Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rac118]

I dont know many words in korean, maybe 25. But I've been here a year and a half and my impression of the language is that its extremely primitive.

My impressions, not that these cant be incorrect:

-no articles, which means no the, an, or a

this would literally have to make sentences sound like "Me go home."

-no differentiation between amounts

so no difference between talking about one apple or ten apples. this is a much less complicated way of looking at the world because we are talking about ideas that are abstract, non specific.

-overly simple syntax

i guess im least sure about this one but it seems that the subject or the most important idea of the sentence is said at the beginning, as if they cant carry that idea to the end because they might forget. So, i guess it would be "Home me go." or "Apple me eat."

vocabulary also seems to be extremely limited, i hear the word babo about 600 times a day. in english i know there are many many ways to call a person stupid.



im not claiming to be an expert on any of this, im perfectly willing to be proven wrong, maybe some of you know things i dont.

[PeteJB]

The term is 'Scientific' language, simple it is most certainly not.

[rac118]

care to explain what that means?

[PeteJB]

Because it's not. Just because you hear babo 600 times a day doesn't mean there aren't other words to describe a person as stupid, for which there are many in Korean including words originating from Chinese that barely translate into a single English word without the requirement of a sentence to explain.

[rac118]

haha

question "care to explain what that means?" answer "because its not."

i love it.



anyway, i dont really know im just curious about other opinions. so you are saying that korean doesnt use a limited vocabulary. that only attacks one of the points. do you have any numbers that show this to be the case? i did a google search but i didnt really come up with anything. also, i might have a hard time believing a number because so many of the "korean" words are just badly pronounced attempts at speaking english. god, "konglish," is there anything more annoying...

[PeteJB]

'Haha'

Yoy say "I know about 25 words in Korean" and call it simple. I think only someone who has studied a larger portion of any given language has the right to claim it is simple.

I love it.

Everything you have said doesn't seem to carry much weight for the point your trying to make. For example, your attack on Konglish is pointless because English has butchered words from other languages for years - Korean is hardly the first to do this.

[rac118]

I made that point about 3 times in the OP.


I think someone is feeling insecure because he wasted his time learning it.



No content = boring


I hope someone else can contribute.

[PeteJB]

Even if I didn't know Korean, I'd know better than to call it 'extremely primitive'. If you want content your going to have to come up with better points than those.

[CentralCali]

I'm glad that my linguistics profs took pains to disabuse their students of the notion that one natural language is more primitive or more difficult than another. It made the study of language itself much more fascinating.

[FMPJ]

Most linguists agree that one only needs to know at least 26 words in any language in order to evaluate it.