Harrison CP#5

Wednesday, October 22

Today after my culture class Jihun, Koo, Seforah, and I had a bit of an impromptu conversation partner session. Our class discussion about what we do at sporting events in our countries evolved into a discussion our food and, somehow, our naming traditions. I guess it all started when I told them about a misunderstanding Jihun and I had about chicken fingers. The other day I told him that I had recently eaten chicken fingers. He thought I meant literal chicken fingers, i.e. chicken feet, so I had to explain that I meant strips of chicken breast meat, not toes. What was funny was that when I said "chicken fingers" to them, Koo thought I meant chicken feet as well.

We then somehow got to talking about our names. I told them that my first name is more common as a last name and in fact it was my mother's maiden name. I told them that naming children after family members is a very common practice in America. Apparently this is not the case in Korea, but Koo and Jihun had a hard time explaining exactly how they name their children. What I did find out is that a monk gave Jihun his name, which I thought was cool. Koo also told me that Koo was actually her family name and that Eunkyung was actually her "first name." She said she just goes by Koo because her first name is difficult to pronounce, but I told her I was committed to practicing it so maybe one day I would be able to say it right. Seforah explained to us that names in Brazil are so long because children take the surnames of both their mother and father, in addition to one or two middle names. We also talked for a little bit about the difficultly Americans have hearing and saying the difference between consonants and double consonants in Korean. It was funny because Seforah couldn't hear the difference either. Koo explained that it is hard for Koreans to figure out "p" and "f" as well as "r" and "l" since these sounds don't exist in Korean. I thought this was surprising since a lot of Korean words have anglicized spellings will r's and l's.