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Cannibalize
May 12, 2008Cannibalism is a good thing. It depends, however, on which you consider edible and palatable. I have decided to cannibalize my students’ blunders and post them in this blog.
Hangul, or the Korean alphabet, does not represent most phonics available in English. This was the case in the old Philippine alphabet, Alibata (A-ba-ka-da-e-ga-ha-i-la-ma-na-o-pa-ra-sa-ta-u-wa-ya). If you’ve noticed our old phonetic system lacked the letters represented in English as the letters “c”, “f”, “j”, “q”, “v”, ”x” and “z”. But since the Americans taught us English in colonial times, our familiarity with the English vowels is close to natural. There are some remnants though of our inefficient phoneme system like, “zero” is pronounced as “jero”.
Koreans suffer a heavier ordeal. Since most of English consonants are absent in their phonetic system, their English pronunciation suffers. Take the letters "f" and "p" in English is considered the same or is represented by only one symbol in Hangul. Ok, ok enough of the gibberish. Here are the examples:
me: “How’s your weekend?”
student1: “I went to potty” (I went to a party)
me: “How did you go to the Philippines?”
student2: “in eflayne” (in airplane)
me: “Is the word ‘imagine’, noun?”
student3: “Hmm.. No, it’s a bulb”
me: “A what?”
student3: “baaaalb” (ah…verb!)
me: “Have you been to People’s Park?”
student4: “Yes, the fuck is good” (Yes, the park is good)
me: “Good Lord”
Of course not all Koreans suffer this problem. Most young students who enroll in Philippine schools improve their English pronunciation significantly. Those who’ve studied English for a long time has gotten the hang of English pretty well. But I’ve got to say their tongues are good meat.
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