English Language Learners meet-up June 27, 2017

I've been volunteering every week at an English language learners meet-up for a long time now. I thought it would be interesting* to record all the vocabulary I taught people today. It's a snapshot of the life of an English learner.

• drizzle
• soothing
• newcomer
• prejudice
• (right) over your head
• period piece
• twilight
• dusk
• dawn
• air quotes
• sarcasm
• irony
• chicxulub
• comet
• solar
• lunar
• eclipse
• meteor shower
• obsessed
• "beat the heat"
• pant
• bless
• shrine
• thumbprint
• lifeguard
• "have a good nose for ___"
• insight
• Independence Day
• the Fourth of July
• cul-de-sac
• dead end
• central

*I was right! It's fascinating!

Preposition Watch: in advance of

When did this happen? When did people on the radio stop saying "prior to" or "before" or even "in the run-up to" and start saying "in advance of"?

I'm talking about this: "In advance of Comey's testimony, Republicans refuse to appear on Morning Joe to defend Trump."

Yes, yes, of course: language changes all the time. I say that all the time, and it's as unproblematic as it is trite. Still, I don't like "in advance of."

It's also possible that this phrase has been around since forever, but I've only recently started to notice it. I suspect this is true of "meantime" used for "meanwhile." (As in, "Meantime, I'll be out here waiting in the car.") That feels newish to me also—I first became aware of it about 15 years ago—but maybe people have always said it.

Learning Korean 13: You can't hear a goat in Korean!

Talk about breaking news! In Korean, you can't hear a goat! Not only that, but you can't smell a flower either! With a story this powerful, is it any wonder I'm coming out of semiretirement?!

Here's the deal: direct word-for-word translations of sentences like these don't work in Korean:

1) Today, I smelled a flower.
2) Yesterday, I heard a goat in the garden.

1A) 저는 오늘 꽃을 맡았어요.
2A) 저는 어제 염소가 정원에서 들렸어요.

You can't smell flowers or anything except... smells. You can "smell" the smell of something, but you can't "smell" the thing itself. Likewise with hearing things; you can't hear a goat or a penguin or the tender breeze in the hazel thicket (for instance if you're a hobbit). You can only "hear" the sound of something.

3) Today, I smelled (the scent of) a flower.
4) Yesterday, I heard (the sound of) a goat in the garden.

Nobody would say 3) or 4), but you need to say things like 3A) and 4A):

3A) 저는 오늘 꽃의 냄새를 맡았어요.
4A) 저는 어제 염소의 소리가 정원에서 들렸어요.

So go forth and smell the smells and hear the sounds!

(Bonus content: Why am I talking about goats? Because this point of grammar came up when I was talking with a Korean friend about a goat sound effect used over and over in the Korean TV show 응답하라 1988. And now I can't stop keeping track of all the goat sound effects in each episode!)

The 46th TOPIK: a happy update

The scores are in. On the 46th TOPIK, administered 4/16/16, I got a 153, which puts me in the exalted company of the "High Beginners" of level 2! I am officially still a beginner! (I had thought I'd get a 152, and I beat that prediction by more than 0.6%!

My reading score was 88/100 (the average for the 46th TOPIK was 61.40). My listening score was as low as I thought it'd be, at 65/100. (The average was 69.52.)

But remember? My score on April 2015's test was a mere 110.

I crushed my record!

Learning Korean 12: more than just words and grammar

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...")

The 46th TOPIK

I took the 46th TOPIK today. (Remember way back when, when I took the 40th? Good times.)

I did better this time around. As I was taking the test, I'd mark down all the questions I wasn't too confident about. I estimate that I scored a 152, which would be enough to make me a level 2. (Cue the trumpets.) Last year, right after the test, I estimated that I'd scored only 100.

The listening portion was still unbearable. But I was able to get through all the reading questions with time to spare.

I even wore a watch, which I never do. And I didn't need to: I was sitting right under a big clock. And I practiced vocab for a while before the test, also. So, a year and some vocab practicing might have been enough to catapult me into level 2. We'll know for sure in a while, when the scores are announced.

Learning Korean 11: more invisible nuance

That's the thing about language: it's pretty complicated. (This is something I discovered on my own. I am brilliant that way.) People are complicated, the things they might wish to express are complicated, and their social environment is complicated. These things conspire to render language complicated. I'm convinced that many nuances of Korean will be forever beyond me, even after (if?) I become more proficient. For instance, the difference between -는지 and -냐고 in sentences like 공부한 학생이 시험을 잘 볼건지 물어봤어요 ("He asked whether a student who studies will do well on the test") and 공부한 학생이 시험을 잘 볼거냐고 물어봤어요 ("He asked if a student who studies will do well on the test").

At least, these are the different (?) meanings my teacher would assign to those sentences. Other Koreans have told me the sentences feel different but in ways that are very difficult to express. Which is fair. Lots of these kinds of nuances are very hard to sort out and explain. (I've experienced this many times when I'm working with English language learners. They will ask how these two words or constructions differ, and sometimes, even if I'm absolutely certain they do differ, I really can't say how they differ.) So I'm not uncomfortable when I encounter things like this in Korean. I just toss them on the pile of things I don't really understand, halfheartedly resolving to revisit them later. But this case. I'm not sure.

Because I don't feel any difference in those two English sentences, the one with whether and the one with if. There are certainly some cases where the choice of whether or if affects the meaning. (And I'm aware that proper/standard/fussy usage might rule against if and in favor of whether in some other cases.)

Compare:

A. Let me know if you need to borrow my chainsaw.
B. Let me know whether you need to borrow my chainsaw.

A could be paraphrased as "If in fact you do need to borrow my chainsaw, let me know," while B could be paraphrased as "Let me know—one way or the other—about your need to borrow my chainsaw."

Two very different meanings. (Of course, yes, sometimes they're used in exactly the same ways.)

But in sentences like this, I don't hear any difference:

C. The cashier asked if I needed a receipt.
D. The cashier asked whether I needed a receipt.

I think C and D mean exactly the same thing. (If I were editing C—and the context wasn't informal or loose—I would probably "convert" it to D. So, yes, there might be some stylistic difference, but I don't think there's any semantic or logical difference.)

Which brings me back to the Korean distinction, supposedly a whether/if distinction. Basically, I'm not buying it. There might, in fact, be some nuance there, but I don't think resorting to whether and if will help us make sense of it. I think Korean speakers just have a hard time formulating and expressing the nature of this distinction, so it might just remain invisible to me for a while (forever). It reminds me of my attempts to explain the difference between will and might to Koreans. Apparently, it's not something Korean captures neatly. Although, now that I think of it, it seems much clearer than this supposed whether/if business.