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Jeon Woncheol

 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
ProfArguelles
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United States
foreignlanguageexper
Joined 7259 days ago

609 posts - 2102 votes 

 
 Message 1 of 2
03 April 2005 at 7:04am | IP Logged 
I recently offered linguistic portraits of my father and myself in the hopes of encouraging others to believe that they too could become polyglots, and now I worry lest some should assume that the only way to do so is to be an academic or scholarly type. Thus, I would like to offer another portrait of a polyglot personally known to me who is of a much more practical character, my friend Jeon Woncheol. Unfortunately, I have lost touch with him in recent years so I cannot absolutely confirm the accuracy and completeness of everything I am about to write, though I am sure that if I could track him down and tell him about this forum, he would become an enthusiastically contributing member.

Jeon Woncheol was born in a poor and remote area of rural South Korea in 1963. His family lived in Japan for some period during his boyhood, but he was reared mainly in the countryside, and yet he obtained admission to Korea’s premier university, Seoul National University, which is amazingly competitive and generally only takes those from the best urban high schools who have had plenty of private tutoring, so the fact of his admission in itself constitutes proof that he has a sharp and first rate mind, which is also immediately evident when you begin talking to him. I do not know just what he majored in, but it was something in the area of law or politics. At the time he was in college, student demonstrations brought down the Korean military dictatorship and ushered in a more democratic regime. He was an active and leading demonstrator the entire time, and while he certainly does not regret this, he does regret that he consequently never really got to study while in school.

He has worked for various relief organs of the United Nations and was in the Chechenian war in that capacity. In the hopes of obtaining a higher type of post, he somewhat belatedly decided to get a US law degree. I believe he got his JD at the University of Indiana, but he had passed the bar exam in California and was getting experience in human rights law when I last heard from him a year or two ago. His overriding human rights concern is the suppression of minority linguistic groups in China.

I met him when he called my university because he was looking for a private tutor in French conversation. On our first encounter in a coffee shop, we conversed in Korean, English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian, and this became our regular weekly routine for some years. Of these Western languages, he is strongest all the time in English and Russian. His strength in the other four varies as he has occasion to use them—that is, if he has been reading French, his French is good but the others are weak, whereas if he has been conversing a lot in Spanish, his French and the others are weaker, and so on. However, he clearly has a solid foundation in all of them and can access them quite passably whenever need or occasion arises. He has also studied Latin on his own. For Koreans, Western languages are excruciatingly difficult, and hardly any know more than one. I have known many Koreans who have lived in a Western country for years, gotten their doctorates there, and yet whose skills in the language, be it English, German, French, etc., are not at the level of Jeon Woncheol’s.

These are the only languages I was able to “test” him in. However, on occasion, we were joined by others who knew Japanese and Chinese, and these people confirmed that he was quite fluent in both, which I do not doubt given that they are much easier for him than Western languages, and that he was always able to inform me, in detail, about any Chinese character that baffled me. Most of the languages he knows are Central Asian. He was writing a book about Manchu when I lost contact with him, and I know that he knows Mongolian. He knows a good handful of smaller Turkic languages whose names slip my mind, but I know that he actively writes in these languages because he would occasionally inadvertently e-mail me something in one of them. He may know some other kinds of languages as well. He is firmly convinced that Korean and Japanese are bone fide Altaic languages, clearly related to Mongolian and the Turkic languages. However, I stress again that he has learned all these languages, not as a comparative historical philologist, but as a political activist concerned for the human rights of their speakers. So, here is a living example of a busy, active, man of the world who knows and uses over a dozen languages.
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hokusai77
Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 7155 days ago

212 posts - 217 votes 
1 sounds
Speaks: Italian*, FrenchB1, EnglishC1
Studies: GermanB1, Japanese

 
 Message 2 of 2
09 August 2005 at 6:43am | IP Logged 
Yes, for Koreans and Japanese, European languages are all very difficult. Thank you for introducing him.
1 person has voted this message useful



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