Korea - Day 11 - Hangul and the Rosetta Stones

Today's class got off to a good start. Most of the students from last week returned this week, and some new students joined us. In fact the class was so enthusiastic we stayed until 5:30pm working on lab exercises. Afterwards I decided to walk back to the hotel following some different side streets. Twenty minutes later I was in the restaurant and shopping area just across from my hotel.

I decided to be adventurous and head into a Korean restaurant for dinner. I sat down at a table and the waitress brought me a menu - all in Korean. There were enough pictures that after a few minutes I was able to point to her and explain what I wanted - a plate of spicy chicken with rice, and a cake-like thing I saw. She nodded and returned with the check listing my order - in Korean. I checked the total and thought that the price reflected more than what I was willing to eat, so I motioned for her that this was too much. She nodded, ran off and made the adjustment before the kitchen cooked too much food.

A few minutes later the waitress returned with what I thought was the cake thing. It turned out to be a half-loaf of unsliced white bread with a dollop of butter on the top. Before I knew what was happening the waitress took two forks and "prepared" this bread by mashing the butter into the soft white center of the bread, leaving the crust intact. Think about how you might mash the butter inside a baked potato, but this was happening with bread. When she was done I was left with a hollow cube of bread crust that measured 6 inches on each side with a buttery, mashed bread white (now yellow) in the middle. I ate a few forkfuls, not wanting to fill up on bread before my dinner arrived.

But my dinner wasn't coming out. In fact other patrons who arrived after me were now enjoying their hot meals. I looked at my ticket more closely and sounded out the one item printed on it: Ho-ni-jum-bo-beu-rae-deu. Honey jumbo bread! That's what I was eating! That's apparently all I ordered! I laughed to myself, now realizing that the waitress had it right the first time. Sheepishly I called her over and re-ordered the chicken plate.

So how did I figure out how to read the ticket? Well, on my way up to Seoul on Friday I decided to try and figure out the Korean alphabet, also known as Hangul. Hangul is a writing system that traces its roots back to the 1400s. Its simplicity and accuracy has earned it high praise in the esteem of linguists. In fact it has been given a World Heritage status by the United Nations.

Three years ago I was staying in a hotel in Manhattan right in the heart of Koreatown on 32nd Street. It was then that I wandered into a Korean bookstore and flipped through a book on how to teach yourself to read Korean. I remembered that each group of characters is a syllable, and that the letters are arranged within each syllable. But other than that, I needed to figure out what the letters where.

When I boarded the train I grabbed a newspaper and started looking through it for my "Rosetta Stones." Any advertisement that listed the product name in both Korean and English was a starting point. There I began to determine what the letters were. Consonants were easy; vowels are a bit trickier. There are two letters that change based on where they are in the word: the "o"-shape that is unique to Korean (vis Chinese and Japanese), and another character which is best described as a very square "2". Slowly and steadily I picked off the consonants one by one. It turns out that Korean only has 14 consonants, but the 10 vowels more than make up for it.

Now I just need to expand my vocabulary beyond "gamsahamnida" which means "Thank you!"