putting one leg on a knee, and showing his instructor the sole of his foot. Super offensive apparently, and off to a more boring instructor he went.
Then, once he was in country on intel flights, almost all of the people in the bases were South Vietnamese, but he is trained to speak Northern, for less than obvious reasons. So this got him into trouble routinely, and made him an issue with on-base stuff. One woman, a cook, on his first day was in the room and he asked "How are you, sister?" In Nothern, this is fine. In Southern, he called her a slut or a whore (someone can back me up on this). She ran out crying, and they needed a new cook.
He said he caused a lot of problems like that. That was the first time.
Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a pass for making these kinds of mistakes and they're happy that you're even make an effort to learn their language.
This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.
I suppose this is true of all tonal languages but Vietnamese is very unforgiving. Even when people really butcher the pronunciation and grammar of English I can still usually guess what they're trying to say. If you don't really nail the pronunciation and tones of Vietnamese people won't understand you at all. I've seen a lot of foreigners give up in frustration even after years of living here.
If you really want to learn to speak tiếng Việt you have to find a real teacher and drill the basics of tones and pronunciation. If you try to pick it up a phrase at a time chatting with people you'll never get it.
I also found out that after starting studying Chinese it is easier to me to understand Chinese people speaking Portuguese (my native language) because I understand a bit of the Chinese grammar and phrasal structures.
When other kids complained about our old Taiwanese teacher's English accent, I asked them simply: "let's say hypothetically we inverted the situation and found an exact parallel of your Chinese accent to her spoken English when Chinese comes out of your mouth, and you understand the accent is native. How hard will you laugh?"
The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why.
Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five?
God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else.
Me: 200 characters of Mandarian
Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese
Fuck my life.
Bohemia is part of the country where Prague is and with that dialect, you can fare very well all over the country. You'll stick out, and sound downright silly in the depths of Moravia, but you'll be fine. I can't ever remember not being able to understand a Bohemian simply because most TV shows are dubbed by Bohemians.
But if you're a Moravian (like me), you'll be quite unlucky in the rest of the country. Moravians speak quite quickly and in a deep voice. The language in the thick of it is nearly impossible to understand. There's nothing offensive about it, it just sounds like garbage to any person that speaks the proper Czech language.
The thing is, even if I'm not very good at it and I've never even been there, I can tell what part of Vietnam someone is from. It seems the southern dialect is very easily distinguished from the northern one.
It makes a difference to the diaspora people because it gives you an idea of whether you're of similar background. The exodus seems to have had different stages and groups (eg people who left with the Americans vs Hoa who left a few years later).
Arabic is highly diglossic: in any given area, people use a standard written language called Modern Standard Arabic (used in speech only in certain formal situations) and a local spoke language ("vernacular") used in everyday life. They differ greatly in terms of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Note that vernacular isn't mere slang: it's one's native language.
Also, the vernaculars form a sort of dialect continuum: a Iraqi might have little problem understanding a Syrian from a nearby area, and Syrians might have little trouble understanding Palestinians, and so on, but Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic have little mutual intelligibility.
Neither phenomenon is unique to Arabic. Some Americans speak, say, African American Vernacular English but can also use "standard" American English; of course the difference isn't that big in this case. Brazilian Portuguese is another case of diglossia: the written language has multiple verb tenses and conjugations that aren't used in spoken language, for example.
Dialect continuums also happen in other places, e.g. the Getman speaking countries.
But Arabic is an especially extreme and interesting case (subjectively speaking).
So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.
Some interesting things that have happened since the war:
- Korean national identity movements have been strong in both countries. In the North, an effort towards language "purity" has changed some of the vocabulary and eliminated Chinese characters from written communication. In terms of vocabulary, loan-words from other languages were replaced with "pure" Korean words. For example, South Koreans use "computer" (컴퓨터), while North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi) which means something else (though they've started to use 콤퓨터, an almost homophone for the the South Korean word and loaned from English). The article gives another great example with "donut". In the South, a preference to eliminate Chinese writing as a practical matter of preference has happened as well (these days it's pretty uncommon to see outside of maybe newspapers, people just can't be bothered to remember all of the characters), but knowledge of Chinese characters is still highly prized as a matter of scholarship and education. But the South also has more quickly incorporated loan words from various countries and you'll find loads of English and English-like loan words (sometimes filtered through neighboring Japan or China) ending up in the language and written in Hangul all over the place. French is also common, but usually written in Latin characters for commerce reasons.
A recent cooking show on South Korean TV involves teams of two cooks preparing traditional foods, and one of the teams is from the North. There's no trouble communicating with the Northerners, though my wife lets out chuckles on occasion as they let slip stereotypical sounding communist slogans from time to time as they face difficult cooking challenges - "the North has nothing but strength!" as they work a noodle press by hand.
Oh my god... that's hilarious to me somehow, and I don't have any connection to Korea.
Is there a website somewhere that I could learn a few of these? I'd like to incorporate them into my repetoire.
But I'd love to hear things that people actually say.
Which sounds exactly like Japanese 計算機 (Keisanki) meaning calculator, so why bother eliminating the Chinese writing if you are going to leave the Chinese loaned vocabulary in? Now you're just left with a huge swath of the vocabulary where the roots have become indistinct and impermeable since you eliminated the orthographic clues from the writing. Replacing it with English loanwords seems doubly hare-brained since there's no context for association to learn them with!
All this angst among the Eastern Asian nations over language-historical events that happened a thousand years ago. I bet the Chinese feel real dumb now that they obliterated their own orthographic heritage just in time for computers to come in and make mastery of the written character redundant.
You don't see us fretting over whether we should eliminate the Greek roots or Phoenician lettering from English.
Some English dialects/accents are historically associated with lower-class people, or people perceived to be stupider/lazier/etc. Which creates all sorts of impressions on another person from the instant you open your mouth.
Many southern US accents have these kinds of connotations, for example, to such an extent that A) a lot of people won't take you seriously if you have such an accent and B) I'm glad mine got drilled out of me as a side effect of correcting for a lisp when I was a child.
I have also had severe difficulty understanding some of my wife's family, who are from Maine.
And now I work with many people from the UK. I tend to find that if the person is from the south, I have few problems understanding them. The further north someone is from, the more difficulty I have with them. Some of my Scottish coworkers are, for me, almost impossible to understand.
That being said, the North Koreans who defect should not feel so embarrassed about their style of speaking. It is unique and appreciable. Hell with the comedians. Just be a good sport and a laugh along. People laugh at others when they find themselves are weak.
I'd assume that those vocabulary differences have basically disappeared in the decades since, but I've never been there nor studied German. Thoughts?
I think that would mitigate a lot of the differences (e.g. the Saxons from the DDR would sound more "standard" than the Bavarians from the BRD).
So if you speak neither, both are probably unintelligible, but Bavarian also has different grammar to figure out.
And at least to me (non-native speaker), the most difficult dialects are English. I mean, accents from England. I can usually understand very well people who come from the Indian subcontinent, or China, or Africa... but Manchester? Liverpool?
Northern English dialects perhaps sound funny but for me they are not that hard, despite some describing the Newcastle accent as most difficult.
When our family moved to the central belt (Perthshire) no-one in primary school could fully understand half the things I said. I had to learn how to "speak properly" as one fairly unpleasant head teacher put it. My north east accent and pronunciation is but a long lost memory, though I do still have an interest in the "Scots Language" [1][2], or "Mither Tongue" [3] as it's affectionately known.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_(Scotland)
[1]: http://www.lallans.co.uk/
Though it seems like Scots is so overwhelmed by British Standard English to exist more on a creole continuum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum
But somehow I suspect it is going to be a lot harder for that to happen given the nuclear weapons involved and then learning how southern look down on northern folks.
All in all, if one sees it objectively, east germany wasn’t /that/ different from North Korea.
Yet the world keeps supporting China.
According to it, the South considers the North so underdeveloped and backward that it isn't worth the cost of unification (which it estimates in the billions). Which makes sense considering that virtually the entire population of the North would require intensive medical care, subsidized housing, assimilation training, etc. Not to mention the cost of rounding up and trying the leadership for decades of crimes against humanity. It's an awful mess.