I've been at this Korean business—with varying degrees of diligence—for two years now. (My first lesson was two years and one week ago today!) And trying to do some homework I was struck by how difficult and not-at-all-automatic some of this still is. How far removed it is from my experience with my native language. I guess that's part of what it means to have a native language—that it's original, central, essential. It's not that I never have to stop and think about what I want to say and the best way to say it in English. It's that I usually have to do that in Korean. For me, Korean is still mostly happening at the level of deliberate, analytical behavior, not reflexive, fluent response. So, translating this sentence in my textbook:
"There are plenty of people who are well-acquainted with proofreading work, but there are never enough who can do document editing well as well."
Here's the translation I came up with:
교정하기에 밝는 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람 전혀 충부 안 해요.
Apart from the fact that I had to look up a bunch of vocabulary, and that I wasn't sure how to handle that "as well," and that I'm not confident about how I translated "never," and that I don't know whether I translated the gerund "proofreading" properly—so, apart from the details—I had to approach this with such painstaking attention that it left me feeling exhausted and discouraged. And it makes it hard to understand how anyone can produce or understand a sentence like this easily and with the kind of... thoughtlessness native speakers can indulge in. I feel like I need a calculator just to get to the end of a sentence like this. It's like solving a math problem.
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