Amanda Takes Off...

Saturday I met YJ for a language exchange. It's been a long, long time since we met. It was nice to see her.

We practiced a little bit of quoted speech and read a cute children's book by a Japanese author called, roughly, Me and Mom. A little bear is asking his mom why she loves him, then he does some naughty things and she scolds him, so he asks if she expected a good boy. She talks about being pregnant with him, and hibernating with him, and him being a good boy. The book is cute, but a little...twisted.

We also read the reading section of the last lesson of my 2A book. It's about James, who is riding the bus next to a cute girl. He wants to talk to her but she spends the whole 50 minute ride on the phone. With YJ I just practiced pronunciation and comprehension.

Yesterday I told Good Man I wanted to speak more Korean and dragged out my book and read the story again.

He laughed at me. He couldn't quit laughing at me. Apparently I sound like a North Korean. (Side note: no wonder I keep confusing "octopus" and "squid!" They're the same word but opposite on either side of the border!

Reading the Wikipedia entry I linked to above, I think I sound like a North Korean because of ㅓ.

The vowel ㅓ is not as rounded in the Seoul dialect as it is in the Pyongyang dialect. If expressed in IPA, it would be [ɔ̜] for the one in Seoul dialect and [ɔ] for the one in Pyongyang dialect. Due to this roundedness, speakers of the Seoul dialect would find that ㅓ as pronounced by speakers of the Pyongyang dialect sounds close to the vowel ㅗ.[Emphasis mine.]

Good Man says I sound like a North Korean because my voice isn't flat enough. Especially when I'm reading things that end in -sumnida and variations (-seossumnida and the like). But I recognize that ending very quickly and so I tend to rush through it and my voice goes up and down.

Besides laughing at my accent (which actually didn't bother me because people can still understand me) he was laughing at my answers to the questions about the story. One of the questions was "What happened in the story?"

I wrote, in Korean of course, "James likes a girl. But the girl is 된장녀. So she talks on the phone continuously. James is always lonely. ㅠㅠ [crying tears face]." Dweinjangnyoe means "soybean paste girl." It is a very recent slang word that describes the type of girl who wants to live a Sex and the City life, drinks lots of coffee, only cares about fashion and money and will only date paper-perfect men, preferably with lots of money.

I had a friend who failed the driving test 10 times and thus wanted a husband who made enough money that she could always have a driver. 된장녀.

Another question was, "If you were on the bus and someone like this sat next to you, what would you do?"

iPod을 들을 거예요. 여자가 전화[로] 얘기 많이 하면 바보예요. 그리고 나는 바보[걑은] 사람 안 좋아해요. (Good Man's correction in brackets.)
I would listen to my iPod. If a girl talks [on] the phone a lot, she is an idiot. And I don't like people who [seem like they] are idiots.

He couldn't stop laughing at me. I don't know why.