This time, I'm going to talk about my nearly-lifelong struggle: growing up in an English-speaking country and wanting to speak in Korean to the solely English-speakers. Don't get me wrong, I love the English language. (I'm Korean-American!) But I also love the Korean language.
Aside from the obvious differences that these two languages have, another difference that stands out is that Korean can be such a strong and blunt language. I touched base on this in my post about hate comments in Korea. So in the case of un-watered down hate comments, the bluntness of the Korean language can be bad, even deadly. However, I don't mean to say that the Korean language is an ungodly language - like any languages, you can make it ungodly with your word choice.
But even with good, appropriate diction, Korean phrases can just be more straightforward and harsher. For example, in the Korean singer Lee Hi's song, "1,2,3", there's a line that says "남 걱정하지 말고 너나 잘해" which can be translated into English as, "Don't worry about others, and just take care of yourself." Now, you who I'm going to assume cannot speak Korean, didn't that English translation sound...not so bad? Maybe almost sweet, even? This is the frustrating thing! UGH! It's not a sweet line at all!! There are no ways in English to directly translate the meaning of this line! Okay, okay, an alternative way to translate it into English would be, "Don't worry about others, and you do good". That's just awkward. But the Korean denotation and connotation of this line is more like (not to directly translate it), "Don't be so busy worrying about others when you should be worrying about yourself, you do your own thing"... It still does not match up the harshness even when I try to elaborate... I said it's both the denotation and connotation that displays the harshness of this line, and it's true, some denotations in Korean doesn't even seem to exist in Korea. For your information, I'm an experienced Korean-to-English transcriber and translator, so it's not like I'm deficient at translating.
So with the Korean language being able to be straightforward, but still appropriate (like, PG), I've wanted to use it on so many English speakers. You know, for good comebacks that will make the other person speechless, for cunning-edge remarks, or to be direct. I'm not saying I want to speak rudely all the time, but sometimes, speaking Korean would allow me to stand up more and uh, other purposes that I won't name. Aside from the Korean language being all direct and potentially harsh-without-cursing, maybe because of it's ability to be all direct, it's also a language that allows you to be really close with whom you talk to, as long as you're talking informally, of course (the Korean language consists of formal and informal words/phrases). Like, I guess to try to explain this in British terms, you can call your close friend a bloke all you want. I feel like in America, even if it was your close friend you were talking to, this would be crossing the line. Now I know of some incomprehensible, still-need-to-grow-up teenagers who call their friends all sorts of names (which I won't name) and there are some Korean teenagers who do this too. But I'm not talking about calling names because you're supposedly best friends. I'm talking about, just this closeness that the Korean language can offer. Not distance, but just, a sense of closeness. Oh, just go learn the Korean language and culture and you'll see what I mean.
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