S. KOREANS LEARN TO NOT OFFEND NORTH
Hotel staff attended sessions on dos and don’t’s when they meet Northerners
WHEN a hotel on South Korea’s east coast was asked at short notice to host nearly 280 North Korean visitors, the problem was not finding enough rooms.
It was learning how to not offend them.
Within days of the request, the roughly 150 staff of the four-star Inje Speedium Hotel and Resort were attending sessions on North Korean words and manners, one of which was taught by a professor who used to teach defectors from the North.
Their guests, who checked-in on Wednesday, are North Korean cheerleaders who have come to perform at the Winter Olympic Games here, 80km from the border.
Since the Korean War ended in a truce in 1953, the two sides have grown apart culturally and linguistically.
First rule: in the presence of guests, do not refer to their leader, Kim Jong-un, by name, and certainly do not mention his nuclear and missile programmes.
And, don’t point at badges depicting the North’s former leaders, which are pinned to every North Korean visitor’s chest. In fact, call them “portraits”.
That is some of the advice Kim Young-soo, a professor at Sogang University in Seoul, gave staff at the hotel.
“The two Koreas may have the same ethnic background, but have gone separate ways for such a long time without barely any interaction, so there can be misunderstandings over trivial things,” he said.
A separate one-page cheat sheet provided by the hotel to its staff points out that North Koreans don’t use English words like shampoo and conditioner, which are used in the South.
The North also has words for food and everyday necessities that sound completely different to those used in the South.
The sheet included word comparisons for commonly used goods and services, a hotel official said. For example, vegetables are called chaeso in the South and namsae in the North.
Ahead of the games, which formally opened on Friday, South Korea’s government distributed guidelines to organisers, listing dos and don’t’s when they met North Koreans, an official at the Pyeongchang organising committee said.
The language barrier was particularly challenging for women ice hockey players from the two Koreas who were asked a few weeks ago to compete as one nation, the Canadian head coach of the joint team, Sarah Murray, said last Sunday.
There were “three” languages in one team, she said, referring to English, South Korean and North Korean. South Koreans frequently used English words not understood by the northerners.
She said team meetings needed to be held in the three languages, which took up more time.
The team had compiled its own “dictionary” of different ice hockey terms to better communicate with each other, she said.
Choi Bok-mu, a fitness club manager at the Olympics village in Gangneung, said he had not experienced any problems communicating with North Korean athletes.
“Is it really that different from speaking to someone from another region in South Korea? I don’t think so,” said Choi.
Choi and other volunteer helpers at the games were urged to avoid the topic that another Olympics guest, United States Vice-President Mike Pence, has been eager to address in his public remarks ahead of the opening ceremony: North Korea’s arms programme.