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.

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.)

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 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.

Throwing Your Pencil Across the Room

You know those learn-to-draw tutorials? The blogs, the books, the videos? I have the feeling people have tried for centuries to teach people to draw using these kinds of simple, step-by-step techniques. And I assume that for centuries people have been throwing their pencils across the room in disgust when they realize that it's just not that simple. You can break it down into the smallest steps, but eventually you'll reach the point where you'll need to be able to... draw.

The reason I bring all this up is because I've realized something similar goes on with learn-to-speak-a-foreign-language tutorials. They can teach you a bunch of vocabulary. They can teach you some grammar. They can teach you some useful constructions and colorful idioms. But eventually you reach the point where you need to be able to understand and create sentences of your own. And that's where it all breaks down. I mean, if all you want to be able to do is repeat a script of set phrases—a kind of simulacrum of a conversation—you should be fine. But if you want to do more than just repeat something (just like wanting to do more than draw a face by following a formula that starts with an oval, then a curving line across to indicate where the eyes should go), you will soon want to throw your linguistic pencil across the room.

Still, I'm a sucker for the well-meaning tutorials, the apps, the answers-to-all-your-prayers websites.

Word Watch: conserve

Yesterday (9/01/15), I was listening to NPR (infinite geyser of weird pronunciations!), and I heard a correspondent pronounce the word conserve as "conzerve." Repeatedly. It was in a story about the sage grouse and the Endangered Species Act, but that's probably not relevant. Because I'm filled with curiosity about Our World®, I started thinking about this. Was it just a tic, or can we say something more interesting about it?

Conserve is typically (as in, virtually always or maybe actually always) pronounced "conserve." On the surface, this word looks like it's composed of two morphemes (meaningful components): con + serve. After all, English is packed with words that start with con- (contain, conceal, control, confer, and on and on). Let's leave con- and conserve alone for a minute and look at other prefixes that appear to combine with other morphemes to make words in a similar way.

For instance, re-, pre-, and de-. Notice first that these prefixes can have easily understood, "transparent" meanings. re- (can) mean something like again or back, pre- (can) mean before, and de- (can) mean something like negate or rescind. Look what happens, though, when those prefixes are combined with certain one-syllable words starting with s:

re + side = reside
re + serve = reserve
re + sign = resign
re + sort = resort

pre + side = preside
pre + serve = preserve
(Why is there no presign or presort? Beats me.)

de + serve = deserve
de + sign = design
(Deside? Desort? Nope, I guess not.)

In each of these words, the verb that begins with an s-sound when the word stands alone begins with a z-sound when combined with these prefixes. Just like that strange "conzerve" above, right? Not so fast!

Reside, reserve, resign, and resort aren't always pronounced as "rezide," "rezerve," "rezign," and "rezort." When the prefix re- has its "transparent" meaning—that is, when the meaning of the whole word is an obvious, "mathematical" combination of the prefix and the verb—those verbs are pronounced with s-sounds, just like they are when the words stand alone as independent words.

That is, when reside means "to side something again" (or "to install siding again") it's pronounced "re+side" (with an s). When reserve means "to serve again" it's pronounced "re+serve" (with an s). When resign means "to sign again" it's pronounced "re+sign" (with an s). And when resort means "to sort again" it's pronounce "re+sort" (with an s). But in what sense does re- mean again in reside ("to live in")? Now that you mention it, in what sense does side mean side in that word? Where is the sense of signing in resign ("to step down from a position")? Where is the sense of serving in reserve ("to set aside")? They're not there. Those words only look like they're combinations of meaningful parts.

So! It's only when the prefix+verb combo has a meaning that can't be derived by looking at the meanings of its parts that the s-verbs are pronounced with z's. In other words, it's only where there's a distinction between a-word-made-by-combining-parts and a-word-that-only-looks-like-it's-a-combination-of-meaningful-parts that we can sometimes see those s-verbs pronounced with z's.

Let's return to "conzerve." It's clear to me that that word came about on the analogy of what happens to s-verbs when they're combined with prefixes like re-, pre-, and de-. But notice that con- (lacking as it does an easily understood, "transparent" meaning) doesn't lend itself to those tricky pairs (like pre+side vs preside, "to side something ahead of time" vs. "to supervise or lead proceedings"). There's no possible confusion between "conserve" and "conzerve," because con- doesn't really mean anything on its own. Notice also what kinds of things con- typically gets stuck onto. It often only appears to combine with verbs: contain, conceal, control, confer. Tain isn't an independent word. Nor are ceal, trol, and fer. Nor are many of the "words" con-'s cousin com- "attaches" to. Look at compel, compare, combine, compute. con-/com- just doesn't work the same way as re-, pre-, and de-.

And that's why "conzerve" is weird.

Update (9/11/15): I just heard (on NPR, naturally) "rezources." This appears to follow the story I tell above (except "resources" is a noun, so who knows?), where we expect to see a distinction between "resources" and "rezources." Even though the verb resource (meaning something other than "to source something again") would be pronounced "rezource," I still think the noun "rezource" is bizarre.

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 Thanks People

I realize that this post might be tricky. It's all because of the sorry state of English orthography. We have different sounds referred to (by weirdos) as interdental fricatives. These are sounds made with the tip of the tongue between the teeth: the th sounds. Wait. Sounds? We have more than one of these interdental fricatives? Sure we do: a voiced and a voiceless interdental fricative. Just like we have two labiodental fricatives, for instance (sounds made with the upper teeth against the lower lip)—that is, v and f—we have two th sounds. The problem is that we have only one way of writing those two sounds. We don't even have single letters for those sounds. We're forced to use ungainly combinations of letters. But we used to be able to write them with ease. Say hello to the edh and the thorn.

ð This is edh. It represented the voiced interdental fricative (the first sound in therefore).

þ This is thorn. It represented the voiceless interdental fricative (the first sound in theory).

If we only still used the edh and the thorn, this post would be smooth sailing, and I'd be able to explain my next superinteresting point more easily.

The voiceless sound (the thorn) is found (among other places) at the beginning of nouns (thistle, thumb, thalamus), verbs (think, throw, thump), and adjectives (thin, thorough, thermal). (These sounds don't come only at the beginnings of words—see athlete, filthy, and myth.)

But—typically—the voiced one (the edh) is found in pronouns of all kinds (they, them, this) and more strictly functional words (though, there, and the).

Still not sure you hear the difference? Just compare thigh (which starts with a voiceless th) to thy (which differs from it only by that voiced th).

The first group is sometimes called open-class words, and the second is sometimes called closed-class words. Open-class words are far more numerous and new members are brought in all the time. When new words are borrowed from other languages or coined from scratch, which happens all the time, they're usually nouns, verbs, or adjectives. New conjunctions, articles, or pronouns don't take root very often. 

I have noticed that some people pronounce the word thanks with a voiced (and not a voiceless) interdental fricative That is, they're saying it with an edh. Not only is this just, well... strange, but it's also bucking the tide when it comes to the way English likes to use these two sounds. Thanks is an open-class word, and finding an edh at the beginning of an open-class word is highly unusual. So the edh-thankers are really blazing a trail. The edh-thankers I've encountered haven't shared any obvious trait: they have been of different ages, genders, and regions. It's like watching a new genetic mutation cropping up. Will it spread? Is it dangerous? (Does it have any connection to the distinction between edh-with—picture the word with pronounced like the beginning of the word wither—and thorn-with?)

Full disclosure: I am a thorn-with person. I say with with a voiceless interdental. But the edh-with people... They're out there. Watching. Waiting.

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.

Learning Korean 2

This is the grammar I've been working on lately:

1. The honorific suffix: -으시, which I would like to call the horrific suffix, because it's confusing and complicated.

This is my first systematic exposure to the honorific form. Before digging into this chapter, I had really only seen the honorific in memorized-as-a-whole forms, like 주셔서 감사합니다 (jusyeoseo kamsamnida "thank you for") or polite imperatives like 앉으세요 (anjeuseyo "please have a seat"). But now I see where those forms come from, which is nice. But understanding the ways 시 changes form, having to remember whether the construction in question calls for the bare stem or the 어/아 form, and trying to wrap my mind around the whole honorific system make using the honorific a challenge. I'll talk about Korean's honorific and politeness axes in a later post.

2. The so-called long negative: -지 않다

어제 아파서 아무것도 먹지않았어요. ("Because I was sick yestersay, I didn't eat anything.")

3. The "obviously, as you know" construction: -잖다

A. 잘 한국어를 하고 있어요! ("You're speaking Korean well!")
B. 저는 열심히 공부하잖아요. ("Well, as you know, I do study hard.")

4. The "worth doing/doable/understandable that" construction: -을 만하다

오늘은 저를 학교에 데리고 갈 만해요? ("Can you take me to school today?" "Is it doable to take me to school today?") Note that this is different from 오늘은 저를 학교에 데리고 갈 수 있어요? ("Are you able to take me to school today?") and 오늘은 저를 학교에 데리고 갈래요? ("How about taking me to school today?"), which is different from 오늘은 저를 학교에 데리고 가고 싶어요? ("Do you want to take me to school today?).

5. The "nothing but/no more than" construction: 밖에 안/못

저는 고양이들밖에 기르고 싶지않아요. ("I don't want to raise anything other than cats.") Remember that 밖 means "outside or outside of," and this construction is easy. I don't want to raise anything outside of (or anything beyond) cats.

6. About or concerning: -에 대해(서) / -에 관해(서)

우리 돈에 대해서 생각합시다. ("Let's think about money.")

Korean as Mirror English

Because of deep differences in the way Korean and English handle fundamental units of syntax—how the languages structure and order phrases—they sometimes appear like mirror images of each other. From my perspective, everything in Korean is backwards!

Take a straightforward sentence like this:

"I saw the tree in the vicinity of the library."

In Korean, this could be translated like so:

나는 도서관의 근처에 나무를 봤어요.

Reading from the beginning, one word at a time, you get:

"I / library's / vicinity-in / tree / saw."

But flip it around and read from the end of this sentence to the beginning, and you get:

"Saw / tree / in vicinity / of library / I."

If you ignore the fact that Korean doesn't have articles like English does and that both English and Korean typically stick their subjects at the beginning of the sentence (when Korean actually uses a subject), you see that structurally Korean and English are like opposites. The ways they string together their word groupings are reversed.

Sometimes, when I'm having trouble translating a tough (or not-so-tough) sentence, my teacher will have me start from the end and work my way to the front. In this way—once I've interpreted it the way no one could ever interpret a spoken sentence—it all makes sense.

Ergatives in English: grammatical dinosaurs?

English is full of ergative verbs—verbs whose semantic objects appear as their subjects:

• The door slammed shut.
• That's the way the cookie crumbles.
• The cat knocked the glass off the table and it broke.

The verbs slam, crumble, break are all good, solid, uncontroversial transitive verbs.

For those of you who've forgotten, or who never knew (or who never cared), transitive verbs are verbs that take objects. That is, they name actions that happen to something or someone. Destroy is a transitive verb because when it shows up, the thing destroyed also has to be mentioned. "The marauders destroyed the farming village" is a fine sentence, but "The marauders destroyed" isn't. It's lopsided. It leaves us hanging, just waiting. "Yes? They destroyed... what?" English speakers know that the object just has to be there. (Not all English speakers know the terms transitive and object, of course, but they understand the concepts, and they know which verbs are—or can be—transitive and (at least sometimes) require objects. Which is why "The marauders destroyed" sounds weird to English speakers.)

What's interesting is that the grammatical subjects of those verbs—the door, the cookie, and the glass—are the objects of the actions. The door didn't slam something shut; it was slammed shut. The cookie didn't crumble something; it got crumbled. And the glass didn't break anything; it was broken. In these sentences, semantic objects show up as grammatical subjects. By the way, English isn't alone in using this kind of construction, called the ergative.

You see it in sentences like these too:

• Sure, the car's got more than 300,000 miles on her, but she handles like a dream. (The car is the thing being handled, not the thing handling something else.)
• You're wasting your time, Bruno. That safe won't crack without dynamite. (The safe is the thing being—or not being—cracked, not the thing cracking something else.)
• This bushel of kale will cook up nicely. (The kale is the stuff being cooked, not the thing cooking something else.)
• My grandma was a tough old thing who didn't scare easily. (It's not that she has a hard time scaring people—it's not easy to scare her.)
• After lots of huffing and puffing, the Big Bad Wolf knew the brick house just wouldn't blow down. (You get it.) 
• A watched pot never boils.
• That paper cut will heal in no time.

This kind of sentence is all around. I never thought there was anything too remarkable about them until a while back my son claimed that some ergative construction I had used was bizarre. "No one says things like that!" he declared with all the certainty of a too-bright then-11-year-old. I came up with example after example of everyday ergatives, and he insisted that he'd never heard anyone say anything like them.

"There used to be a stupid advertising slogan about 'the soup that eats like a meal,'" I told him.

He was unimpressed, and he held his ground. "Kids do not say stuff like that!"

Is he right? And if so, what does that mean? Does it mean ergatives are on the way out? In 50 years, will sentences like those noted above (or even ones like "The new Claude Clodworthy novel is a turgid read"—suggesting to the linguistically naive that the novel reads something, instead of being something people read) sound hopelessly obsolete? Are ergatives going the way of whom?

Or are ergatives just not part of kids' linguistic arsenal? (Kids don't say notwithstanding or fiduciary too often either, but we don't take that as evidence that those grown-up words are on their last legs.) Maybe English speakers just have to grow into ergatives the same way people have to grow into calculus and a nuanced appreciation of Claude Clodworthy.

Or maybe the kid is just full of it.

Learning Korean 1

I've been learning Korean since September 2013. At my first teacher's recommendation, I started using the You Speak Korean! series of books by Soohee Kim, Emily Curtis, and Haewon Cho. I'm currently on book 3, Intermediate Korean 1. My second (and current) teacher even helped with the creation of the series.

I'd studied plenty of languages before Korean (Latin, Russian, Ancient Greek, German, Old English, Sanskrit, and Finnish), but with Korean it's completely different. For one thing, I'm not enrolled in college or grad school this time around. In other words, I'm old. My efforts feel much more deliberate now, more self-directed. And I take a much more active approach to language learning than I ever did before. I do exercises in my book, and I write sentences to practice and showcase points of grammar as I learn them. But I also listen to podcasts about learning Korean. Every week, I go to a meetup of English speakers learning Korean and Koreans learning English. I get together with a Korean friend for chatting and help. I watch (subtitled) Korean dramas. I compose sentences in my head all the time. I look up words. My engagement with Korean is so much richer than my engagement with Russian, say, ever was. (Although I sometimes think my Russian fluency, at its peak, was better than my current Korean fluency.) Part of that is the changing times. In the mid-80s, I couldn't access the same breadth of pop culture, and so on. No one could. Before the Internet, finding kindred spirits and this kind of language material was impossible.

And unlike Latin or Sanskrit, Korean is alive and well. So I can encounter it in a wide variety of contexts and settings. Pop songs, websites, overheard conversations. This means my experience with it, active and passive, is so much more real than it could ever be with half the languages I've studied. So, while I use a textbook and work with a tutor and think about things the way someone with a linguistics background might, my experience with Korean isn't merely academic. It exists in the world of, you know, people.

Still, I've never lived in Korea. And I'm too bashful to throw myself into Korean-speaking opportunities with abandon. And, like I said, my brain is getting old, well past the point where absorbing a new language is merely a matter of exposure.