“Never”, and “Sometimes”
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK has been written to fill a specific need: that of the thousands of foreign servicemen and civilians stationed in Korea for a year or two who wish to learn something of the language spoken around them. The structure of Korean is peculiarly complex, and difficulties plague the foreign student from the very beginning. I have attempted to simplify some of the common problems and to acquaint the reader with the most useful way to say a lot of everyday things.
The sentences are almost all given in the Polite (-ǒ yo) style, which is both the simplest and the most widely useful. From this style, another common. style—the Intimate—is easily derived simply by dropping the final particle. Koreans who look at the book will miss the Formal (-sǔmnida) style which they feel more appropriate to use with foreigners on first acquaintance. My purpose in sticking to one style is to provide the reader with the means to say a great many different things, rather than teach him a great many ways to say the same thing. From an academic point of view, this approach has certain drawbacks. From the practical point of view, it is the quickest and simplest way to put the foreigner into direct communication with Koreans, and that is the aim of this book.
The material is presented in the original McCune-Reischauer Romanization so that it may be used in conjunction with Joan V. Underwood’s Concise English-Korean Dictionary Romanized. This system contains a number of features which make the rather complicated structure of Korean grammar seem even more difficult than it is. The McCune-Reischauer Romanization is based on an attempt to use common English values of letters to represent Korean sounds in terms of the raw impressions they make on an American ear. This system was influenced by the Wade-Giles Romanization of Chinese and the Hepburn Romanization of Japanese. Both of these Romanizations have certain shortcomings (particularly the Chinese one), but the shortcomings do not stand out as sore thumbs in the way those of the McCune-Reischauer Romanization do, because the systems of sounds and sound changes of Chinese and Japanese are so much simpler than those of Korean. The excuse for using this rather cumbersome system here is that is seems to be favored by the person who has time for only a quick brush with the language. I have tried to simplify the use of the McCune-Reischauer system to some extent by generous word division and by showing automatic sound changes only within words. If the reader plans to go on with his study of Korean beyond the material contained in this book, he will probably find it advisable to do so either in the native script (Han-gǔl) or in one of the other Romanization systems shown in the table at the end of the lessons. For a scientific description of the structure of Korean, the reader is referred to the author’s other publications, Korean Phonemics and Korean Morphophonemics. A comprehensive grammar is in preparation.
I hope that the material contained in this book—while perhaps oversimplifying a complicated language—will be of some immediate, practical use to the reader who wants to learn some Korean “in a hurry”. And I hope some of those who learn Korean in a hurry will find such an interest in the language and the people who speak it that they will someday spare the time and patience needed to master the language.
| Tokyo, August 1954 | SAMUEL E. MARTIN |
NOTE TO REVISED EDITION
Since work on a Korean-English dictionary has held up the preparation of my comprehensive grammar for the past several years, it seems a good idea to put out a new edition of this little book which has met with a kinder reception than I had anticipated. I am grateful to Professor Edward C. Wagner, of Harvard University, for pointing out a number of errors; these have been corrected in this edition. Several readers have asked where they might buy my monograph Korean Morphophonemics; it is available for $2.00 from the Secretary of the Linguistic Society of America, Box 7790, University Station, Austin 12, Texas. The article “Korean Phonemics” appears in the anthology Readings in Linguistics, edited by Martin Joos and available for $6.00 from the Columbia University Press, 2960 Broadway, New York 27, New York.
| New Haven, November 1959 | S.E.M. |
KOREAN IN A HURRY
Lesson 1
VOWELS
The vowels and combinations of y or w with a vowel are pronounced somewhat as follows:
| i | as Marine (meet, cheat) | |
| wi | as we (queen, between, sweet) | |
| e | as met (or hey say mate) | |
| ye | as yes (or yea man.) | |
| we | as wet (or way, sway, quake) | |
| oe | usually pronounced just like we | |
| ae | as at (cap, sack, ham) | |
| yae | as yam | |
| wae | as Wac (swam) | |
| a |
as ah (hah, father)
|
