The Korean Language uses the Hangul alphabet, which was created in 1444.  Before it's creation, Korean was written using Chinese characters.  Then king Sejong, the creator of Hangul, decided that since Korean was a language of its own, it should have it's own alphabet.  As with many other things that distinguish them from China or Japan, Koreans are quite proud of their language.
Korean is one of the five most difficult languages to learn for Native English speakers - another excuse for us foreign teachers who haven't gotten past 100 words.  But Hangul, the written form of Korean, is not difficult to learn.  I can now sound out most of the signs around Pohang; understanding them is another thing.  Quite a few Korean words, though, are English words that have been Hangul-isized.  Although, because Hangul is organized into syllabic blocks with no consonant blends, many of these English words gain a couple of syllables in the transition.  So words like bus, ski, sports, news, TV, toast, and juice are bus-uh, suh-ki, suh-po-chuh, nyu-suh, ti-buh-i, toe-suh-tuh and ju-suh in Korean.  When us foreign teachers don't know a word in Korean, which is all the time, we just guess by saying the word in English and adding an 'uh' at the end.
Funny things happen also when English names are converted into Korean.  The English 'r' sound isn't a part of the Korean language so we have some students with some pretty funny names:  'Scarlet' has become 'Scallet', 'Laura' has become 'La la', and 'Ruby' has become 'Luby'.  I don't even notice anymore.  If I ever meet another Ruby, she'll forever be Luby to me.

When I think about what to blog about each week, I usually try to talk about something that describes my experience here in Korea.  Then, it occurred to me that a big part of my experience here is me writing my blog - it's certainly on my mind a lot.  So I decided to blog about my blog.  Overall I think it's been a success.  It's made me realize how much I like to write, and that's pretty cool.  It also helps me to remember and internalize the experiences that I'm having.  It's nice to have an account of things.  It hasn't always been easy though.  In some blogs, I'm really stretching for ideas - hopefully you can't tell.  I can hardly believe that I've written 48 blogs so far. The funniest things is, a year ago I never would have thought that I would enjoy blogging. So that's one way I've changed I guess.  I'm proud of my blog.

This weekend Alisa, Jane, and I were walking on the beach and this is what we found - so Korean:

Here are some examples of the summer, taken from my walk to school:

This weekend we're going to Japan!

Thanks for reading.
Michael