Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language.
맥주 한 잔 주세요
Beer one please
화장실은 어디에요?
Toilet where?
와이파이 있어요?
wifi is here?
You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!
Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question.
E.g.,
오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open.
오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today?
오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today.
오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I heard [someone] saying that restaurant is probably open today.
오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들으셨다면서요? I heard that you heard that the restaurant is probably open today, is that true?
오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 말한 분이 누군지 찾아서 좀 따져야겠어! I'm going to find whoever told me that the restaurant would open today, and set the record straight!
오늘 그 식당 열 것 같을 리가 없잖아요! There's no way the restaurant is even open today!
In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.
> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.
Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always suspected that it might feel significantly different to construct sentences in languages with different word ordering, and I think that confirms that.
Just for your curiosity, my favourite explanation of Japanese sentence structure is that it is an outside in language, where English is inside out. Since Japanese doesn't follow a conrete word order like SVO, it was very helpful to see it that way.
The kids had lunch in the park at 12pm today.
vs
The kids, Today at 12pm in the park had lunch.
The grander more ephemeral concepts go first in Japanese, with some common exceptions (persons tend to go at the start as it does in the example). In English we tend to start with the closest concept and work our way out.
That really helped my understanding and sentence creation.
Some languages don’t even use word order as the primary mechanism for forming sentences. Latin and Ancient Greek are two examples. They are “inflected” meaning you change the word to show how it functions in a sentence.
Pronouns in English still function this way a little (for example he = subject, him = object).
Yep. Take German for example. Any subordinate clause puts all verbs at the end in reverse order (SOV; it used to be all clauses but as with many languages it started to shift toward SVO).
I like cats, because cats like me.
translates to
Ich mag Katzen, weil Katzen mich mögen.
which directly translates to
I like cats, because cats me like.
This is a simple example but gets sufficiently complex as the sentence does. All of the verbs get pushed to the end, which as an English speaker means you have to mentally construct the sentence first and know which verbs you need to use prior to using them.
It gets further complicated because verbs also change the tense of the sentence, which ultimately dictates which articles to use (der/die/das/den/des/etc. - all meaning "the" - or ein/einen/eine/eines/etc. - all meaning "a").
And yes, native speaking Germans screw it up all the time, too. Just like English speakers mess up "a" and "an", "me and my friends", "your/you're", etc.
What makes you think that native German speakers screw it up "all the time"? I'm German and I did not encounter any of these mistakes in years, despite being a grammar nazi.
Using the wrong register is a form of humor as well just like in English and other languages but with different impact due to the politeness level being so important to the syntactic structure just like in Japanese. Being overly polite or using too low of a register works much better than sarcasm for comedic purposes for reasons I can’t quite explain. In English sarcasm is commonly how I joke around and involves an intonation cue but it doesn’t really work in Korean even with intonation (possibly because intonation and vowel lengthening is used for a lot of word distinction perhaps although homonyms exist in basically all languages) and if you try it native speakers will oftentimes have trouble telling if you’re serious or not. Although these days due to Western influences IMO most Koreans understand sarcasm as a style of humor and can apply it for all languages although for older generations it’s going to be less natural. The country’s had massive, massive social and economic changes in the past 100 years, it’s kind of wild
There are many levels of honorifics, from very low form to very polite form. Most aren’t used on a daily basis though, just like how most people don’t speak like they’re a lawyer addressing a courtroom.
Close. But 드시게 is not correct in that place because its an honorific form given to yourself when you're trying to honor the other person. And I'd rather use 감히 instead of 겸손히, which can be roughly translated into "dare to"
Another Korean here. Usually in Korea, one could refer to an unknown someone as "선생님(teacher)". "각하", on the other hand, has been referred to the President of Korea. So it really sounds weird to a Korean. When someone calls you "각하". If I were to be a customer, then I would be called "고객님". Where "고객" means customer and "님" is like "sama" in Japanese, and "sir" in English.
The rules for how you speak to people and how you address people you are speaking about are different.
The whole thing is a bit more complex than suffix changes alone especially with more out there titles but generally speaking,
I think you've seen a bit on how the endings would change depending on your relationship to the hearer.
For the latter(addressing people you're speaking about)
For instance, You would basically never call an acquaintance just by name
Take the name 김영철
If you were on relatively equal social standing, you would generally address 김영철 as 김영철 씨 or 영철 씨
If you wanted to take it a step further in respect, you would replace 씨 with 님
For a senior in age or experience in say the workplace, it would become 선배 but this can be used to address the person on its own without the name attached.
There are also different words for how you would address different members of the family. Unlike in English, you would basically never call an older brother or sister by their actual name. It's more a generic brother or sister word that changes depending on if the speaker is male or female.
오빠 - female referring to older brother
형 - male referring to older brother
누나 - male referring to older sister
언니 - female referring to older sister
For royalty, there'll be different titles for different members of the royalty.
> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.
This is quite interesting to hear, but I assume you mean that you always knew if you were going ask a question before you asked it. So the issue was the actual construction of the sentence itself?
If not, there are plenty of ways to bail out of a statement midway through a sentence.
- Korean is more efficient than English... right?
- Korean is more efficient than English, isn't it?
- Korean is more efficient than English? (raising intonation at the end)
In a sense, sure I guess my brain almost always knows whether I wanted a question or not - after all, native English speakers have no problem asking questions. However, it's hard to get used to it, when I've never done it before.
It's like a habit. Imagine you make coffee every morning - after a while it becomes second nature and you don't even think about what you're doing, you just get up and mindlessly start the coffee grinder. Once in a while your girlfriend visits, and she wants milk in the coffee, no problem, I'll pour some milk on her cup at the end.
And one day you have a different girlfriend, and she doesn't like coffee at all, so when she's visiting you have to make tea! So you just get up, start grinding the coffee, and half a minute later, "Oh damn, not again!" Even though making coffee and making tea take about the same effort, it just throws a wrench in your morning routine until you get used to it, which make take a long time.
> If not, there are plenty of ways to bail out of a statement midway through a sentence.
Sure you can also do it in English, but you can't do it as gloriously as in Korean, where you can start the same sentence and end up with:
한국어는 영어보다 더 효율적입니다. Korean is more efficient than English.
한국어는 영어보다 더 효율적...(read the room, oh no, bail out)...이라는 헛소리를 하는 사람이 다 있더라고요 하하하! => I found an idiot saying Korean is more efficient than English, ha ha!
Working with many IT workers from Indian origin, their English always frustrated me in that when they ask questions they won't say it in the interrogative form. It was always in the declarative.
"We are deploying the code, right?" versus "Are we deploying the code?"
"This is Boolean, correct?" versus "Is this Boolean?"
Is this cultural, or are they afraid to ask questions? It's almost as if by stating the question in the declarative form they are hedging their doubt. As an American English speaker, I find this annoying. If you don't know, be bold to ask straight, don't doublespeak it.
English actually has this one backwards. Just think about the concept of a question mark. You're already specifying at the end of your sentences "the preceding was a question". Some languages have a literal spoken grammatical word that functions just like a question mark at the end of a sentence. In Chinese this word is "ma" (specific to yes/no questions). Also in Chinese, the way to pose a more general question mirrors the answer you are trying to get. You just substitute the information you don't have with the question words who/what/when/where/why. Eg "The bathroom is where?" "The bathroom is out back". When you stop and think about it, its actually kind of strange for English to pull the question words to the front, completely changing its sentence grammar for this one particular use case. I can't think of any other context where you can pull the verb to the front, violating the usual SVO ordering. English is weird, they aren't being timid (I think), you're projecting an interpretation of how they phrase things which actually has a simple linguistic explanation.
I suspect they meant what they said - you're probably used to deciding that your statement is going to be a question because you must in English. You are probably forgetting all of the times you have started saying something only to realize that you werent sure of what you were talking about.
It does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity.
From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages.
> English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages.
I think that it's the grammar rules that make English fairly efficient, and also effectively add to its vocabulary, because word order in English is so strong that it twists whatever word you put in a particular position into whatever part of speech it needs to be. In less order-based languages you have to learn a bunch of elaborate formulas to change the word; in English, it's basically just Subject, Verb, Object and a few mathematical rules about commas, prepositions and conjunctions to make that basic structure recursive or flowery. All of English's core vocabulary is horrifyingly irregular, and you can ignore almost all of that irregularity, prefixes and suffixes, and still make yourself pretty easily understood.
I think the massive vocabulary of English makes it less dense. We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. We find ourselves arguing about the innuendo around words or the "actual definitions" of words almost more than material issues, constantly invoking contradictory authorities. We're also constantly repeating ourselves and pretending like we've understood because using obscure words is a sign of intelligence, and not understanding them a sign of stupidity.
Romance languages seem to have a lot fewer words with specific meanings, and do most of their playing with grammar (making a lot of sentences into horrifying mazes.) And irt the center and north in Germanic Europe, the most interesting thing about "Uncleftish Beholding" is that to English speakers it reads like stupid cavemen talking about magic, but it's basically a unit-by-unit direct translation of how Danes, Norwegians and Swedes really talk. English speakers never use the common word for anything if they want to sound like they know what they're talking about.
an aside: I've always heard that Vietnamese is the most efficient by syllable. IIRC some paper came up with a metric where it was about 1.4x more efficient than English. There was also someone who figured out that universally, human languages expressed ideas at the same rate, but the people who spoke less efficient languages just talked faster.
> We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things.
They could have meant different things at some point in time. A Language can change drastically with time and if the people using the words stop differentiating between them it may appear as if it was only a game of pretend. This only becomes a problem when someone that doesn't see a difference in meaning communicates with someone that does.
Oh, and there's one really succinct way of expression that's not found in English:
One can say something like 난 라면 - literally "I am ramen" (or something like that - it's a bit fuzzy because the "be" verb is omitted). It would be a ridiculous sentence by itself, but if your friend just asked "I'll have noodles, how about you?" then it's a perfectly fine response.
Similarly you could even say 난 프랑스 ("I am France") if the question was "I visited New York this summer, it was really nice, did you go somewhere?"
I may want to add that as a person who had a lot of exposure to Korean (but is not native). Directly translating for instance “나는 라면” with the example context you mentioned, feels like „in my case, Ramen“. The 는/은 is describing the 나 in a way that is contrasting whatever was said in the current context. It is certainly used for saying something that is different from the other. „Well in MY case, it is …“, but it may work for other cases too, I am not totally sure.
Isn't 난 just 나 (I) + ㄴ (topic marker)? So it seems like 난 라면 should be translated more or less as "As for me, ramen" and 난 프랑스 as "As for me, France".
You are absolutely correct - I oversimplified. On the other hand, nobody says "As for me, ramen" in English (it's not even shorter than "I'll have ramen"), so there's that.
You could just say "Ramen", "Ramen for me", "I want ramen", or maybe even "Me, ramen". But I get your point - it's more common in English to use a longer sentence. The same thing is pointed out about Japanese too - "watashi wa ramen" for "As for me, ramen" - it has the same topic-comment structure as Korean.
How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? If someone came up to me in English and said "toilet where?" I'd presume they're either rude or English isn't their first language.
There are formal and informal ways to say thing in Korean, for every day stuff it's often just a matter of changing the suffix, for some stuff it's a different word, for example 감사합니다 Kamsahamnida is thank you to anyone, but 고마워 gomawo (thanks) only to a friend.
While I agree “restroom?” Is perfectly valid, you could also say “the restroom is where?” Which puts the important noun first and makes it a question later. It’s not particularly formal, which in America at least is completely unnecessary for day to day life.
But arguably putting the key information at the start of a sentence is not ideal as it gives the listener no time to context switch. If I ask a busy waiter in a restaurant "where would I find the toilet", they may well not fully hear the "where would...
" but they'll know for sure what I've asked by the end of the request. Which is presumably why we often prefix statements with "excuse me, but..." and the like...I assume that must happen in Korean too.
주세요 doesn’t actually mean “please”. It’s just the conjugated version of “to give”.
So it’s more like saying “beer, one, give me” in a polite way. And it’s cool, not because of the English translation (which yes, is just as simple), but as a showcasing of the composability of Korean.
Replace 주세요 (joo-se-yo) with any other verb and the sentence works.
For example, 마시다 (ma-si-da) is the verb[0] for “to drink”, so when you drop the “da” and conjugate it with the polite present tense “yo”, the sentence now becomes 맥주 한잔 마시요, or “I’m drinking a beer”.
And then as another show of Korean’s flexibility, don’t change anything about that sentence, but add a question mark and “맥주 한잔 마시?” For it to mean “would you like a beer?”.
Very cool and succinct.
[0]- you can identify Korean verbs because they all end in 다 (da). You can easily conjugate them to present tense by dropping the “da” and replacing it with “yo”. You’ll also notice that each block of characters in Korean maps to exactly one syllable, with no exceptions — pretty cool!
A large part of this is cultural, not linguistic. Japanese syntax has just as much structure to it as English syntax. The difference is that ellipsis is socially accepted in Japan to a much greater extent than in Anglophone societies. You could generate abbreviated sentences in English, which listeners could understand just as well, but people would think you were being rude.
And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents
"Do they have friends ?"
"Do you have a friend ?"
"Do you have friends ?"
"Does he have a friend ?"
And so on.
Plurality as a special marker doesn't really exist. Possessive and Article Determiners don't really exist either. Articles don't exist at all. Possessive markers are few and only used when surrounding context might not be enough to convey the needed information.
You might ask, well how would you know which of those equivalents 친구 있어요 means ?
It's context. Korean is highly context dependent. There is no way to tell before reading or hearing the surrounding context.
>Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?
Oh boy. Let's just say formality and politeness is baked into the language.
Words and sentence/phrase suffixes change depending on your age and relationship with who you're taking to.
친구 있어요 (meaning I have a friend/They have friends etc without the question mark) becomes 친구 있어 speaking to a close friend and 친구 입니다 speaking to someone much older than you (or in a formal setting with say your boss)
There are also on how to address people you refer to in a sentence separate from rules on how you address people you speaking to.
Anyone can argue that any language is efficient based on some ability to express a (relatively) complex idea in (relatively) few words.
In Sanskrit, for instance, one can express entire metaphyiscal/philosophical systems in a single word, using compounds, and in philosophical commentaries this is actually quite frequent (which is what makes reading philosophy in Sanskrit so difficult, because everything is so condensed). The compounds can be of an arbitrary length, and feature extraordinarily complex syntactic system that allows for such complexity of expression. See the Wikipedia article below, for more.
On the other hand, the question template build up can be useful when initiating contact with someone. They have the space of “Could I have…” or equivalent in other languages to get tuned in to the fact you’re asking a question. Much of speech comprehension is being able to anticipate what’s coming.
No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly.
In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise.
Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ?
And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents
"Do they have friends ?"
"Do you have a friend ?"
"Do you have friends ?"
"Does he have a friend ?"
And so on.
If you wanted to say,
"I have a friend"
"He has friends"
"They have a friend" etc, you'd simply remove the question mark and change the tone of the last syllable (when speaking).
친구 있어요.
The exact meaning would have to be divided from surrounding context.
Lots of composability that simply doesn't exist in English.
Hold up, if information is being encoded on tone, and tonal marks aren't part of the written language, then you've at least somewhat bait and switched us. Its not literally one identical phrase for 4 situations. Its several slightly different phrases that happen to not have their difference transcribed within this writing system. The information is still there!
It's not tone - at least not in the same sense Chinese is a tonal language. Standard Korean does not have tones. Maybe a better term would be intonation: it's similar to how the same English sentence could have multiple meanings, e.g., "I certainly did not see him" vs. "I certainly did not see him."
GP's example sentence would have just two different way to say it, either a plain statement or a question. In either case the pronoun is omitted, so you're supposed to infer it from context.
The great irony here is that the one time I truly started to understand Chinese tones was when it was explained in terms of how English speakers already subconsciously use tones. I think I get what you mean. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Like English, Korean uses tones as a channel for metadata, not as a direct part of the encoding set. You can annotate parts of the sentence with tones, such as marking something a question or highlighting certain information as important, but you can't wholesale change whats being said.
Yes. Older forms of Korean were either tonal or had a pitch accent like Japanese or Swedish, and the original form of hangeul included accent marks. Some dialects of Korean still have a pitch accent.
Curious how your definition of efficiency is somehow "by not encoding information about the subject, such as their relation or plurality, we are able to use less words than a language that does encode that information".
it's more that such information about the subject and whatever else is not stated until necessary and not more times than necessary.
If a mother were talking to the counsellor in school about her son's performance in school, and she suddenly asked 친구 있어요 ?, then she's almost certainly asking "Does he have friends?" and so on. If she happens to not be speaking about her son for whatever reason, she can make that known too by adding an extra word. Point is that it happens only when it needs to.
In English, Pulling up a "Friend Have?" will get a mark of confusion no matter the surrounding context. English doesn't prime you to expect information conveyed in such a manner.
Similar story in Japanese, which is also high-context and encodes less information explicitly. Listeners have to do more interpretation using context than in English, since sentences out of context can mean more things.
You can even get two of them down to a single syllable.
"Beer?"
"Loo?"
"Wifi?"
Written with an extra character which indicates tone. English has the meaningless 'do' but even that can be done away with should you so choose.
I always think like whenever these comparisons are made people they're from people who must think in quite stilted English because of their education.
There are some interesting comparisons to be made but comparing highly formalised english as though it's the only way to speak it is not how they should be made.
눈물 = 눈 + 물 = eye + water = tears
물고기 = 물 + 고기 = water + meat = fish (although this only means the animal, not the food, which is weird. 생선 is the fish meat like cow v beef)
돼지고기 = 돼지 + 고기 = pig + meat = pork
etc.
there is a lot of other examples I'm forgetting but its cool.
The modification of the verb root to denote tense and formality as well is pretty intuitive. Korean is a great language. The problematic things IMO are the counting of items and the uses of the Korean v Chinese number systems, plus the random Hanja here and there.
Isn't English (and other Germanic languages) very similar in its propensity for noun+noun compounds? There is crab meat, horse meat, shark meat, etc. And if it weren't for the Norman Conquest, pork would probably be called pig meat. After all, it is simply called Schweinefleisch in German.
Programmers love to come up with abstractions that they see in other fields. 99% of the time these are well-known inside the field. Reminds me of that medical paper that got published where the researcher rediscovered numerical integration.
>Perhaps that's because it is not inherently Linguistics?
I can admit that linguistics is a specific field of knowledge and has certain methodologies associated with it that are not always fitting or practical for all forms of analysis, but I think it's still inappropriate to say that any investigation into the operation of (spoken) language is not in some way a form of "linguistics."
What's nice is that it's immediately legible if you already know how to read, but you also realize how inherently slower it is. One of the nicest parts of Korean (and other east asian languages) is that each block is always a single syllable.
One problem is that Korean syllable structure is not as easy as one os lead to believe, from what I heard. And whether syllable is a meaningful unit is debatable.
As a Korean & English speaking person (Korean Australian) I've grown to love my mother tongue more as I've gotten older, spoke English more, read more Korean books, tried to analyze the differences in languages and communication approaches etc. I just "feel" Korean as a language is, so different to English - more, expressive? nuanced? I'm sure there are plenty of other languages out there that are like that. I don't know how knowing these two very different languages have helped me and shaped me, but I'm certain it's been positive.
The phoenetic aspects of Hangul makes it just about my favorite language. It just feels so natural to say the words and phrases. French, german russian feel so unnatural on the other hand and english accents in england feel like I am pretending to be rich or of a higher class lol. Hangul is peculiar for me because japanese and mandarin both have close cultural influence and ties on Korea but it sounds very different.
I know RPN and found it pretty clear what he's getting at. The stack and parentheses are pretty common way of expressing it order of ops. Don't know Korean though.
It's probably because Naver is a Korean website, with some English localization. In Korean, it's fine to split a word to a new line almost anywhere. I'm guessing it's using the same configuration even for English.
Expanding on the other answer, Koreans play Tetris with their letters, such that almost every "character" is a syllable-length block. eg. the food 떡볶이 tteok'bokk'i is written with three. You can just break a word anywhere because of how the script works. That's not the case with English.
It's the same in Japan with English. People wear things with English words to make themselves look cool, just as a westerner might with kanji, and the actual meaning of the word is secondary to the point of being entirely inconsequential, which is why you might see some hilarious stuff on your way around town.
In Korean fashion too pretty much all writing is in English too. It's all grammatically correct-ish but it reads unnaturally to a native English speaker.
Kind of? Certainly many countries “fetishize” American culture, to a degree. Same with French and Italian culture (especially as it relates to fashion and food). Some stuff is just popular? Certainly things related to Korean and Japanese cultures are popular throughout Asia, as they are in the West, right now.
Yes, this occurs in every industrialized culture that is decently connected to the rest of the world. Anglophone cultures just do it in the most prominent and cringey way possible.
맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please
화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where?
와이파이 있어요? wifi is here?
You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!