Springtime in Iksan is the best time of year.
The otherwise non-descript town, about a half hour west of Chŏnju, South Korea, is beautified by the many cherry blossoms that line the highway between the two municipalities. As the petals on the blossoms fall, they do so with such intensity that they mimic a snow squall in Ottawa.
In 1997, DW and I attended a cherry blossom festival with some of the secretaries and teachers of our hagwon, or private learning institute. Iksan is also famous for its wholesale jewelry stores, where Korean jade could be found for a bargain.
It was also the closest town with an immigration office, from where we picked up our work visas.
Because we were still relatively new arrivals to the country, DW and I were trying to learn the language—both speaking and reading. Because Hangul is a phonetic language that is composed by syllables, reading the written word was pretty easy, and DW and I had mastered pronunciation after a couple of days' studying, before we left Canada.
Comprehension came much later and was much more difficult.
At the hagwon, we taught both children and adult classes. While we endeavored to learn the Korean names of the adult students, all of the children were given Western names: Laura, Stephen, Kenny, Fred...
One day, during some free time in a kids' class, I asked each student his and her Korean names, and then I would practice writing the name out in Hangul on the whiteboard. While I made a few mistakes, the kids were overall impressed with my efforts.
"Teacher," Tony said to me, "can we give you a Korean name?"
I smiled. It sounded like a fun thing to do, but I had to be careful: the kids were sometimes prone to playing pranks on me. "What name would you give me?"
The giggling and muttering in Korean began as they huddled and made their choice. Finally, when the majority nodded their heads, Tony responded.
"Kim Min-Shik."
I repeated the name and then wrote it out, in Hangul, on the board. I had it right. I then stepped out of the classroom and approached our secretary, Mrs. Jung.
"My students gave me a Korean name," I said. The last time I consulted Mrs. Jung like this, I had asked her for clarification on a so-called bad word that one of my troublesome students had called me: gae sae-gi.
Literally translated, it was dog-baby. The implication was son of a bitch.
"What is the name?" asked Mrs. Jung, who was also suspicious of these pranksters.
"Kim Min-Shik."
Her eyes widened and she smiled. "Kim Min-Shik is TV star. Good name."
That weekend, DW and I found ourselves in Iksan, at the cherry blossom festival, and the flower petals were blowing around in the gentle spring breeze. People were wandering the grounds around vendor booths, buying food, drink, and crafts.
We saw the do-jung vendor and I immediately went up to him. A do-jung is a custom-made, stylized name stamp, often applied over or next to your signature on a document. He had a briefcase full of stamps of all shapes and colours, each of the stamps blank. He would carve whatever name you gave him.
I fished through his collection and pulled out a small, red-handled stamp. I handed it to him and said, "Kim Min-Shik."
Away he went to work.
The next Monday, during my afternoon class, I set the kids to completing exercises in their lesson books. Often, when I walked around the room, checking on their work, I would assign stickers to pages that were well-done. The kids loved stickers—especially, stickers from Canada, and I had brought hundreds with me.
This time, I had something else for them.
As I went around the room, I applied a stamp to each child's worksheet. Small and round, and in stylized Hangul.
My Korean name.
I brought my do-jung back to Canada but, for the life of me, I can no longer find it. Still, I'll never forget the name that those kids gave to me. Nor, how to write it.
김 민 식
One of the first things that DW and I learned to do, before we left Canada for South Korea, in 1997, was to learn how to read the written language, Hangul.
It's not a particularly difficult language to learn. The alphabet has 24 characters that are blended together by the syllables that comprise a word. DW and I learned the sounds that each character make and then learned how to pronounce each syllable cluster and read out words. This practice, surprisingly, took only a few hours to master, and by the end of our second day of studying, we could read words pretty quickly.
Our goal was to identify various words that could help us in our travels. For example, we wanted to be able to recognize our city's name—Chŏnju, or Jeonju, as it's more commonly written now, or 전주, in Hangul. In our first few days in Korea, we would practice by reading the words out loud, such as the destinations that were next to the numbers on city buses, or on buildings as we passed by them, on said buses.
We couldn't comprehend the language but it was a huge advantage in looking at the menu on a board outside a restaurant to know what kind of food they served, or to identify a bank, or recognize the way toward downtown.
One of the things that I found rather quirky about South Koreans was the pronunciation of my home country, Canada. It made me think that the first people to hear my country's name was from someone from the southern United States: it came out as "kay-na-da."
And then, I saw how Canada was written, in Hangul.
캐나다
The second character of the first syllable group, the one that looks like a squished H, has the vowel sound ae, like when you say "hey."
No wonder the Koreans were mispronouncing the name of my home and native land: they were misspelling it.
I tried to educate my students over the two years that I taught English, letting them know that if they wanted to truly pronounce Canada properly, they had to spell it the way it truly sounds. And I would write it on the blackboard.
가나다
(My students were always fascinated when I wrote their language out.)
During the 2018 Olympic Winter Games, in Pyeongchang, South Korea, I always cringe when I listen to updates on the radio and I hear our Canadian journalists botch the pronunciation of this north-eastern region. If only they knew the language, they might find it easier to sound out.
It's probably because the English translation of this word uses 11 characters. I've heard it enunciated as "pee-on-chahng" and even "pie-ong-chahng," where the vowel in the last syllable has an open "ah" sounding A. But the worst pronunciation is "pyong-chong," where the vowels have an open O sound, as in the word "wrong."
I'm talking to you, CBC Radio One. To my favourite morning-show host; to the guy who gives the hourly updates from the Land of the Morning Calm.
In Hangul, this region of South Korea is written with six characters in two syllables: 평장.
In Hangul, this region is pronounced "Pyung-chahng." The first syllable rhymes with rung; the vowel in the second syllable has the same sound as in the word awesome.
Try it out loud a couple of times.
When I studied journalism, many years ago in college, we had a class in broadcasting. When we put copy together to read out loud, if we came across a word that had a tricky pronunciation, we wrote it out phonetically. Hearing Pyeongchang read aloud on the radio, it seems like that method has been thrown out the window. Or someone is writing it, phonetically, incorrectly.
CBC, if anyone from your radio shows ever reads this blog post, take it from someone who has lived in South Korea and learned the language, who taught his students the importance of correctly pronouncing his own country by writing it phonetically, in their own language. Please honour that great land by saying the name right.
Two syllables with vowels that make an uh and an open A sound. "Pyung-chang."
If either syllable rhymes with wrong, you, too, are wrong.
