CHENNAI: Learning Korean was easy. I just started it one year back,” says Sadhana Iyengar, a fourth year law student at VIT University, who secured third place in an international elocution competition organised by the King Sejong Institute Foundation in Korea. “I think the difficult level of learning a language depends on the interest level. At the Inko Centre where I learn Korean, I have noticed people who work in Korean-based companies struggling to learn Korean.”
The King Sejong Speech Competition is held annually across the world. InKo Centre conducted the preliminary level competition at the centre in Chennai and Sadhana won the first place. “I was fascinated by the language after watching a Korean drama called ‘Boys before flowers’ back in 2010. Then, I started watching popular Korean series such as ‘Descendants of the sun’ and ‘Rooftop Prince’. My favourite remains the ‘Reply’ series which was released in the late 80s,” says Sadhana.
The entire competition — from Q&A submissions to the speech — was in Korean. The topic was given two weeks prior to the competition and the duration was five minutes. “The subject I got was ‘Kinchy (pickle) VS cheese’. I wrote my speech and my Korean friend edited it for me. Here, I tried a lot Kinchy and wrote my experience. I memorised it and I practiced vigorously to keep the time limit intact. I worked on my conclusion carefully because it is the most important and creative part of a speech,” she explains.
Students from over 50 countries participated in the event. Most of them had more than three years of training and Sadhana was the youngest of them all. The 12 finalists were taken to the Korean Broadcast Service, Seoul, before the final event to train in Korean intonations.
“Though we speak Korean, it is not the exact pronounciation. It has a similarity to Tamil since both share a lot of similar words like ‘appa’ ‘amma’. ‘Santhosham in Tamil is ‘Shantutham’ in Korean. This maybe a reason why I find it easier to connect to the language,” opines Sadhana.