Korean Job Discussion Forums

[citizen erased]

no punctuation, no articles of speech



must sound something like me tarzan, you bak tae hwan




its obviously got very few vocabulary choices. i cant tell you how many times i hear the word "babo" everyday.

personally i pride myself on the myriad ways i can call a person stupid.
___________


more to follow.

[Ginormousaurus]

[Suwon23]

I have asked every girlfriend in Korea how many words there are for "kiss," and so far the consensus is solid: only two, and one of them is loaned from English! Absurd!

Let us annex the Mongoloids, and force upon them the superior ways of the West! To arms, brothers!

(Christ, this is going to show up in Chosun Ilbo...)

[SeoulFinn]

There was a study something like five years ago in Finland. If I remember correctly, there are over thousand different names for your private parts in Finnish. *blush* What does that tell about us Finns? I wonder how many words for one-eyed wonder snake they have in Korean... not many.

[The_Source]

[NilesQ]

I find English to be much more detailed and specific than Korean. But that is also the nature of our culture. Language reflects culture. They have a different word to call their grandmother's house than their own or a house in general. To us, that seems a bit odd. Why is her house any different? It is a house. To them, us having a bunch of different words to say delicious or entertaining could be strange.

[semphoon]

I would love to hear what Koreans think about English. It's true that 맛다 and 재미있다 are used a lot where westerners could use a variety of words. Also, "rat" doesn't have any word in Korean

I have heard that colors in Korean have more details. In English we say "dark blue, light blue, sky blue, something something blue," however Koreans used completely different words to describe them. I know English has azure, sapphire, indigo, teal and others way to state colors, but you can usually hear native speakers use "______ blue." Koreans have a hard time imaging that English speakers even regard these very different colors as just variations of one color, as opposed to a completely unique color in itself.

Also, has someone mentioned when you use the high form in Korean, there are certain nouns that you use to show that the person possessing these nouns is respected. Usually house is "집" however, when it's a respected person you say 덱 (sp)

Also verbs- some verbs are changed to the high form when you are the subject and the object is the person that is respected such as 주다 into 드리다. Other verbs are changed to the high form when the subject doing the verb is respected 먹다 into 드시다, 자다 into 주무시다, 있다 into 계시다 죽다 into 돌아가시다. And even when you don't have to use an all together new form of the verb, you modify if and show respect by adding 시.

Oh yeah, and there are two counting systems in Korea; just to tell the time you need to use both sets of number sino-korean and pure korean.

And that takes us nicely to hanja (Chinese) and it's use in Korean, although I don't know much about it.

I love studying Korean and at the moment I'm going through a patch that is very exciting as I can have interesting conversations, however I'm discovering the more I learn the more I realise I have to learn. I'm sure someone with a higher korean level will be able to provide more information.

[jkelly80]

English has about 10 times the amount of words as Korean. It's much more specific than any language.

[Bread]

[mervsdamun]

The number of words in English has grown from 50,000 to 60,000 words in Old English to about a million today. There are a number of ways in which the English vocabulary increases. The principal way in which it grows is by borrowing words from other languages. About 80% of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin. Another way is by combining words into one word such as housewife, greenhouse, and overdue. The addition of prefixes and suffixes to words also increases the immense vocabulary of the English language.

Source:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/JohnnyLing.shtml

[mervsdamun]

Or as someone else correctly noted:

The simple reason that English has so many words is that it is very much a mongrel language, with influences from Celtic, Latin, Danish, German and French (among others). For almost all words with a Germanic origin (e.g. motherhood) there is a synonym of Latin or French origin (e.g. maternity).

[rusty1983]

What's going on with the Finns then? Do they really have that many words for '*beep*'? Why on Earth would they?

[excitinghead]

[rusty1983]

I like this article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1883481.stm

Inuits have all those words for snow but I think we trounce it for having words for 'drunk'

[Yu_Bum_suk]

The biggest problem I see with the Korean language is that Koreans can't understand anyone else speaking it. I was once with a guy who does translations for the US government and he had to repeat something five or six times before a Korean understood. Hell, it seems like sometimes Koreans can't understand each other. The other day my coworker was giving her name to someone on the phone. Her given name's 민주, about as common as Susan or Christie in English. She had to repeat it four times and eventually spell it out. And how many times have you got into a taxi with a Korean who had to repeat where you're going three times?

You'd think a langauge so phonetically 'perfect' would be a bit easier for people to understand.