Reading this article, I found myself agreeing with more of it than I expected, even as a Korean-language speaker.
There are words that are used differently in North Korea and South Korea, but even within South Korean Korean, the sentence endings, vocabulary, and phrasing you should use can change a lot depending on the situation. The basic structure may be similar, but small differences matter.
Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct, but in South Korea, especially in more formal or higher-status social settings, speaking that directly can make a person sound crude or unsophisticated. Formal South Korean speech is often based on cushioning expressions. So even with the same Korean writing system, the rules for using sentences differ slightly.
This is something I feel even more strongly as a non-Western speaker participating on HN. If I do not use AI translation, many of my expressions become awkward. But after asking about it, I understand that even if the original Korean text was written without AI, using AI translation alone may cause the English version to be treated as Gen AI, which means I cannot really submit my blog posts.
So, reluctantly, I write my English comments by carefully combining machine translation, the English I have learned, and manual correction. Reading this article made me worry about how low-quality or awkward my comments may appear on HN.
Your comments are great and I trust it more precisely because you didn't use AI ,and trust me, we can tell when one uses AI, as the sentence and grammar structures are way different.
> Unlike North Korea, South Korean society extensively uses loanwords in technology, finance, and culture. English-derived words like “computer,” “café,” and “internet” are ubiquitous in the South but virtually unknown in the North, creating challenges for defectors encountering them for the first time.
This is tangential to the topic at hand, but as a Korean learner of ~9 years, it's maddening just how many English loanwords there are. In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
It's trendy to do so, but I think displacing Korean/Sino-Korean vocabulary at this pace is reckless. I think of it as 사대주의 (toadyism) to some degree as well.
---
Some years ago, I went to some cafe and ordered a coffee, like I've done thousands of times here. The employee asked me if I wanted a '디씨' (di-ssi). I had no idea what that was, so I had to ask, and lo and behold: it was shorthand for discount. Discount would be 5 syllables in Korean (디스카운트), an unbelievably long word in a language where most words are 2 syllables.
I was, and am, baffled because Korean already has a serviceable and widely used word that means discount: 할인 (hal-een), which is Sino-Korean (Hanja: 割引). I figure this is some marketing thing, but the same point applies. There are many cases where there's a perfectly capable word that, for seemingly no reason, gets switched out for an English loanword.
Maybe it's to give headaches to anyone trying to learn the language.
I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English/German words.
This is an extreme level of pedantry(forgive me), but there is a subtle difference between "DC" and "할인" (and also "세일").
"할인" refers to a wide variety of discounts: it may have a few conditions (minimum quantity, membership, etc.), be available only for a certain period of time, or be a fixed amount or percentage.
"세일" is pretty much the same, although it puts a tiny bit more focus on being a limited-time offer and being percentage-based.
"DC" almost always refers only to a simple, percentage-based discount or rounding down the price. It also sounds much more spontaneous and less formal.
Imo as a Korean speaker, the thing about North Korean Korean is that it sounds much more aggressive, from the words to the general tone. They’re also usually much more direct, and in a lot of North Korean defector stories I’ve read, that has been a common pain point for them.
It doesn't make a convincing case to me. The differences cited seem no more, perhaps less than the differences between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish which are, at least officially, distinct languages not dialects but are nonetheless largely mutually intelligible for many native speakers.
And I'll bet that "Modern slang expressions — enthusiastically adopted by younger generations" is also difficult for elderly South Koreans; just as teenage British slang is foreign to this seventy year old Briton.
I suspect that a kind of class distinction and lack of shared recent history is behind most of the difficulty in socialisation rather then the language itself.
Exposure is also a path to more mutual intelligibility, even if the differences persist. You're more likely to understand a dialect that isn't yours if you've heard it before, or even better, heard it often. So while I don't know much about Korea, I suspect more contact between north and south would also bridge the gaps.
As a Korean learner I think the article makes one believe it's the different meanings of words that cause problems, when it's more the fundamental difference in how the language is spoken in every day situations.
E.g. see the other comment by the Korean speaker here:
> Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct [...].
Yeah, but I will point out that Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are also countries with incredibly similar political cultures, economic systems, societal norms, cultural values, and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if the culture shock between DPRK and SK is much bigger after 70 years of tyranny and oppression.
I would have loved to read the version of the article that dove deeper and was not touched by LLM, even if it meant less clear English from the (presumably Korean) author.
Eh, Spanish has the same issues across the pond and everyone adapts quickly.
Móvil/Celular -cell phone-
Camarero/Mesero -waiter-
Tiroteo/Balacera -shooting-
Nevera/Heladera -freezer-
Cacahuete/Maní -peanut-
Coche/Carro -car- (In Iberian Spanish carro it's a old carriage)
Ordenador/Computadora (Computador was used in Ib. Spa. long ago maybe in 1960's and 1970's). And -computación (computing) it's used on formal, academical contexts, such as papers for the university.
Of course a formally written book will be understood everywhere, and the older, the better.
A few years back I analyzed how (informal, social media) written Spanish differs from place to place and (re-)discovered that the vireynados were a thing a while back :)
There are words that are used differently in North Korea and South Korea, but even within South Korean Korean, the sentence endings, vocabulary, and phrasing you should use can change a lot depending on the situation. The basic structure may be similar, but small differences matter.
Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct, but in South Korea, especially in more formal or higher-status social settings, speaking that directly can make a person sound crude or unsophisticated. Formal South Korean speech is often based on cushioning expressions. So even with the same Korean writing system, the rules for using sentences differ slightly.
This is something I feel even more strongly as a non-Western speaker participating on HN. If I do not use AI translation, many of my expressions become awkward. But after asking about it, I understand that even if the original Korean text was written without AI, using AI translation alone may cause the English version to be treated as Gen AI, which means I cannot really submit my blog posts.
So, reluctantly, I write my English comments by carefully combining machine translation, the English I have learned, and manual correction. Reading this article made me worry about how low-quality or awkward my comments may appear on HN.
Machine English is generally much more off-putting than English with a few mistakes, so I don’t think you need to be so nervous.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46393992#46396486
This is tangential to the topic at hand, but as a Korean learner of ~9 years, it's maddening just how many English loanwords there are. In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.
It's trendy to do so, but I think displacing Korean/Sino-Korean vocabulary at this pace is reckless. I think of it as 사대주의 (toadyism) to some degree as well.
---
Some years ago, I went to some cafe and ordered a coffee, like I've done thousands of times here. The employee asked me if I wanted a '디씨' (di-ssi). I had no idea what that was, so I had to ask, and lo and behold: it was shorthand for discount. Discount would be 5 syllables in Korean (디스카운트), an unbelievably long word in a language where most words are 2 syllables.
I was, and am, baffled because Korean already has a serviceable and widely used word that means discount: 할인 (hal-een), which is Sino-Korean (Hanja: 割引). I figure this is some marketing thing, but the same point applies. There are many cases where there's a perfectly capable word that, for seemingly no reason, gets switched out for an English loanword.
Maybe it's to give headaches to anyone trying to learn the language.
"할인" refers to a wide variety of discounts: it may have a few conditions (minimum quantity, membership, etc.), be available only for a certain period of time, or be a fixed amount or percentage.
"세일" is pretty much the same, although it puts a tiny bit more focus on being a limited-time offer and being percentage-based.
"DC" almost always refers only to a simple, percentage-based discount or rounding down the price. It also sounds much more spontaneous and less formal.
And I'll bet that "Modern slang expressions — enthusiastically adopted by younger generations" is also difficult for elderly South Koreans; just as teenage British slang is foreign to this seventy year old Briton.
I suspect that a kind of class distinction and lack of shared recent history is behind most of the difficulty in socialisation rather then the language itself.
E.g. see the other comment by the Korean speaker here:
> Vocabulary changes depending on context, relationship, social distance, age, and whether the situation is public or private. North Korean speech is often more direct [...].
Also Korean slang changes incredibly fast.
Móvil/Celular -cell phone-
Camarero/Mesero -waiter-
Tiroteo/Balacera -shooting-
Nevera/Heladera -freezer-
Cacahuete/Maní -peanut-
Coche/Carro -car- (In Iberian Spanish carro it's a old carriage)
Ordenador/Computadora (Computador was used in Ib. Spa. long ago maybe in 1960's and 1970's). And -computación (computing) it's used on formal, academical contexts, such as papers for the university.
Of course a formally written book will be understood everywhere, and the older, the better.
But a key difference here is that NK and SK are separated by a fence, not by 2,000 miles of ocean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s...
"Coger" in Spain means "to grab", in LATAM it means "to have sex" xD
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...