Korean Mnemonics 6: juniors and seniors

I have a hard time keeping the Korean words 선배 (seonbae "senior") and 후배 (hubae "junior") straight.

Then I remember (or try to remember) that seonbae and senior start with the same sound.

Sometimes it just takes a while for a word to sink in deep enough that no tricks are needed to keep it lodged firmly in memory. Multiply this problem by hundreds or thousands of tricky, easily confused or forgotten words, and it's a miracle anyone can ever learn another language. How many tricks and shortcuts will I need to come up with? And how am I supposed to remember them?

Korean Mnemonics 5: The Mnemonic That Wasn't

This was all set to be the best Korean Mnemonics post yet. (Which is saying something!) There are a number of similar words for different kinds of responses (reply to written inquiry, reply to spoken question, immediate response, and so on), and I was having trouble keeping them straight.

I realized that one of these words—for "incorrect answer"—came premade in English: 오담 (odam, or, like, "oh damn" sort of). Perfect! I felt pretty good about this for maybe a whole day. Before I realized I had misread this and all the other "reply" words. It's not 오담 (odam). It's 오답 (odap), which doesn't lend itself quite so readily to any memory tricks.

For the record, here are the other words in my list (which I have basically decided to forget):

답 (dap, "answer to written question")
응답 (eungdap, "response, usually immediate")
정답 (jeongdap, "correct answer")
대답 (daedap, "answer to spoken question")
회답 (hwedap, "reply to written inquiry")
답장 (dapjang, "written reply")

Korean Mnemonics 4: alphabetical order

Almost as though it's a whole different language or something, Korean insists on having its own alphabetical order. Sure, it doesn't have many of the sounds represented by letters in the Roman alphabet, but did they have to make their alphabetical order so hard to memorize? (To be fair, English requires you to learn an entire song to remember its alphabetical order.)

ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ

In the transliteration scheme I use, this is basically k (or g), kk, n, d (or t), tt, r, m, b (or p), pp, s, ss, Ø, j, jj, ch, k', t', p', h.

(This is just for initial consonants, not vowels or final consonants. And I don't even understand what it means that there's an alphabetical order for final consonants. And North Korea has its own alphabetical orders! Well, sure. They would. And everything is further complicated by the fact that those letters don't map cleanly onto letters in the English alphabet. It's all kind of... approximate.)

I've seen mnemonics for remembering Korean alphabetical order before, but they don't work for me. My textbook offers this: "Canada lamps are Jackie Churchill and Katie Thomas's parents' hobby." To me, that's about as hard as remembering the string of consonants. (Canada lamps? Jackie Churchill? Katie Thomas?)

Here are the ones I came up with:

Condor mobs just chase kittens to pink heaven.
Canada rumbles—jerks choose kids to put here.
Gandalf rumbas with joy. Champions come to pinch him.

With these, and my textbook's "Canada lamps," the "doubled" consonants are understood to follow the single forms. So, where the order starts with ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ, the mnemonic starts with one k sound, an n sound, then one d sound. You also have to remember that the aspirated stops—ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ (k', t', p')—come at the end. Oh. And these don't account for the ㅇ/ Ø.  I told you: it's hard.

Korean Mnemonics 3: Monday and Tuesday

I have spent countless months unable to keep 월요일 (weolyoil "Monday") and 화요일 (hwayoil "Tuesday") straight.

Ignore that last part of the word—the 요일, found in all names of the days of the week—and you're left with 월 (weol) and 화 (hwa). The shapes of the vowels can help, maybe (just like in Korean Mnemonics 1)? In the word for Monday, the vowel ㅓ points backward, as though toward the weekend that just ended. In the word for Tuesday, the vowel ㅏ points ahead toward the next weekend.

I think I'm going crazy.

I admit it: this is totally strained, and remembering this could end up being as hard as just remembering which word is which. But I need this! I have looked up Monday and Tuesday so many times. Never again!

Isn't it funny how the arbitrariness of words—the essentially random connection between word and referent—seems to vanish when it's your own language? Of course the English words Monday and Tuesday are easy to keep straight: Monday could only mean, you know, Monday, and Tuesday just sounds so... Tuesday. But when you're staring down the barrel of a foreign lexicon, everything seems like a slippery mishmash with nothing to grab hold of. So I'm reaching for anything that floats, even if it's some cockamamie story about vowels pointing to weekends.

Bonus for English language learners: I just thought of something. If you're having trouble with Monday and Tuesday, all you have to do is remember that Monday is the one-day, and Tuesday is the two-day.

Korean Mnemonics 2: uncle and cousin

Words that look alike and mean similar things are especially hard to keep straight. And that's the case with 삼촌 (samchon "uncle") and 사촌 (sachon "cousin"). I don't know if this has anything to do with the etymology of the words, but the first syllables (삼 and 사) mean "3" and "4," respectively, in the so-called Sino-Korean number series.

So just remember that 삼촌 (3-촌) comes before 사촌 (4-촌), just as uncles come before cousins. They're born first, and deserve more... respect... as elders...?

Whatever works.

Update: I just brought this up with my teacher, who tells me that my trick actually is based on the etymology of the words. In addition to 3-촌 (uncle) and 4-촌 (cousin), there is also 5-촌 (오촌, ocheon "parent's sibling's child; that is, second cousin") and beyond! So while English has a system of increasing distance (2nd, 3rd, 4th, once removed, etc.), Korean uses a system of addition, where family relationships are tallied up.

Korean Mnemonics 1: putting in and putting on

Learning new vocabulary in a foreign language is a never-ending struggle. It often feels like I've filled up every available space already, so when I try to learn a new batch of words they just overflow the tank and slosh over the sides and down the drain. So any little trick helps. Here's how my teacher helped me learn to remember the differences among three very similar-looking words.

1. 넣다     2. 놓다     3. 낳다

1. neohta     2. nohta     3. nahta

They're almost the same, the only difference being in the first vowel: ㅓ,  ㅗ, or ㅏ.

And what's worse, 1. and 2. mean very similar things, too.

1. neohta means "put in," 2. nohta means "put on," and 3. nahta means "give birth." What's the trick? The shapes of those vowels are like little pictures: The ㅓ of 넣다 is going into the ㄴ. See it tucked into the crook of the ㄴ's elbow?

The ㅗ of 놓다 is lying flat on top of the ㅎ. Picture the top of a cookie jar or the lid of a pot resting on a countertop.

And in the ㅏof 낳다, you see a little line coming out of the big line.

These pictures tell the stories of the verbs' meanings: put in, put on, and give birth (something comes out).

Ingenious.

Three verbs down, seven million to go.