월드미션프론티어

I joke that I can understand two languages, English and "Konglish". For those of you who don't know, "Konglish" is English as mis-spoken by Koreans. I was introduced to Konglish by a student of mine who said "Book one give me". He spoke all the words correctly, but he spoke them in Korean order instead of English order. (It should be "Give me one book?) Another example of out-of-order Konglish occurred when another student told me that she was proud of "two my sisters?. (It should be "my two sisters?)

Konglish creeps into many corners of conversation. Once I was listening to a college student read from his book report about mythology. He began to read, "Jee-oose was the father of many gods". My eyes got big and I listened some more. He talked about myth and pagan stories. I thought "how in the world could he talk about Jesus that way?" After several minutes of slow burn, I interrupted his reading and said "What do you mean that Jesus was an ancient myth?" He didn't understand my question. He saw that I was upset and showed me the paper he was speaking from. And there it was "Zeus was the father of many gods". I smiled and handed the paper back. I said to him the word is pronounced "Zeus" with a "Z"

In an English literature class we were discussing favorite American authors. One girl said her favorite author was "Pebuh". I asked her to repeat the name and she said "Pebuh? again, only in a louder voice. I thought real hard and couldn't think of any author that matched those sounds. So she wrote it down and I realized that she was speaking of "Pearl Buck", a really hard author to pronounce in Korean.

There are some rare words that don't make sense in either pure Korean or pure English. For example, only a person fluent in Konglish could appreciate the word on my vanity license plate: "ROOM 9".

Of course there is an opposite of Konglish called "Ko Jang Mal". This is Korean as mis-spoken by Americans. Did I tell you that one time I called my Korean school principle "Seng son nim"?