South Korea

South korea. Why this country? Truth is, I got familiar with this country and its culture thanks to their pop music and tv-dramas, which I find really entertaining and actually spend lot of time watching them and suffering because of the main characters impossible love, or hating the bad and evil mother and all that kind of crazy things. If I sit in front of the computer and start watching someshow, I really can’t stop until I finish it. My grades have suffered the consequences of this new hobbie. Well, I’ll start by saying where Korea is.

Location

Korea is an East Asian country that is currently divided into two separate states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to thenortheast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea), and separated from the Republic of China (Taiwan) to the south by the East China Sea. This country was divided into South and North after the Korean War ended en 1953. While North Korea is a communist regime, with and eternal “president”, who seems more like an emperor than a president, South Korea isa democratic republic member of the G20 major economies of the world. It capital is called Seoul, and today, is considered to be a leading global city. It is one of the world's top ten financial and commercial centers, home to major multinationalconglomerates  such as Samsung, LG and Hyundai-Kia.

Language

Their alphabet is called Hangul, and it uses some Chinese characters they call Hanjafor its writing. Unlike Latin alphabet, letters are not written sequentially. They are grouped in blocks instead and each block describes a syllable. For example, the sentence “my cat is awesome”, it’s written like: 내 고양이는 대단하다, and it can be “translated” into the alphabet we know, or Romanized and it would look like this: nae goyang-ineun daedanhada. To do this, I used Google Translator, sothere’s a chance that what’s written there is not the sentence “my cat is awesome”, but I think you get the idea.

And Koreans have a particularity that I find really interesting: their language reflects the importance of the level of familiarity between the speaker and the listener. You can see this in every language. I’m going to use Spanish. When you are talking to an authority or an older personyou say, Hola, ¿cómo está usted?. I used Spanish instead of English because it is easier to see the difference between you, and you (friendly). Well, this thing in Korea is much more important. There, the respect for others is unbelievably strict. Because of this, they have formal and informal speeches. If you’re just meeting a person, you can’t go and talk to him/her HEY what’s your name, howyou’ve been, I think I really like you, like Latin’s tend to do. There, if you’re talking to someone with higher status, let’s say an older relative, or older stranger, and employer, a teacher, etc, you have to indicate the subject’s superiority by using special nouns or verb endings. (you have to indicate that the person you’re talking to is “superior”) The age difference doesn’t need to be years ofdifference. Only months are enough to demonstrate respect for the other person.

And there are seven speech levels, and each level has its own set of verbs endings, which are used to show respect towards a speaker. They have extremely formal and polite, formal and polite, neutral politeness, informal and polite, impolite, informal and impolite. Just so you can understand the difference, let’stake the phrase “thank you”. We have
-감사합니다 (gamsahabnida), which is formal.
-감사해[요] (kam sa hae yo), less formal.
-고맙습니다 (goh map seub ni da), formal
-고마워[요] (gomawo), informal.
And they all are ways of saying Thank You. The use of the wrong speech level is considered rude and insulting, depending of the degree of difference between the used form and the expected form. Let’s say I have...