The things there was never time for in class

Essays on language change, speech sounds, and second-language learning — roughly two a month.

The essays are written in Korean. Titles and summaries below are in English; following a link opens the Korean text.

All essays16

Phonetics · Korean · Language & Society 16Hangul and Nationalist Pride Examining common claims about Hangul one by one, separating what belongs to the script from what belongs to the Korean language, and asking what pride grounded in fact looks like. 2026. 10
Phonology · Language & Society · Korean 15Language Play From ‘Italian Brainrot’ to rhyming in pop songs, a look at language play that sets meaning aside and builds expressions from sound alone. 2026. 10
Language & Society · Language Change · Korean · Morphology 14The Personalization of Language How personalized expressions and distinctive spellings emerge as Korean moves from an age of standardization toward a more individualized society. 2026. 09
Phonology · English · Language Change 13Why Is English Spelling Such a Mess? Starting from the famous claim that ‘ghoti’ could spell fish, and tracing the historical forces that pulled English spelling apart. 2026. 09
Language Change · Korean · Phonology 12Changes Underway in Korean Right Now Change is said to be visible only in hindsight; this essay points to shifts happening within our own generation. 2026. 08
Phonology · Korean · Language Change 11What Loanword Spelling Reveals About Korean From ‘쵸코렡’ to ‘초콜릿’ — what shifting loanword orthography reveals about the Korean sound system. 2026. 08
Morphology · Language Change · Korean 10Frequency and Analogy A learner's slip in Korean opens a view of how analogy generates new forms. 2026. 07
Morphology · Language Change · English 9Why Repetition Matters Why English irregular verbs arose and why they survive — frequency as the force that preserves form. 2026. 07
Language & Society · English · Phonetics 8What English Means to Us An old controversy over a baseball player's English filler sound, and what it says about how Korean society reads English. 2026. 06
Language & Society · Language Change · Korean 7More Than a Means of Communication How a word whose dictionary definition never changed became a different word in thirty years. 2026. 06
Phonology · Language Universals · Korean 6Different Yet the Same III Placing Korean palatalization beside English flapping reveals the same phonological process working under different surfaces. 2026. 05
Language Universals · Language Acquisition 5Different Yet the Same II Arbitrariness makes languages look far apart; this essay traces where that distance actually comes from. 2026. 05
Language Universals · Korean 4Different Yet the Same I A song title with a double-subject construction opens a look at why an ungrammatical sentence can still read naturally. 2026. 04
Language Change · Language & Society · Korean 3Language Evolves by Collective Intelligence Turning around the yearly complaint that young people are ruining Korean, and showing how change happens by collective choice. 2026. 04
Phonetics · Language Acquisition 2Letting Go of the Obsession with Pronunciation Using a documentary on child language development to ask what adult learners lose when they fixate on pronunciation. 2026. 03
Korean · Language Change · English 1The Future of Korean Starting from grammatical categories Korean lacks, such as English relative pronouns, and asking where Korean is heading. 2026. 03