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.

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.

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?

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.

Learning Korean 6: Relative Clauses and Insults

"You big hair-having, ugly shirt-wearing, too loud gum-chewing son of a bitch."

This is exactly how Korean relative clauses work. By which I mean, this is the word order of relative clauses in Korean. So every time I form relative clauses, first I have to translate what I want to say into that kind of swaggering throw-down, which makes relative clauses in Korean a joy.

"The man who chews his food too loud and wears ugly shirts" becomes, basically, "the too-loud-food-chewing, ugly-shirt-wearing man," and that's just cool.

음식을 너무 고성으로 씹는 추한 셔츠를 입는 남자

Actually, that might not be quite right, but my point stands. And if anyone reads this one day and wants to make something of it, they're nothing but a too-much-Korean-knowing, bad-tennis-playing, wet-paint-sitting fool.

Korean Mnemonics 5: The Mnemonic That Wasn't

This was all set to be the best Korean Mnemonics post yet. (Which is saying something!) There are a number of similar words for different kinds of responses (reply to written inquiry, reply to spoken question, immediate response, and so on), and I was having trouble keeping them straight.

I realized that one of these words—for "incorrect answer"—came premade in English: 오담 (odam, or, like, "oh damn" sort of). Perfect! I felt pretty good about this for maybe a whole day. Before I realized I had misread this and all the other "reply" words. It's not 오담 (odam). It's 오답 (odap), which doesn't lend itself quite so readily to any memory tricks.

For the record, here are the other words in my list (which I have basically decided to forget):

답 (dap, "answer to written question")
응답 (eungdap, "response, usually immediate")
정답 (jeongdap, "correct answer")
대답 (daedap, "answer to spoken question")
회답 (hwedap, "reply to written inquiry")
답장 (dapjang, "written reply")

Learning Korean 5: Words that Sound Too Similar

There are a couple sets of words I have trouble keeping straight. They're just too similar-looking.

조용하다 joyonghada "to be quiet"
유명하다 yumyeonghada "to be famous"
유창하다 yuchanghada "to be fluent"
중요하다 jungyohada "to be important"
유행하다 yuhaenghada "to be trendy"

And the other set:

곱다 / 고와요 kopda / kowayo "be nice, kind, pretty"
굽다 / 구워요 kupda / kuweoyo "grill, broil"
춥다 / 추워요 chupda / chuweoyo "be cold"
좁다 / 좁아요 jopda / jobayo "be crowded, narrow"

There's something about these groups (and I'm sure the groups will grow as my vocabulary grows) I find challenging. Taken together, they just feel like blobs of the same sounds and strings of sounds tossed together in random combinations. Which, I mean, I guess they are, being words and everything.

I'd love to see troublesome groups of English words that give English learners difficulty. Anyone have anything like that?

Learning Korean 4: The Summer of Chapter 4

I have been stalled on Chapter 4 of my textbook, 한국말 하시는군요 (Book 3, Intermediate Korean 1) for at least two months now. It covers a great deal of territory, and a lot of the material is crucial, but some of the topics feel more like ornamentation than nuts-and-bolts Korean. It's been a slog. And the summer in Seattle has been really hot. I just haven't been so motivated. Anyway.

1. The so-called sentential modifiers: -은, -는, 을

These endings are the workhorses of Korean, as they allow for relative clauses and a whole suite of much more complex sentences. For instance, 먹은 과자 ("the snacks I ate"), 먹는 과자 ("the snacks I eat), and 먹을 과자 ("the snacks to eat"). Things get more complicated than this, though. For one thing, the past tense endings -던 and -ㅆ던, as in 먹던 and 먹었던. Actually, I still don't understand those last two or know how or where to use them. (I think they express the past progressive or pluperfect or... something.) So I'm sticking to the basics for now. I just know that these modifiers are very common and are used in a lot of constructions.

2. The "all you need to do is" construction: -으면 되다

Literally, this is "if you (verb), it works," but in practice, it means "you only need to (verb)." 비가 오면 우산을 가지고 가면 돼요. ("If it rans, you just need to take an umbrella.")

3. It takes (money, time, etc.) to...: -는 데 걸리다 / 들다

주차 자리를 찾는 데 얼마나 걸려?! ("How long does it take to find a parking space?!")
영화를 보는 데 십 불 들어요. ("It costs ten dollars to see a movie.")

4. Have ever done: -은 적이 있다

미국에서 여행한 적이 있어요? ("Have you ever traveled in the US?")
전 어렸을때 스키를 탄 적이 없었어요. ("When I was young, I never went skiing.")

Then there's the slightly (but totally) different form that uses 어/아 본 적이 있다 and means "have tried doing." No, I don't understand which situations call for which of these, as the English translations, while different, seem very similar and, in some cases, close enough in meaning to make understanding the distinction difficult.

5: Know (or not know) how to: -을 줄 알다 / 모르다

운전할 줄 알아요? ("Do you know how to drive?")

Note these two constructions that are similar (to this English-speaker's brain) but not very similar (according to Korean-speaking brains):

운전하는 방법을 알아요? ("Do you know how to drive?" That is, "Do you know the method of driving?")
운전할 수 있어요? ("Can you drive?" That is, "Are you able to drive?")

6: The "noun about a noun" construction: N1에 대한 N2

그 건물에서 일하는 사람에 대한 비밀이 있어요. ("I have a secret (N2) about a person (N1) who works in that building.") See the relative clause? 그 건물에서 일하는 사람 ("a person who works in that building")! Excitement!

7: Through, via, making use of: N-을 통해(서)

그 영화를 통해서 한국말을 배웠어요. ("I learned Korean from (watching) that movie.") That is not actually true about me and any movie. Also, the -을 통해서 construction is usually (often? widely?) used with people. As in "I learned through the squat stranger that the train was canceled." So maybe my example about the movie isn't the most apt.

Update (8/31/15): I'm calling it. Moving on to chapter 5. Enough, already.

The 42nd TOPIK

Well, this'll be short. Registration for the next TOPIK (number 42) came and went, and I never nailed down all the information. The Korean Consulate here in Seattle didn't return my emails. Is TOPIK 42 even offered in Seattle? I couldn't find out. So... TOPIK 43 (44?), here we come.

One Syllable, Three Pronunciations

Korean likes to keep you on your toes.

Take the syllable spelled 의. Rivaling the absurdities of English's spelling conventions, this syllable has three pronunciations depending on... stuff:

• 의 is "ee" when at the end of a word and not a separate morpheme (as in 강의, kangeui [kang-ee] "lecture")
• 의 is "eh" when it's the possessive marker (as in 집의 옆, chibeui yeop [chibeh yeop] "the side of the house")
• 의 is (more or less) "uh-ee" when it's not at the end of a word (as in 의사, euisa [uh-eesa] "doctor")

So. Thanks?

Expensive Onions: more Korean backwardness

I've talked before about how, at the deepest levels of its structure, Korean is like mirror English, built in a way that seems backward to an English speaker. Today I want to mention some trivial—but still interesting—examples of "backwardness."

Look at the English words onion and green onion. The way the English lexicon works, big round onions are basic. Those things are called by one simple word: onion. The long-stemmed type of onion that isn't round and bulbous is treated as a special variety of that larger category: a green onion. It won't surprise you to learn that Korean does it the other way around.

In Korean, the long-stemmed green thing is called 파 (p'a), and the big, round thing is 양파 (yangp'a). It's backwards! The Korean lexicon treats the long-stemmed thing as the default, the basic exemplar of the category, and it's the big, round thing that's a different version of that. (It would be like English saying "chive" and "big, round chive." In other words: chaos.)

It's the same thing with the words for "expensive" and "inexpensive." (There might very well be hundreds—thousands!—of examples like this. These are the only two I can think of at the moment. With a bigger vocabulary I'm sure I could come up with more.) In English the basic state is expensiveness, and we modify it to negate it: in + expensive. Korean is the other way around: the more basic form is 싼 (ssan "inexpensive"), and the marked form is 비싼 (pissan "expensive"). So it's like having the basic form in English be cheap, with the standard way of referring to something that isn't cheap as uncheap.

I'm not pretending that this means anything, other than that different languages encode these things differently. I don't know whether this different encoding actually leads to different attitudes or perceptions—I assume it doesn't—but I still think it's interesting.

The 40th TOPIK: an unhappy update

The scores are in for the 40th TOPIK.

I got 110.

Level 1.

Better than I thought I'd done.

Worse than I wanted to do.

Way worse than the practice tests suggested I'd do.

Learning Korean 3: stumbling blocks (the honorific and politeness systems)

Apart from the things that make learning any language as an adult difficult—the vocabulary, the unfamiliar speech sounds and their novel combinations, the different ways the grammar encodes simple ideas, the unending frustration of having to work at something that is effortless and automatic in our native languages—what is it that makes learning Korean difficult for me?

(Probably the hardest thing is listening comprehension. But this isn't specific to Korean. When we hear our native language, we recognize and process the speech signal almost instantaneously, retrieving words from a mental lexicon and deconstructing sentences in a split second. When I hear actual Korean, I struggle to match up what my ears catch with what I know about the language. It's too fast—my ears aren't nearly fast enough—and words change shape when they're shoved next to each other in people's mouths. Again, that's not a Korean thing. That's a speech thing. I think of myself as someone with a great ear: I'm "good at accents," I can easily identify voices, I'm sensitive to slight differences in speech. I studied phonetics in grad school. This is supposed to be my thing. But when I hear Korean—even simple Korean I should have no trouble with—I just sit there staring dumbly. My reading comprehension, though just at a beginner level, leaves my listening comprehension in the dust. I'm really self-conscious about this. Now that I think of it, I had the same problem with Russian in college. I enjoyed learning Russian grammar, and my vocabulary and pronunciation were pretty good. But when I was faced with an actual person speaking Russian to me—or at me, as it often felt—my ears just couldn't keep up. One of my professors was so eager to keep me taking Russian she told me to concentrate on learning grammar and vocabulary. "So, you won't talk. That's OK.")

One thing that doesn't contribute much to the challenge is hangeul, the ingenious Korean writing system. It's just an alphabet, after all—only 33 symbols. Yes, the letters are arranged into units in a way that takes a little getting used to, but an alphabet isn't too tough to learn. 

But Korean does have a number of features that cause me a lot of problems. (I'm ignoring the not inconsiderable fact that, at all levels, Korean is structured in such a way that renders it a backward English.) The one I want to talk about now is Korean's systems of marking deference and politeness.

The Honorific System

Korean requires (polite, respectful) speakers to employ different verb forms, different case markers, and even completely different words when speaking to those worthy of a heightened level of respect. If I ask my friend about renovations going on at his house, I will use the word 집 (chip "house"), but if I ask about, say, the renovations undertaken by my math professor*, I have to use the word 댁 (taek). There's a whole list of word-pairs like this, covering (mostly) highly personal matters, like age, name, birthday, health, and eating.

Then there are different words for things like giving and meeting with someone, depending on their status or the level of deference due to them. If I want to say, "I gave my friend a book," that might be 전 친구한테 책을 줬어요 (Cheon ["I"] chinguhante ["to my friend"] chaegeul ["a book"] jweosseoyo ["gave"]). But "I gave my grandfather a book" could be 전 하라버님께 책을 드렸어요 (Cheon ["I"] harabeonimkke ["to my grandfather"] chaegeul ["a book"] deuryeosseoyo ["gave"]). The two things that make this frustrating are 1) there's a different dative marker depending on the status of the recipient of the action (한테 for regular-old people vs. 께 for those deserving special respect), and 2) there's a different verb entirely! When you give something to your friend or someone of your social level, you use 주다 (juda)—which shows up here as 줬어요 (jweosseoyo)—but for those you wish to honor, you use 드리다 (deurida)—which shows up here as 드렸어요 (deuryeosseoyo). Actually, 드리다 doesn't really mean "give"—it means "give to someone to whom you show respect"! (Maybe 드리다 should be translated as "bestow upon," which would at least indicate its heightened sense.)

And when there isn't a special verb, Korean requires you to stick in the particle (으)시 ([eu]shi) when speaking about someone you wish to (or need to) honor. To say "The dog lives in the city" I could say, 개가 도시에 살아요 (Kaega toshie sarayo). But if I want to say, "The president of the company lives in the city," that would be 사장님께서 도시에 사세요 (Sajangnimkkeseo toshie saseyo). It might not look like that special honorific particle (으)시 is in that president-of-the-company example, but it is. It just helpfully changed shape. So that everything would be just that much more complicated.

Wrapping your head around this is a challenge. Remembering when to use different vocabulary and how to form the honorific forms of regular verbs takes real effort. For an American English speaker, this whole system goes against the grain. For one thing, English grammar (that is, the entire system of rules and patterns underlying the language) just doesn't do this stuff. While English speakers (of course) modify their speech depending on context—you probably wouldn't speak to your friend's elderly grandmother the same way you'd speak to your friend—we don't have anything that matches the systematic nature of this kind of code-switching. And while it would be laughable to claim that America is a society without class distinctions (ha ha?), I think it is true that American customs—in general—speak to a certain (perhaps illusory) egalitarianism. It's not unusual to call your boss by his or her first name. We sometimes like to pretend class distinctions don't exist. Calling attention to or emphasizing someone's (or even one's own) status can seem impolite.

So that's hard. Korean requires you to pay attention to this and make judgments about it, if only to select the correct words and case endings and verb forms. But it gets worse.

It Gets Worse

As tricky as this can be, the whole thing is complicated by the fact that there's a separate set of considerations and forms overlaid on top of the honorific system: the system of politeness. (Or maybe it's best thought of as formality? Or social distance? Or I'm not really sure what? You might need to grow up inside this to really get it.)

Whereas the honorific system deals with your relationship to the person you're talking about, the politeness system deals with your relationship to the person you're talking to. If you're talking to a stranger or someone of higher status (and maybe in certain formal situations?), your sentences must end in -요 (yo). That particle doesn't really mean anything, exactly. It merely signals or acknowledges that the nature of your discourse is of a certain degree of formality or social distance.

(There are other sentence-ending markers, too, corresponding to yet other relationships between speaker and listener, but I think I understand them even less. And enough is enough, already.)

The part that's especially annoying is that the honorific markers and the politeness marker are independent of each other. You can make well-formed sentences with every combination of deference and formality: 1) talking about an "honored" person to a person with whom you share a degree of social distance, 2) talking about an "honored" person to a person with whom you have a more intimate relationship, 3) talking about someone who isn't "honored" to a person with whom you share a degree of social distance, and 4) talking about someone who isn't "honored" to a person with whom you have a more intimate relationship. 

So! If our situation involves me talking to someone about someone, say, traveling —여행하다 (yeohaenghada)—the verb will take four different forms, depending on who I'm talking about and who I'm talking to.

1) Talking about my math professor* to my friend's parents: 여행하세요 (yeohaenghaseyo)

2) Talking about my math professor* to my buddy: 여행하셔 (yeohaenghasyeo)

3) Talking about my buddy to my friend's parents: 여행해요 (yeohaenghaeyo)

4) Talking about my buddy to my other buddy: 여행해 (yeohaenghae)

You know, looking at all this, I don't feel quite so bad about having trouble with the whole mess.

*My Math Professor

No, I don't have a math professor. And, yes, the point in question holds for professors in other disciplines, too.