Hi everyone!

When I first visited Eugene several months ago to see the UofO campus, I noticed that there was a restaurant nearby with Korean writing on the building! Seeing that intrigued me very much because I realized there must be quite a bit of East Asian influences of culture and food in Eugene. The place that I visited was “Cafe Seoul Korean Restaurant”, on the corner of Franklin Boulevard and Villard street. Right outside of the restaurant is this large sign that says: “레스토랑” (reseutorang), which translates to “Restaurant” in English. This example of Korean writing is a loan word, which are words borrowed from the English language and incorporated into a language using their own writing system. Korean and Japanese are two languages which have many loan words that are even a part of their daily vocabulary. The purpose of this sign is probably to cater to the Korean speaking community of Eugene, and to the students of the UofO who are learning East Asian culture and Korean as well.

My second example of East Asian writing (above), was found at Vivian Olum Child Development Center on campus. Since I work there, I noticed this sign was put on the door on one of the classrooms in the center. The sign is saying “Welcome” in 5 different languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Indonesian, and Korean. In Korean, the text directly translates to, “Welcome to our classroom”. Considering the diversity of faculty and staff at the University, it makes sense to be welcoming and culturally accepting of all the different languages UO faculty and staff children may speak when they come to childcare. That in mind, the fact that this poster includes those specific 5 languages, may mean that the majority of families in the area, speak one (or more) of those languages. This example also relates back to what we discussed in class about Korean speech styles. This specific speech style used in the welcome poster is casual speech (or banmal). To make it a higher speech, one would most likely add the honorific particle “-yo”(요) to the end of the last word to make it more polite! 🙂

Until this point in our class so far, I have thoroughly enjoyed learning all the history and new terms pertaining to East Asian cultures and languages. I love learning about each major country (Korea, China, Japan) separately and focusing in on the details of writing systems, speech, and history that led to different phenomena occurring. One of the strategies I use the most to use the lectures to their full potential is, I take many detailed notes on the most important points, and notes on the concepts that I don’t understand. When I am confused on certain materials, I can use my notes to look back and dig further so that I completely understand everything that was in the lecture. Since both of our instructors are so understanding, I always take advantage of that to ask the necessary questions if there is an assignment I don’t understand. Overall, I am very curious to continuously learn more in the duration of this class.