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.

Learning Korean 10: I told you so

In keeping with my decision to slow down and get my head out of the textbook (and ignore its demands that I keep cramming in vocabulary and new grammar), I've been focusing on one thing for about a month now: the indirect reporting construction. 

This is the "said that" construction, as in "I said that it was cold yesterday."

What makes this difficult (beyond it just being a new construction in Korean) is the different, but related, forms it can take: in the future tense, instead of -다고, -ㄹ거라고 is used

학생이 수업을 다녀요. "The student attends class."

저는 학생이 수업을 다닌다고 했어요. "I said that the student attends class." (Compare with 저는 학생이 수업을 다닐거라고 했어요. "I said that the student will attend class.")

In the future, it's 저는 학생이 수업을 다닐거냐고 물어봤어요. "I asked whether the student will attend class."

저는 학생이 수업을 다니는지 물어봤어요. How this differs from the form above, I don't really understand. I also don't understand what happens when subjects are omitted in these kinds of indirect statements and questions. The subtleties multiply. I'm just trying to keep up with the rudiments.

Incidentally, the direct reporting construction ("I said, quote, it was cold yesterday, unquote.") is very similar to the indirect reporting construction: instead of -다고 it uses 라고.

저는 학생이 수업을 다녀요라고 헀어요. "I said 'the student attends class.'" (Notice how the original sentence—학생이 수업을 다녀요—appears completely intact here, followed by 라고, which acts like a closing quotation mark.)

Anyway, this is what I've been doing: writing sentences and then "converting" them into indirect statements and questions, one after another, hoping the repetition somehow hammers it home.

On Tutoring

I just wrapped up another quarter of volunteer ESL tutoring at Seattle Central College. This was, I think, my fifth quarter, and I still really enjoy it. I like feeling that I can play a role in someone's life, helping to introduce them to English, to Seattle, to the US. I admire these students, who have probably had to overcome far more than I have, and I'm proud to have the chance to help them. Unlike previous quarters, this quarter I had only one student. R is from Somalia. She's peppery. That's the best word I can think of to describe her. She is prone to kvetch, not shy about complaining. But she warmed up to me, and we would laugh as we read together from her workbook or when I quizzed her on past tense forms.

I still think that's one of the toughest things about English. It's just so confounding, the way the language forces you to memorize unguessable exceptions to everyday words, words you'll use and encounter in every English conversation. It seems so mean. R had trouble with this. She couldn't remember some of the most common irregular verbs, and she resorted to a workaround: did leave for left. I told her that didn't sound very natural, but it was good enough for her.

Prepositions in general were difficult, too: I came six o'clock. The truck leave Somalia. She talked him.

Another thing many English learners, including R, have a great deal of trouble with is articles. I'm thinking specifically of the fact that English forbids certain nouns—singular count, or countable, nouns—from appearing naked: *I ate cookie. *We visited museum. *When playing soccer, the man broke finger.

In each of these almost-but-not-quite-English sentences, a singular count noun (cookie, museum, finger) appears without an article. (Actually, what they lack is a determiner, of which articles are one type.) You have to use a determiner with a singular count noun: for instance, I ate the cookie; We visited that museum; When playing soccer, the man broke his finger.

I have seen English learners from all kinds of linguistic backgrounds produce sentences like those, sentences with bare singular count nouns. This particular mistake seems pretty resistant to correction. In my solipsism I always wonder: How can they not hear how... unfinished that sounds? I know that's a dumb reaction. They don't hear it because they haven't yet mastered this arbitrary requirement of English. Just as I haven't yet mastered plenty of arbitrary requirements of, say, Korean (or any arbitrary requirements of Somali).

R and I ended the quarter on a good note. She told me more about her personal story, how she made her sometimes harrowing way to Seattle. And I was reminded, again, of the importance of language. How this person's experiences—all our experiences—are locked away inside until language can send them out into the world.

Korean Planets and the Days of the Week

Warning: This post is likely to be more error-laden than usual.

This is what my Korean teacher and I discovered during a recent lesson. The names of the days of the week and the names of the planets are related. OK. That's not so strange. English has Monday (moon day), Sunday (sun day), and Saturday (Saturn day).

The days of the week in Korean go like so:

Monday: 월요일 (weolyoil)
Tuesday: 화요일 (hwayoil)
Wednesday: 수요일 (suyoil)
Thursday: 목요일 (mokyoil)
Friday: 금요일 (keumyoil)
Saturday: 토요일 (toyoil)
Sunday: 일요일 (ilyoil)

This is where it gets good. Way back, centuries ago, Chinese astronomers could see five planets with the unaided eye, and they named them after the five elements. Mars was named after fire (which came to Korean as 화): 화성. Mercury was named 수성, after water (수). Jupiter was named 목성, after wood (목). Venus was named 금성, gold or metal (금). Saturn was named 토성, after soil (토).

The days of the week are actually named after the planets: Tuesday is Mars day, Wednesday is Mercury day, Thursday is Jupiter day, Friday is Venus day, and Saturday is Saturn day (hey!). That leaves Sunday and Monday, which (hey, again) are named after the sun and moon in Korean, too.

The Problem with English

Learning Korean, I'm usually so focused on a new system—trying to recognize patterns, remember details, and grasp nuance—that I forget I've already mastered a system: English. I'm volunteer-tutoring again, and my student this quarter is from Somalia. She is struggling with English, and today we went over an aspect of English that must drive English learners crazy: the tense system.

Sure, forming the past tense of most verbs is straightforward: add -ed (which has three pronunciations, of course—"t," "d," and "id"—which is its own small annoyance).

walk > walked
stare > stared
compute > computed

But even though this is the standard method (referred to as "weak" by grammarian-type people), there are a great many verbs that don't fall in line:

sing > sang
swim > swam
give > gave

Imagine that you're trying to learn this system, which we should probably call a "system." Maybe by this point, you've tried to find a pattern and you've thought, "Most verbs add -ed, but with some short verbs with an i, you change the vowel to a." Nice try.

fling > flung
bring > brought
hit > hit

How are you supposed to get your head around the fact that the past tense of catch is caught? "Maybe," you might reason, your desperation growing, "words that end in a -tch sound have these bizarre past tense forms?" Words like teach (taught)?

Sure they do.

reach > reached
search > searched
etch > etched

"Maybe common words are more likely to have irregular ("strong") past tense forms? Please!" After all, look at do (did) and see (saw).

But no.

talk > talked
say > said (strange spelling and slightly off pronunciation, but this is basically say + ed)

I'm not even talking about the bizarre words (be and go) that have past-tense forms that come from a different planet. (This happened through a process called suppletion, where two different words get married and adopt a strict division of labor.) And then there's stand (stood) and make (made) and hold (held).

And what happens when you consider the third principle part of verbs, the past participle? This is the form used in the passive and the so-called perfect forms:

watch > watched > watched (this is the typical “weak” verb pattern)
drink > drank > drunk (three different forms of a “strong” verb)
take > took > taken (three different forms that work differently from drink)
sit > sat > sat (two different forms of a “strong” verb)
run > ran > run (two different forms, but following a different pattern from sit > sat > sat)
put > put > put (only one form!)

The patterns go out the window. The bottom line is that while there are indeed generalizations, they will only get you so far. What you'll have to contend with is memorizing the past tense and past participle forms of tons and tons of verbs.

And what about the places where even native English speakers disagree? What's the past tense of spit?

I'm not suggesting I'm the first person to notice all this. I'm probably more like the billion and first. And there's plenty more to say about the patterns and the exceptions and the exceptions to the exceptions.

Professional intellectual and interesting person Steven Pinker wrote a whole book about this, and it's a real page-turner! (It's actually really good. You should read it. It starts with this phenomenon and ends up getting into the mysteries and wonders of the human mind. Seriously.)

I'm going to try to remember all this when I'm struggling with Korean (that is, always and at all times). Every language has its hurdles, and this is definitely one that English sets up in front of beginners. So the problem with English is really the problem of every language: it's hard to learn it on purpose. When you learn it as a baby, it's easy. Yes, you'll make mistakes, but you won't know they're mistakes, and you'll correct them gradually and automatically, as your knowledge of the system grows and becomes more sophisticated.

Then there's prepositions. And the way you can make what are essentially new verbs with them: do in, take over, buy out... And the proper use of articles! And contractions! And...

Learning Korean 9: I was right!

It's a not-so-great thing to be right about, but I was right that the verb 무섭다 (museopta) is confusing. I could never remember whether it means "to be scared" or "to be scary." It seemed like there were plenty of other similar pairs I had had trouble with, but I looked up 무섭다 many times.

At my lesson today, I brought it up with my teacher. Her answer: it can mean both, so my confusion is completely warranted. What a ... relief? Context determines what meaning is intended, and certain situations trigger different verb forms that prevent ambiguity. For instance:

괴물이 집에 왔는데 난 무서웠어! (A monster came to the house! I was scared/scary.) Only "scared" makes sense given the context. 

괴물이 무서워해. (A monster is scared/scary.) Because the (let's call it) 3rd-Person Internal State form of the verb is used—무서워 + 하다—the only possible interpretation is that this is a statement about the monster's internal state: The monster is scared. 

Then there's what happens when the adjectival form (무서운) is used, but I've already forgotten which meaning this suggests. "Scary," I think. 

(There might also be subject/topic nuances, too, but if so, I've forgotten them, and probably didn't understand them anyway.)

Korean Mnemonics 6: juniors and seniors

I have a hard time keeping the Korean words 선배 (seonbae "senior") and 후배 (hubae "junior") straight.

Then I remember (or try to remember) that seonbae and senior start with the same sound.

Sometimes it just takes a while for a word to sink in deep enough that no tricks are needed to keep it lodged firmly in memory. Multiply this problem by hundreds or thousands of tricky, easily confused or forgotten words, and it's a miracle anyone can ever learn another language. How many tricks and shortcuts will I need to come up with? And how am I supposed to remember them?

Listen to Ancient Languages

Have you ever (I mean "always") wanted to know what ancient languages actually sounded like? Here's your chance:

Are these accurate? How should I know? What do I look like, some kind of Proto-Indo-European guy? But it's still fascinating, just to imagine these long-dead tongues brought back to life.

That Thing

It's time for another misguided article in the New York Times about language and how terrible Americans are at it.

This go-around the subject is the @ symbol and what the heck we're supposed to call it. What most of us (most of us Americans) call it, of course, is "the at symbol." The reason for this puzzles the piece's author, which seems strange. I mean, wouldn't you think a journalist could spare fifteen seconds to look it up if he didn't already know? It's called "at" not because it's now most often used in email addresses to signify that So-and-so can be found at, say, the New York Times, but because it's short for "at the rate of" and it was originally used to indicate the rate at which something was charged: 2 lbs. of onions @ $0.69/lb. (Did he actually not know this?)

Anyway, back to the part that really bugs me. After going through the adorable names other languages use for @—in Danish it's elephant trunk A, in Hungarian it's worm, and so on—and being reminded that Americans are a bunch of dopes with no vision, no sense of wonder, we get this pronouncement from a real-live linguist:

"It just doesn't seem like it's a habit of ours as English speakers. If you want to go for some sort of very, very general cultural metaphor, we go for function while the other so-called artistic cultures take an immediately holistic view. Instead of 'What do you do and who are you?' it's more, 'What do you appear to be?'"

Where do you even start with this kind of thing?

First off, "Americans go for function" isn't a metaphor. It's a generalization. 

Second, how is it more "holistic" to name things according to their appearance rather than their function? Or was that word chosen only because it would let her fondle a pet prejudice? I think it's clear that she meant those other cultures (the "artistic" ones!) are clever and cute and charming, and boring-old Americans go for the obvious answer.

(The piece also mentions that quotation marks are called "goose eyes" in Danish and "little paws" in Belorussian. To which I say: Now, hold on. Are you telling me Danes and Belorussians never use more prosaic terms to name quotation marks? I don't buy it for one second.)

Even if we ignore the astounding fecundity of American slang and jargon and confine ourselves to typographical symbols and numbers, we easily see that the piece's thesis is absurd. Here are some "holistic" terms English-speakers use for numbers and typographical symbols:

0  Goose egg
† ‡  Dagger and double dagger
!   Bang
…  Dot-dot-dot (not very clever, no, but also not the functional flavor of boring mentioned in the piece)
“”  Curly quotes (then there are also smart quotes and dumb quotes)
•  Bullet
/  Slash (not something functional, like demarcator)
⌘  (the Apple command key symbol) called clover, pretzel, etc. 
And what about dingbat?

None of these are "functional." They all describe the appearance of the symbols—sometimes playfully—and thus put the lie to the idea that Americans are a bunch of by-the-numbers halfwits. And remember, this is looking only at symbols. Imagine the rich—and virtually endless—stream of jargon from sports, medicine, the military, government, and every other trade, profession, hobby, discipline, and subculture you can name. 

This linguistic abandon and invention was something H. L. Mencken hammered hard in his The American Language, from 1919.

[T]he American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O. K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. [...] The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that “the creative powers of language are even now not extinct.” 

But of more importance than its sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are its extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest as much upon brilliant phrases as upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an incomparable capacity for projecting hidden and often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech.

And then there's this:

American thus shows its character in a constant experimentation, a wide hospitality to novelty, a steady reaching out for new and vivid forms. […] It is producing new words every day, by trope, by agglutination, by the shedding of inflections, by the merging of parts of speech, and by sheer brilliance of imagination. […] One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubblings assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. “When we Americans are through with the English language,” says Mr. Dooley, “it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.” Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English.Bill-board is better than hoarding. Officeholder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public-servant. Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless-watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism): its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough; the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting where two rails join. The English called it a crossing-plate. The Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog.

But that's only H. L. Mencken talking.

You know, it's practically a law: Every generalization about a particular language variety or its speakers is completely wrong. It's true: we call @ by something pretty darn functional. What's your point?

Addendum: I realize now that I might have climbed onto my hobby horse a little prematurely. The piece didn't make a distinction between Americans and other English-speakers. It made a (spurious) distinction between English-speakers and the speakers of other languages. All that Mencken stuff up there is still true—and still worth reading—but not quite as super-duper relevant as I had thought.

Learning Korean 7A: an update

In a recent post, I talked about how difficult the sentences in my Korean textbook are getting. Today, I went over some of them with my teacher, and it was, as usual, humbling.

This was the sentence I discussed in the previous post:

"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."

And this was my Korean translation:

교정하기에 밝는 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람 전혀 충부 안 해요.

And here it is with my errors marked:

교정하기에 밝은 사람이 많지만 문서를 잘 편집할 수 있는 사람은 전혀 안 충분 안 해요. (But that last word would be better translated as 충분하지않아요 instead of the I-guess-it's-clunkier version with 안.)

The first error was in treating 밝다 (be well acquainted) as a verb, instead of an adjective. Then, I should have used the 은/는 topic marker on the second 사람 to mean something like "but these other people, in contrast." And then there was my handling of the negated form of 충분하다.

All in all, I translated that sentence... passably. Of course, it's just one sentence among millions. There's always more to say, more to practice, more to learn, more to improve. (Just ask Sisyphus.)

Ad Watch: why we take off and don't flap

Let's enjoy another Delta Airlines ad narrated by Donald Sutherland.

This one's called "Take Off: Why We Go," and I think they're trolling us now. 

In case you don't want to waste thirty seconds of your time watching an ad on purpose, here's what we got: on top of blurry footage of bands and blotches of color rushing by, Donald Sutherland steadfastly refuses to flap. It's almost heroic.

What’s happening here is not normal; it’s extraordinary.
Two hundred and nineTy-one people, three hundred and fifTy tons,
one hundred and eighTy-six miles per hour. 

(Blah blah blah. A bunch of heavy breathing about pioneers and covered wagons and the wonderfulness of people who sit on planes.) 

EighTy thousand people now, on the ground, in the air, engines on.
Because there is no stop in us, or you. Only go.

In case you're new here, those capital Ts are my way of representing what we (yes, all of us) call aspirated Ts. This is the sound you hear at the beginning of a word like Tuesday. It's very different from the sound we spell with a t, but which we (well, we Americans) pronounce in a word like water. That sound—the one in water—is a flap, and it's what we would expect to hear in the word eighty. But not in a Delta ad. No, sir and/or madam.

Because that would fail to... It would fail to, well... I don't know why they can't do that, but they can't. Like many others, they seem to believe that flapping sends the Wrong Signal. It indicates a lack of precision and maybe even a lack of being able to fly airplanes. It's all very strange.  

Addendum (9/28/15): I didn't include this in the partial transcript of the ad above, but there's another peculiar thing in here, beyond Donald Sutherland's infuriating refusal to flap. At the 0:20 mark:

You're not sure what's on the other side to that time after you land...

If you're anything like me, you're thinking, "Wha?!" On the other side... to something? Did the completely standard English phrase "the other side of something" change when we weren't looking? (But we're always looking!) I simply don't believe that anyone else anywhere has ever said something like, "The remote? Oh, it's on the other side to the couch." Why are advertisements so weird?

The Danger of Dictionaries Part II: The More Dangering

I've talked about the limitations and absurdity of dictionaries before, and I'm back with a new bunch of examples. These all come from a word-finding app called Spellix. When you find a word in the game, you are (sometimes) shown its definition. Now, I have no idea why the game does this. It's of no use as far as gameplay goes. The definitions have nothing to do with scoring, and as they show up after you enter words, all I can think is that the game designers wanted to throw in a little "educational" component.

Which... okay. Fine. The world can always use more "educational," um... components. But the definitions are so strange as to be doubly useless. (But they did provide an additional dimension of entertainment, so that's something.) Here, take a look and see what I mean.

Each of these is such a perfect bauble of superfluous gibberish that it's almost impressive. Why do these things exist? Why did the game designers spend the time (and—oh god—the money?) to produce these "definitions"? They are of no utility for anything. Where they aren't tautologous (SICKS as people who are sick and SING as, basically, to sing), they are almost sort of accurate, in a well-meaning but fevered way (see CAT and BEEPS). And then you come to OGRES, the definition of which—as they say—isn't even wrong. Everything about this is gloriously, breathtakingly unlike anything of any value. Even if ogre had something to do with numbers, who on earth would describe any number as the sum of 7 and 1? And GEN as an informal term for information? Wh—? I mean—? Why did—?

Learning Korean 8: More on KDS

In the same vein as Learning Korean 7, I give you this brief disquisition on Korean Discouragement Syndrome (popularly known as KDS). I have been slowly crawling into Chapter 5, and I'm finding more thorny constructions, this time involving gerunds and nominalized sentences. For instance:

금년 봄이 이렇게 추운 걸 믿을 수 없어.

Keumnyeon bomi iroke chu-un geol mideul su eopseo.

Literally, phrase-by-phrase, this is:

This year's spring—like this—being cold—believe can't. Or, "I can't believe this spring is so cold."

Trying to follow along in my textbook is a matter of deliberate concentration as I pick my way through the sentence. It's only nine words (and nowhere near as complex as sentences get in this chapter), but I might as well be deciphering cuneiform. The basic idea behind this and other sentences in the chapter is simple enough. But when I try to actually do these sentences, I run into a brick wall. And it's only through careful work that I can crack them. How different from truly understanding a language, where it's rarely a matter of anything more than hearing and understanding. The two—the input and the output—seem almost identical, we travel from one to the other so fast.

I can translate simple (written) sentences (simple subjects, objects, conjunctions, and verbs—and maybe a relative clause thrown in here and there), pretty quickly, often almost as fast as I can read them. But anything more complex is a real slog. Which is why I'm still suffering from KDS.

Learning Korean 7: Painstaking and Unnatural

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.