A is for....

Welcome to my first post for the 2013 A-Z challenge.  My posts are going to be a mixture of things, mainly based on my travels (including a large proportion about things I learnt during a year in South Korea).

So, A is for ANNYEONG-HASEYO  안녕하세요

This is the way you say hello in Korea, in Hangeul to be exact.  Hangeul is a fairly simple language, in that it is comprised of only 24 vowels and consonants.  Compared to other languages in Asia, Japanese, Cantonese etc, it is pretty easy to learn.  There are things to learn, like what sounds are produced when certain characters are put together or doubled etc, but all in all it's a clever system. Here's a glimpse of what the alphabet looks like;

Found on this blog, worth a look if you want to learn a bit of Hangul! http://josefwigren.com/hangul-in-20-minutes/

That said, after a year of living in Seoul I knew only a handful of words, but that was purely down to being lazy on my part.  I could sound things out, enough to read a menu or the name of a place.  Like many countries, Korea has a lot of words influenced by the West.  These words are referred to as Konglish, when an English word is written in Hangeul.  I would feel all excited and proud that I had figured out the word, only to realise it was English!  Classic words you see written in Konglish are simple things like camera or hamburger.

Oh, and if you are ever in Korea, they refer to mobiles/cell phones as hand phones... 

안녕히 가세요  Annyeong-hi gaseyo (Goodbye to a person when they are leaving but you are staying, meaning something like go in peace).