西洋오랑캐

Roughly ever four or five months I go through the folder on my computer lovingly known as “Tunes” and go through the countless tunes contained within searching out rarely listened to uh…tunes. Occassionally I’ll find something worthwhile that I had forgotten about, but more often than not the crap I find is promptly deleted.

Recently I took it upon myself to undertake a “Tunes” purge once again. There among the one-hit wonders of early 90’s alternative rock, and random Pantera tunes, I found the Pimsleur’s Korean program. Apparently I had downloaded this awhile back and promptly forgotten about it, so this past week I’ve gave it a spin to check out how worthwhile it was, and now I bring you this report.

The over all program is not that bad, but my one major gripe with it was how formal the entire thing was. For those of you not in the know, Korean is a language that words (verbs in particular) change based upon who you are speaking to. You aren’t supposed to address a senior citizen the same way you would talk to a classmate, or a kindergarten student. Anyhow I digress…the form presented in this program are some of the most formal I have heard…which leads to some akward situations.

My personal favorite was the exchanged prefaced with “Imagine an American man meeting a Korean woman. He wants to begin a conversation with her.” Ok I’ve imagined it…what follows is the most formal exchange of words I have ever heard uttered in Korean. These people are dropping 선생님 (seonsaengnim) as the pronoun “you.” Now in Korean there are a couple different words meaning “you.” You got your 너 (neo), the lowest (in my limited knowledge), then you got your 당신 (dangshin) which is more formal than the previously mentioned 너, and in my experience is the version of “you” that one would drop anytime they are talking to someone that they don’t know that well, or that custom dictates you show respect to. And then there is 선생님. Literally this word means teacher, but as a pronoun it would be akin to “sir” or “ma’am” in the English language.

So there is this guy trying to mack it to a girl and using the most honorific forms of the language. He rocks something like this:

MAN: 실례합니다, 영어를 알심니까? (I am begging your pardon honorable ma’am, but do you have knowledge of the English language?)
WOMAN: 아니오, 선생님. (No I do not gentle sir).

Now I don’t frequently “spit game” at the ladies, but I’m willing to bet that this style of hitting on people of the opposite sex (or same sex if that’s what floats your boat) would not be extremely effective in scoring the babes. By the time you finished calling her ma’am she’d be off chatting it up with the dude who arrived in a sports car.

So I’m not particularly fond of this course. It is important to know how to speak formally, but this is a conversational program, and the bulk of people that one would be conversing with would not be speaking in this fashion (or require being spoken to in such a fashion). Additionally I felt the course moved far too slowly. Granted it was all materially I already knew, but over the five hours that made up the course they taught extremely few phrases. So overall Pimsleur Korean is not that awesome. Pantera’s “Cemetary Gates” on the other hand….