Notes on Learning Korean

If you didn't know, I've been tudying Korean pretty hard-core...most every day I do at least some studying, and I get my boss at work to tutor me a couple times a week....so I wrote up some notes on the experience. I tried to keep them low on the technical content scale...

A Different (intimidating looking) Alphabet

I guess this one is a no-brainer. However, though admitting this may take some of the wow factor away from the whole white guy speaking Korean thing, this is actually the least of my worries, it didn't take me very long to learn and I could teach it to you in three or four lessons. Really. I'm serious, to anyone. There's a reason they have the lowest illiteracy rate in the world. 

Nay means Yes

It would be bad enough for a normal English speaker since Nay is always associated with a negative reponse (voting etc.) But for me it's worse cause Nay means 'no' in Dutch and 'yes' in Korean. My first while in Korea it was really confusing....and when I was speaking Dutch at Christmas it was confusing in reverse

Two Sets of Numbers

Yes, you heard that right. They have two sets of numbers. For everything. One is inherited from China, and one is Korean. On top of learning the numbers themselves, one has to learn which numbers are used with which objects, because they are wrong with the other set of numbers. You would think they would understand no matter which word for "three" that you use. But they don't. The dumbest thing is telling time....hours and minutes use different number systems...so if you wanted to say 3:03 you would say    "three (chinese) hour, three (korean) minute"

Lack of Subjects. Korean likes to be logical and efficient, and leave out unneccessary information. For the most part it is logical...save for a few points (redundant dual number sytems anyone?) The lack of subjects however are confusing for an English speaker....as a general rule, subjects are omitted in Korean. So if you wanted to ask if Helga was going to the store you wouldn't say "is she going to the store?" you would just say "store go?" and leave everyone to infer who you are talking about. Therefore, the only difference between "I like cheese!" and "do you like cheese?" is your intonation, because in Korean they would both be "cheese like" either as a statement or a question. When my Korean friends leave out subjects I often find myself looking around to make sure I'm the only one they could be referring to...confusing as it sounds, it doesn't seem to be an issue for them.  

Verb Endings (shudder)

This language and culture is so saturated in politeness/respect for elders & superiors (i.e. Confucian hierarchical relationships) that you cannot say anything without first deciding how polite/formal/informal you wish to be...this affects every verb that you will use.....and it's really not cool to speak informally to superiors/elders/strangers that may possible somehow be your superior. So I always err on the side of caution. The politeish most common one is just -yo. So you add that to every verb.  The verb for go is 'ka' so if I asked my boss "odi ka?" (where are you going) without the 'yo' attached she would not be impressed. Likewise if I ask a kid, "odi kayo?" they would get really confused and blink at me.... 

Another example....what I'm saying in that picture is "congratulations" but the "합니다" part is an uber polite verb ending. 

I could go on to a discussion of how they don't have adjectives (they have adjectival verbs) 

Or how particles are the worst thing in the world...[gah, they have particles for everything...attached to basically every noun is a particle marking it as the subject of the sentence, the object of the sentence etc. ] 

But since I don't think many of you are linguistic nerds I will spare you further torture