There are plenty of noodles in Korea, but your udon and ramen are clearly Japanese and your jjamppong and jajangmyeon are (ostensibly) Chinese. For a taste of true, home-grown Korean noodles, look no further than cold noodles, a.k.a. naengmyeon (냉면). The noodles themselves are typically buckwheat based, like soba (which is also often served cold in Japan), and come either in soup (물냉면 “mul naengmyeon”, water cold noodles) or dry (비빔냉면”bibim naengmyeon” mixed cold noodles). I believe the soupy version is more traditional.
There is a huge difference between the cold noodles from North Korea, called Pyongyang Cold Noodles, to distinguish them from the South Korean version. The South Korean style is loaded with vinegar (or kimchi juice), chili sauce, slices of pickled radishes, apples, and half of a hardboiled egg to create a cacophony of flavors that can take a little getting used to. The North Korean style is simpler, where one is supposed to appreciate the purity of the broth. The difference is a little too on the nose as a metaphor for the two Koreans.
찜닭 (jjim-dalk, literally: steamed chicken) is a marvel of Korean ingenuity. Chunks of chicken (with or without bones) are braised in a spicy (or not) soy-based sauce along with onions, potatoes, carrots, dumplings, rice cakes, and glass noodles. The cheese topping is optional, but worth it.
The whole dish is reminiscent of 大盘鸡 (da4pan2ji1, literally: big plate chicken), a Uighur dish from northwestern China where hunks of chicken are braised together with peppers, Chinese scallion, and potatoes in a flavorful spicy red sauce and served on a plate of broad wheat noodles. The jjim-dalk sauce, ignoring the baseline spiciness common in Korea, reminds me of 三杯鸡 (san1bei1ji1, literally: three cup chicken), a Taiwanese* dish so named for its use of a cup of soy sauce, a cup of rice wine, and a cup of sesame oil in its preparation**.
*: Sanbeiji originated in Jiangxi province, but it is currently most strongly associated with Taiwanese cuisine. **: There is some debate as to the exact ingredients referenced by the three cups. As there is also a lot of sugar in the sanbeiji, many reasonable people assume that one of the cups refers to a cup of sugar. Baidu’s Wikipedia-clone says the original recipe used a cup of lard (instead of sesame oil).
One of the unfortunate things about Korean food once you get over the first flush of how delicious everything is is that you notice that meal after meal is visually similar. It makes it very hard to be aggressively sharing through social media (as if the little dopamine bursts of a half dozen likes directly stimulated the taste buds). Meal after meal, or at least the meals I’ve been going for, are composed of a cauldron of soup, a metal bowl of rice, and a handful of kimchi/banchan. Beyond that, its not hard to notice how meat is pretty much always served with a basket of lettuce leaves and a few chili peppers. No one will ever convince that Korean food is unhealthy because each bite of meat is taken with a mouthful of lettuce. You certain get your fill of salad.
수육 (suyuk, 水肉，”boiled pork”) is eaten with the lettuce wraps much like your array of barbecued meats, but the key difference is that it is boiled rather than barbecued. As should be clear from the parenthetical above, suyuk is based on the hanja literally representing “water meat,” though there is no close equivalent in Chinese cuisine. If I wasn’t dining alone and ordered a medium or large portion of suyuk, the restaurant would have brought it out in a chafing dish and the broth to heat it up at the table.
Suyuk appears to usually be served in restaurants that also offer an array of 국밥 (gukbap, “soup rice”). As pictured above, this set meal came with a bowl of pork soup to which I added a small portion of noodles and the bowl of rice. There were three dishes of seasonings (salty, spicy, and fishy) and the bowl of chives to doctor up the soup to one’s taste.
The whole set was listed as a 수백한상 (su baek han sang), which I think literally means “water, white/hundred, one, table” or rendered more naturally a table of suyuk set meal. baek (백) is an interesting word which either means white or hundred via the Chinese loan words 白 (bai2) or 百 (bai3) respectively. Baek appears in baekban which refers to a set meal consisting mostly of banchan side dishes (notice how ban shows up in both words). The dictionary says baekban is 白饭 (bai2fan4, “white rice”) in the Chinese hanja, which strikes me as less poetic than an etymology suggesting a hundred dishes.
해장국 (Haejang-guk), aka “Hangover Soup,” is a hearty stew served across Korea. I ordered it by random, assuming that the hae referred to “seafood,” but my error was a pleasant mistake. Honestly, it seems a lot like any other soup in Korea, although the addition of a chunk of bone and the coagulated blood are nice touches that should provide valuable nutrients.
국 (guk) is a word meaning soup, and 해장 (haejang) does literally mean “to get sober,” so the nickname is a proper translation.
I can attest to having it in the middle of a drinking session and not having a hangover the next day, though I wasn’t drinking that much to begin with. Worth a try, but I wouldn’t want it if I actually had a hangover.
In a span of two days, I came across “아르바이트” from two different sources, and it is far too interesting a word to pass up. At first glance, it is obviously a loan word because it is too long and there are a bunch ㅡ’s in it.
Loan words in Korean adopt a number of very predictable patterns to approximate non-native sounds. [1] There are straight substitutions for consonants that don’t exist in Korean. For example, ㅍ (p) substitutes for “f” or ㅈ (j) substitutes for a “z” sound. [2] Vowels are combined to create new diphthongs. The long i sound (as in “eye”) is created through the addition of 아 ( “a” as in father) and 이 (“i”, but sounds like “ee”) — 아이 (“ai”) –, while 에 (“e” as in bed) and 이 (“i”) combine to make 에이 (“ei”, but pronounced like “ay” in day). [3] consonant clusters have the neutral “eu” sound as place holders. For example, 스트레스 is technically “seu-teu-re-seu”, but if you ignore all the eu’s, you get “stres,” i.e. stress.
So, when I come across “아르바이트”, I sound it out to see if I could identify the English: a-reu-bai-teu –> arbait… Arbeit! WTF is a German word doing in Korean? I thought it was a fluke until I saw it twice.
So, “arbeit” in Korean appears to refer to part-time work or a manual labor type wage-based job. I have some serious questions about how this entered the language. The general (native) way to say work is 일하다 (il -hada). This is a verb-object combination, where hada means “to do” and takes il as the object. What does il mean? The dictionary lists three distinct words: work, day, one. For “day” and “one,” il is the Korean pronunciation of two Chinese characters: 日 (ri4, “day”) and 一 (yi1, “one”). Maybe 일 is a native Korean word meaning work, but I like the supposition of it being related to day such that the etymology of work in Korean would be “what you do all day.”
It should be a given that what passes for Chinese food in America is light years away from “authentic” Chinese food, but there is one dish that bridges the gap. I remember the first time I had sweet and sour pork in China and thinking it tasted exactly like Panda Express (in a good way). The same can be said for Korea, as despite their versions of Chinese food being bizarre to my sinified palate, one invariant served at pretty much all Chinese restaurants in Korea is a dish called tang-su-yuk (탕수육).
I can’t imagine a less appetizing looking dish
It doesn’t take a linguist to realize that tang-su-yuk sounds an awful lot like tang-cu-rou (糖醋肉 “sugar vinegar meat”) or more properly 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4li3ji3 “sugar vinegar pork loin”), although the Korean dictionary says that the hanja (Chinese characters) behind tang-su-yuk are actually 糖水肉 (tang2shui3 rou4, “sugar water meat”). Though, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
To the best of my knowledge, China has at least three distinct schools of sweet and sour pork. There is the Cantonese style centered around Guangdong and available at every Hong Kong cafe (港式茶餐厅); there is the southern (江南 jiang1nan2, a.k.a. south of the Yangtze) style centered around Hangzhou; and there is the northern style, which I associate most strongly with Dongbei (东北 “Northeast” a.k.a. Manchuria), though technically speaking Dongbei food is based on Shandong cuisine.
In Hong Kong, one orders 咕咾肉 (gu1lao3rou4 in Mandarin), which I assume has some meaning in Cantonese. The meat is chopped pork ribs (排骨 pai2gu3) that are lightly coated in flour or corn starch to create a very crispy, but thin outside texture. Bell peppers, onions, and pineapple are briefly stir-fried in, though the vegetables usually retain a bit of their raw edge. Needless to say, the dish is heavy on the sweet.
In the lower reaches of the Yangtze river, one orders 糖醋里脊 (tang2cu4 li3ji3), where the name is a literally description of the ingredients: sugar and vinegar. 里脊 means tenderloin, so there are no bones in the dish. Relatively lean, elongated pieces of pork are thickly battered and served in a brownish sauce. Much like McDonald’s failed launch of mozzarella sticks, there is often a moment of disappointment when you bite into what looks to be a big chunk only to find there is barely any meat inside.
In northeastern China, you order 锅包肉 (guo1bao1rou1, literally “pot wrapped meat”) whose name probably has an interesting origin story associated with it. This dish batters large, thin slices of lean pork and better restaurants add a bit of shredded ginger to the sauce. Unlike the other two forms of sweet and sour pork, the pieces are not bite sized. Though there is still a lot of breading hanging off the pork it is usually fried very crispy on the outside and chewy inside.
All in all, I probably prefer Guobaorou, but they are all good in their own rights. Just hope that the kitchen is able to walk that fine line between sweet and sour to achieve the perfect balance.
First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.
— Zen Poem (also lyrics from a Donovan song)
As I am plugging along in Korean, learning hundreds of grammatical points and 18 different ways to express the future tense through nearly indiscernible differences in conjugation, I come across the following:
You start off learning lots of adjectives (aka descriptive verbs) in their “infinitive” forms all of which end in the 다 (da). 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) means to be pretty, and one can imagine on the streets of Korea there are plenty of occasions to say so. However, it couldn’t possibly be right to go around saying things in the infinitive form (“to be pretty”) when it would be more appropriate to say “she is pretty” or “you are pretty.” Of course, there are a whole host of considerations for how casual or polite you want to be and additional subtleties that could be added to indicate that this is new information to me (e.g. I’m just discovering this).
And then I come to the lesson on a “narrative” form where the conjugation ends up exactly the same as the infinitive. So, it would have been fine to say 예쁘다 (yeppeu-da) all along as long as I wasn’t speaking to myself.
I’ve definitely been neglecting my duties as a culinary ambassador (aka clueless whitesplainer), so I’m reaching into the photo album archives to bring up this classic snack food: tteokbokki (떡볶이). I’ve only had it the one time so far, but I have found myself craving it more and more over the past week. Chewy “rice cakes” in a spicy sweet sauce, how can you do any better? Maybe by adding some oden (오뎅, borrowed from Japanese, but meaning “fishcakes” here). The square guys in the picture have a chewy tofu texture with a mild fishy flavor. They are usually served on skewers and you can ask for a bowl of the “soup” to drink on the side.
I briefly introduced 떡 (tteok) on the travel blog when I had a “traditional” tteok soup for the lunar new years. While you can buy bags of sliced tteok from supermarkets, its the tteokbokki format that is sold in every night market and street corner. 볶이 (bokki) means “stir-fried,” which feels like a misnomer, as they are usually just hanging around simmering in the oh-so spicy, oh-so delicious sauce. You’ll also see 볶 on the menu of small snack shops for fried rice (볶음밥, bokkeumbap).
If it wasn’t already apparent that I am crazy, this should settle it. I’m about a month into cramming Korean into my brain, and I’m already building a dictionary. It’s a work in progress and more importantly its part of my process for retaining vocabulary.
I don’t have the patience to sit and attempt to memorize vocabulary lists. I don’t mind copying a vocabulary word here or there, either by hand or into the computer, but I also recoiled at the idea of just writing a character or word 50 times in a row (as is standard among Chinese learners). I always found flashcards to be a mixed blessing. Whether physical or digital, its a lot of work maintaining a deck–adding new items and removing items you are confident about. Something about the randomness seems suboptimal.
On the other hand, I am willing to take the time to engage with large volumes of vocabulary items while performing a variety of menial tasks–copying from app/pdf worksheet/textbook to paper, typing into computer, sorting and collating lists in Excel, removing duplicates, finding typos, etc. There is something immensely satisfying to discover that some words that stubbornly remain in the peripheral of my vocabulary have actually shown up across multiple sources. The clouds parts, the sun shines through, and the word catches on fire under the laser focus of attention.
I think there is something to say about the wisdom of the crowd. If you try learning a language from any given source, there are going to be tons of words that raise eyebrows for their seeming impracticality. However, once you start averaging across multiple sources, you can identify the truly widespread and common words (through a sort of low level manual corpus analysis). I actually wrote a paper taking this idea as a hack for estimating age of acquisition of characters among Chinese native speakers (I should probably dust it off and finally get around to submitting it to a journal). On the other hand, its interesting to see which words are completely glossed over because its assumed you already know it. However, there is a messiness to the merging process, as I’m not working off of official vocabulary lists.
The cool thing is I finally have a rough estimate of my vocabulary in Korean, under 1000 words. Of course, there is the entirety of Duolingo’s vocabulary to be integrated as well as additional lessons from the current three sources (TTMIK, Lingodeer, 新标准韩语).
Ultimately, I’m hoping to use this dictionary as a basis to design some newbie learner resources.
