I've been thinking about this topic for a long time, and I keep thinking I should start keeping track of good examples of what I'm thinking about. And I keep not keeping track. But something came up today that reminded me of this. Here it is:
Languages are more than just words and grammar.
It's brilliant in its simplicity and the fact that billions of people have already noticed it.
Over and over I learn that doing Korean properly is about much more than having a big vocabulary (which I don't) and mastering an encyclopedia's worth of grammatical constructions (which I haven't). And it's more than understanding all the superficially nonsensical idioms and exceptions that Korean and all languages accumulate. It's also—crucially—knowing how Korean (read: any language) does stuff.
Korean doesn't say, "That guy is tall." It says, "That guy's height is big." Korean doesn't say, "I caught a cold." It says, "I'm caught in a cold." Korean doesn't say, "Oh no—I'm late." It says, "Oh no—I was late." Korean doesn't say, "There are a lot of potatoes here." It says, "Potatoes abound."
I was chatting with a Korean friend who had just arrived in Taiwan for a vacation. She told me she was very tired. Being the geographically stupid American, I thought this could be jet lag. (There's actually only a one-hour time difference.)
큰 시차가 있어요? ("Is there a big time difference?")
She told me that while my question is intelligible, it's weird. I had forgotten simple stuff about how you do Korean. Instead of asking, "Is there a big time difference?" you would ask something like, "Is the time difference big?" or "Does the time difference... (um... ) express itself greatly?"
시차가 커요?
시차가 많이 나요?
This kind of difference between English and Korean—and presumably between any two languages—can be found in approximately 40 hundred million different contexts and types of statements.
Addendum (6/15/16): At today's lesson, I learned another one of these weird you-would-never-predict-it differences. In English you can say, "When I stopped eating pumpkin muffins, I discovered..." But in Korean, you don't "stop doing something." You "start not doing it."
운동하지 않기 시작했을때... ("When I stopped exercising..." Literally, "When I started not exercising...")
