Friday, June 2, 2017

Honorificness

One of the things that makes learning Korean difficult is that there are different words for speaking to different people.  You use a totally different set of vocabulary when you're talking to older people than when you're talking to your peers.

In our online course, the teacher will say, "Here is the honorific way to say...."
And Sarah says, "I always think she's saying horrific instead of honorific."

Today I sputtered, "Why can't we just speak to ALL people honorifically and be done with it?"

Sarah said, "Mom, you're going to sound like a suck-up if you use the horrific speech with regular people.  You're going to get us kicked into North Korea and we'll never get out!"

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