My Korean Husband

Intercultural Life

Tag: korean names (Page 2 of 2)

His Name

2013/01/18 / / 15 Comments

I’m visiting my parents right now while he stays in Sydney for work.

radio interviewI did an interview with Ahn Junghyun for the radio program 1013 Main Street yesterday which will be on the show today at 11:30am. You can listen on the website or on the smart phone app.

I was a bit worried I sounded very incoherent because I had an echo on the phone meaning I could hear myself 1 second after I spoke, which was distracting. I was also doing it in 40 C heat (that’s 104 F for you Americans ^_^) so please forgive me if I sound rambling. Yes, Australia is very hot at the moment. Especially where my parents live.

So my husband was annoyed that I said his name in the interview at first, but very quickly got over it. His Korean name is Sunhong which should actually be spelled “Soonhong”, but when he first made his passport years ago he wrote it with a ‘u’ because it fit onto one line on the passport form. He has forever condemned himself to having his name read out as “SUN hong? SUN hong?” in Australia.

Koreans tell me his name is very countryside sounding, but of course not being a native Korean speaker, I can not tell that at all. His family often call him “Honga” or “Hongie” but of course when calling out to him drag the sound out. Many times at his parents’ house I heard them saying “Hongaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!” Hehe.

Facebook Likes

2012/10/18 / / 8 Comments

(Hangul is the alphabet of the Korean language: The history of Hangul is really interesting so I suggest reading about it.)

8.48% of my readers are in Korea. A lot of them are foreigners living in Korea but I do get some Koreans reading my blog. So on the Facebook page I do get some likes from people whose name is only in Hangul. I can read Hangul so I had no problem reading their name out. My husband wanted to point out they were Korean which was obviously already evident to me! hehe

However, I am starting to notice people who are not Korean using Hangul for screen names or on Facebook, so it is possible that they might not be Korean. But in this example they had a pretty obvious Korean name. (When this happened it was not actually the name Kim Minji. I didn’t want to use a real name and a Korean friend was here when I drew this comic so we just thought of a really common Korean name to use).

If you want to learn Korean or even are just interested in Kpop and/or Korean culture I recommend learning how to read Hangul. The romanizations of Hangul are so different from how Korean actually sounds and Hangul is pretty easy to learn. When I first started Korean classes our teacher told us to never rely on romanizations and the sooner we learn how to read Hangul, the better. Correct pronunciation is of course much harder but even just being able to read Hangul to yourself opens up a whole new world.

Also, currently 207 likes on Facebook! Amazing for this little blog I started earlier this year.

Having a Korean Surname

2012/08/05 / / 36 Comments

I changed my family name to my husband’s family name. Actually, traditionally in Korea the wife doesn’t take her husband’s name (but the children do), so while I was not following Korean culture exactly, I still wanted to acknowledge my husband’s culture. So I decided to take on his family name. Gwon (권) can also be written in English as ‘Kwon’. If you are a Big Bang fan you’ll know this is how G-Dragon spells it.

I’ve only recently started using the name. Though we’ve technically been married for a little while, we had three weddings so I had to wait for all of them to be over. Then we were traveling for a bit and I couldn’t change it on my passport yet. Now I’m actually making it official and changing everything over to my new name. But I’ve realised I’m probably going to have to spell it out all the time! The times I’ve made appointments for things I have to very clearly spell it out. I don’t blame people for not knowing it, it is unusual for Australia. Also, my parents gave me a name with the less usual spelling so I have to spell that out quite often. Guess I’ll be spelling out my full name a lot!

Do you have a more unusual name for your country? Do you have to spell it out for people?

BTW, I was so tired last night (I make comics the night before) and didn’t try very hard with this one. Which is why I didn’t colour within the lines well haha. Sorry!

Boarding Pass

2012/06/05 / / 4 Comments

My husband’s Korean name is not that difficult but Australians can have some problems pronouncing it when they read it. I’ve noticed airport staff and flight attendants have interesting ways of avoiding trying to say his name.

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