

Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors - adamnemecek
http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-05-19/korean-today-virtually-two-languages-and-thats-problem-north-korean-defectors

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616c
I cannot say I am surprised. I could talk about Arabic almost every time I
comment here. That get's boring. Let's move to Vietnamese.

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.

~~~
cageface
I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge
difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People
from the center in particular are often unintelligible even to other
Vietnamese. It's a treacherous enough language already since getting a tone
wrong can mean you're unintentionally saying something quite vulgar.

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.

~~~
chinhodado
> 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.

~~~
apendleton
An American friend who lives in Vietnam has told me he finds that while
Vietnamese people aren't bothered by foreigners speaking broken Vietnamese,
they also don't have an especially practiced facility for guessing what
someone might have meant when they butcher something. He theorizes that
because there's almost no non-native speaker population, Vietnamese people
just don't get much experience having to do that the way Americans do with
non-native English speakers. The impression I got was that if you messed up
tones, you might get a delighted, but also perplexed, response.

~~~
cageface
I've found that, ironically, Vietnamese that already speak English are also
more likely to understand my amateur Vietnamese. Maybe that's because they're
more familiar with the sounds of English and can make more educated guesses
about what I'm trying to say.

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.

~~~
carelesslisper
That makes sense. As a non-native English speaker I find it easier to
understand people from my country speaking English than other accents.

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.

------
QuercusMax
The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article,
there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can
lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be
vocabulary.

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.

~~~
bane
Right. Linguistic unification in the peninsula happened long before the war.
Though there are still regional dialects and accents, the North-South split
was far less divisive in language terms than this article assumes and has only
had a couple generations to occur.

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.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
> 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.

~~~
DanBC
Here's one list: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-
monitor-31446387](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-31446387)

But I'd love to hear things that people actually say.

------
nashashmi
I find it interesting the kinds of things one can learn from two countries
that are nearly identical, but one is in isolation and the other is not.

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.

~~~
stephengillie
How was it for East Berliners and West Berliners right after the Wall fell?
Didn't they have to deal with vocabulary differences as well?

I'd assume that those vocabulary differences have basically disappeared in the
decades since, but I've never been there nor studied German. Thoughts?

~~~
more_original
The differences weren't that great. German has a number of distinctive
dialects (Bavarian, Saxonian, etc.), and with Saxony in the east, there have
been historical differences anyway. The Saxonian dialect has sort of become
synonymous with Eastern Germany, even though it's just one of the Eastern
dialects. I can think of very few differences that existed due to the
separation, mainly just a few brand names that became synonymous with a
product in the East, but were not known in the West.

~~~
amyjess
Isn't Standard German based on the Upper Saxon and Thüringian dialects anyway?

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).

~~~
wink
Saxonian grammar seems to be pretty much 100% High German, whereas Bavarian
has a lot of grammatical differences.

So if you speak neither, both are probably unintelligible, but Bavarian also
has different grammar to figure out.

------
guard-of-terra
This is called multiple language norms. English is "virtually" a lot of
languages.

~~~
ptaipale
Or dialects and vocabularies.

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.

~~~
teh_klev
I'm a Scot and as a child was brought up, until around ten years old, in rural
north east Scotland. The local tongue around those parts was heavily
influenced by Doric [0] (this was the 1970's - we didn't see many "incomers"
:) ).

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)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_\(Scotland\))

[1]: [http://www.lallans.co.uk/](http://www.lallans.co.uk/)

[2]: [http://www.scotslanguage.com/](http://www.scotslanguage.com/)

[3]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Kay_(writer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Kay_\(writer\))

~~~
panglott
Scots is an amazing language.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0EwquC6wBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0EwquC6wBU)

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum)

~~~
teh_klev
The woman in that video, as you've probably noticed, is speaking Shetlandic.
What's strange is that I've found that folks from the Borders sound very
similar, especially from around Hawick, Kelso and Galashiels, yet they're ~400
miles apart and over the sea.

~~~
jccooper
In pre-industrial Scotland, the Shetlands may have been nearly as close to the
Borders as Edinburgh, especially if the Tweed was navigable (even for small
boats) at that point. Before good roads and (especially) mechanized transport
the sea was not an obstacle, it was an opportunity.

------
ck2
I hope to live long enough to see North and South Korea unified like East/West
Germany.

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.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
And the small fact that the North is a totalitarian shithole.

~~~
kuschku
East Germany was also not a great place – the largest domestic intelligence
agency ever, everyone spying on each other, a totalitarian regime, a wall so
that no one could flee, food was there, but you had no bananas, no chocolate,
or any other expensive food.

All in all, if one sees it objectively, east germany wasn’t /that/ different
from North Korea.

~~~
jccooper
East Germany was in poor condition relative to West, but nowhere near as
disparate from the west as the Koreas are from each other. Though in East
Germany you could get no bananas, in North Korea you can't get rice.

