Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors • Hacker News Board

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#51

Post by amyjess » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

more_original wrote: post #37

stephengillie wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 becam…

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).

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#52

Post by apendleton » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 5:40 PM UTC

chinhodado wrote: post #39

cageface wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#53

Post by madcaptenor » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 6:32 PM UTC

SloopJon wrote: post #27

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? I'm pretty sure someone from South Carolina would be able to understand the average Welshperson (or anyone in the UK or Ireland)

Years after they left Georgia, my parents still liked to tell us about the time they were introduced to bald eggs: the third time the waiter asked very slowly, "Would you like some boiled eggs?"

I was born in Philadelphia and now live in Atlanta. Once while driving from Atlanta to Athens I picked up on the radio a man talking about how everyone should come down to the Wal-Mart parking lot and have some "bull penis". I knew that couldn't be what he was saying... it turned out he was talking about "boiled peanuts".

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#54

Post by Kalium » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 7:45 PM UTC

engi_nerd wrote: post #23

ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious? I'm pretty sure someone from South Carolina would be able to understand the average Welshperson (or anyone in the UK or Ireland)

I don't know about that. I had difficulty understanding people from different parts of my own home state (Kentucky). I grew up in the Louisville area, and had difficulty understanding people from the eastern part of the state. I have also had severe difficulty understanding some of my wife's family, who are from Maine. And now I work with many people from the UK. I tend to find that if the person is from the south, I…

I've had similar experiences. I once encountered a somewhat drunk Acadian man when I was in Texas. It was several minutes before I figured out that he was, in fact, speaking English.

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#55

Post by 616c » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #11

616c wrote: post #5

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 fir…

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…

No surprise here. I majored in Arabic in college. I have looked into Chinese, Farsi, Hindi/Urdi, Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese, in order of effort, with a year of Chinese at college level (in the US that is bullshit, but while doing grad level Arabic, caused people to laugh in conversation at my masochism).

The ASEAN languages, so Thai and Indonesian and Vietnamese, seemed so so much harder than Chinese. Not even sure why.

Mandarin was hard, with 4 tones. I think standard Vietnamese has ... five?

God help me if I ever learned Cantonese Chinese! I actually knew people from the south, and eight/nine tones made me wonder how they fuck people stop learning the language and move onto anything else.

Me: 200 characters of Mandarian

Southern Chinese Dude w/ College Degree: Spoken Cantonense with 9 tones and 20,000 chacters in Mandarin Chinese

Fuck my life.

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#56

Post by 616c » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 10:11 PM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #52

chinhodado wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

Well, after my time in China, I sucked it up and tried to learn Chinese and communicate in broken Chinese with my students.

When other kids complained about our old Taiwanese teacher's English accent, I asked them simply: "let's say hypothetically we inverted the situation and found an exact parallel of your Chinese accent to her spoken English when Chinese comes out of your mouth, and you understand the accent is native. How hard will you laugh?"

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#57

Post by cageface » Mon, Jun 01, 2015, 11:42 PM UTC

apendleton wrote: post #52

chinhodado wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

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.

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#58

Post by bane » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 1:35 AM UTC

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #36

bane wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effor…

> 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…

Here's some

https://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&num=...

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#59

Post by nandemo » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 7:28 AM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #49

616c wrote: post #5

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 fir…

That's a great story. I'm curious about Arabic now - can you tell us more?

I'm not the grandparent but:

Arabic is highly diglossic: in any given area, people use a standard written language called Modern Standard Arabic (used in speech only in certain formal situations) and a local spoke language ("vernacular") used in everyday life. They differ greatly in terms of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary. Note that vernacular isn't mere slang: it's one's native language.

Also, the vernaculars form a sort of dialect continuum: a Iraqi might have little problem understanding a Syrian from a nearby area, and Syrians might have little trouble understanding Palestinians, and so on, but Iraqi and Moroccan Arabic have little mutual intelligibility.

Neither phenomenon is unique to Arabic. Some Americans speak, say, African American Vernacular English but can also use "standard" American English; of course the difference isn't that big in this case. Brazilian Portuguese is another case of diglossia: the written language has multiple verb tenses and conjugations that aren't used in spoken language, for example.

Dialect continuums also happen in other places, e.g. the Getman speaking countries.

But Arabic is an especially extreme and interesting case (subjectively speaking).

Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors

#60

Post by carelesslisper » Wed, Jun 03, 2015, 10:22 PM UTC

cageface wrote: post #57

apendleton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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.