Showing posts with label english. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Gook

As pointed out in another post some people may think that waygook is considered a racial slur. It's not quite that, but after some quick research it turns out that the two words are incredibly related. Both Wikipedia and The Urban Dictionary have a similar explanations; here's a brief description from Wikipedia's definition of gook:

An Asian person, especially an enemy (e.g. Koreans or Vietnamese during the Korean and Vietnam wars). By extension, any Asian person. Probably derived from the Korean words “hanguk” and “miguk”. “Hanguk” refers to Korea and “miguk” is the common word for the United States. American troops thought "miguk" sounded like "me gook" (i.e. "I am a gook"). The word persisted during the Vietnam War, perhaps also because the Vietnamese people have a similar word “quốc”, meaning "country".
So the term gook only derives a derogatory meaning in a North American context. In Korea it's the word for country (국) and since it describes a person's nationality everybody in Korean ends up being a kind of gook.

The Korean word for foreign (외국 aka waygook), or foreigner (외국인 aka waygookin) or even foreign person (외국사람 aka waygook saram), all use 국 as a base word and the use of gook in this context is so far removed from North American meaning that nobody recognizes it as a derogatory term. So when you have a website for foreigners in Korea, waygook.org seems quite appropriate.

As for spelling, the competing romanization systems create many transcriptions for 국 including gook, guk, kook, kuk, etc. Even the language tools disagree, making no discernible difference between waygook or wayguk.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Korean vs. English

I cannot speak Korean.

(And according to the text books that I've seen, I don't speak English all that well either.)

This isn't really a problem at the school where I work since I have a plethora of English teachers who I can magically summon by walking aimless down the hall. But on the odd occasion when I need to talk one of the school staff and my support team is busy with their students or their smokes, I'm in a bit of a bind.

Fortunately there is Google translate and the other language tools on the Internet. Some are viable alternatives to Google and others not so much, but I have a funny feeling that all translation sites use more or less the same engine, much life duff beer, since the translations from English to Korean and vice versa are all far from perfect.

So the only real difference is in the packaging and in the end I usually use Google since it has the direct Korean to English and English to Korean links, the browser button feature, and of course the trademarked minimalistic interface.

For the Korean speaker there's the dictionary at naver.com and if you have the Haansoft's Hangul, you should have an English to Korean dictionary, 한컴 사전, installed.

Thursday, May 31, 2007

English Key Strokes to Hangul Characters Converter

Here's a nifty web app from Kyung Chul Lee that:

When typing in Korean is not available even though Korean can be viewed correctly, this web page allows you to compose Korean letters as you type in Korean with English keyboard.
It's a nice alternative to the hassle of using a Korean keyboard on an American computer.