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...