Comment on How are North Koreans who escape to the South integrate, like what do they do for work, home, etc?
hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 week agolanguages are different between the two countries
they aren’t, there’s very little difference in the language. minor differences in intonation and vocabs, but that’s same for every different dialects (even only considering south korea).
Jspelts@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I lived in Asia for over a decade. The Korean spoken in the North is very different than the South. And as the South is a developed nation, there are contexts that simply do not exist in the North. And considering they’ve been divided for so long without much in the way of any kind of interaction, the languages have had over 80 years to evolve.
Do you speak the same English that was spoken 80 years ago? Now double that effect to simulate the difference between two languages evolving away from each other.
hexagonwin@lemmy.today 1 week ago
do you speak korean? i’m a native (south) korean speaker. i have no problem understanding north korean
propagandatv/newspaper. have also interacted with north korean defectors few times. surely there’s differences but they’re not “very different”Jspelts@lemmy.world 1 week ago
안녕하세요! I taught English in China, one of my students was Korean (I worked at an international school), his mom and I talk regularly. Perhaps it’s not as different as I have come to understand, but from what she’s told me the transition is difficult for them and they have a hard time fitting in. Which I can relate to, having moved to China for 10 years (I was in Incheon for a little while later) and then back to the USA. Coming back here (US) from China was actually hard for me after 10 years so I can imagine (a little) about what they go through. But she had told me it is difficult for them to be “successful” in the South, even if the housing is much better and there’s far more in the way of food, necessities, and entertainment.