Korean Job Discussion Forums

[kimdeal54]

I just saw a guy flipping his lid while trying to get a taxi. If he'd had a basic understanding of Korean, he'd have known that the first taxi wasn't in service ("Yeah, drive right past me, asshole!! Why is your f***ing LIGHT on?!!"), and the second taxi driver was trying to tell him that the fare was 15,000 won ("50,000 won!!! That's crap! I'm not a f***ing tourist! Screw you!!").

I'm prepared to bet that he'd be happier if he could speak or read a little Korean.

[tomato]

chungbukdo, what's Anki?

[T-J]

[PatrickGHBusan]

[PatrickGHBusan]

[mithridates]

A bit more on thinking in another language: there are actually certain subjects that are more or less impossible to think in any language (even your mother tongue) without it becoming really awkward. What's the English word for jeonse for example? Special Korean money-lending apartment loan system? No, it's just jeonse. We also tend to start thinking of money as x number of green bills too, not in whatever currency we are otherwise used to using.

Now just expand that bit by bit (on top of regular fluency) and eventually you build up your own world that really doesn't have anything to do with your mother tongue.

The interesting thing is that some languages isolate themselves in better ways. The Space Shuttle Discovery is just (Supe-su Shattoru) Diskabarii in Japanese, in Korean it's halfway converted as 디스커버리 우주왕복선 (English translit for the first, while the second means space return-ship), and Chinese uses a full calque by calling it the 发现号航天飞机, or discovery-hao (like Korean -ho, put at the end of ship/train/etc. names) navigating-space airplane. So with Japanese you get the approximate English pronunciation, while with Chinese you don't learn how to say it but you will learn what it means. If you knew English but had never heard what the shuttle was called you might call it something a bit off like the Space Shuttle Discover.

[tomato]

There's one other item I can think of in which it is difficult if not impossible to think in a second language: when working a math problem.

Nazi Germany sent spies who were accent-free in speaking the host language.
When the officials of the host country suspected a spy, they would put that suspect in a position in which he would have to do some mathematicking.
Then they watched closely to see which language the suspect used for counting.

[Vagabundo]

[chungbukdo]

[PatrickGHBusan]

[Vagabundo]

patrick are you saying you consciously scheme and plan in a secondary or tertiary language without making a conscious effort to do so in that language?

if so, then I'll just nod but won't believe until/unless it happens to me.

as to "dreaming" in another language, that takes it to another level altogether.

I suppose I'll have to play "doubting Thomas" on this one, which is a role I'm most comfortable with anyways

btw.. I have a friend who has lived for years in Brazil. His Portuguese is so good that many locals simply think he's from the south (where his lighter skin and blonde hair wouldn't be abnormal in that region of the country).

Yet, I'd often hear him tell me stories where he'd say he said something "in his BEST" Portuguese. I couldn't understand quite what that meant at that time but after learning Spanish I completely do. I could be mistaken but when one takes the time to think something like this over, then you're not "thinking" in the other language.. at best you're thinking in both hopping back and forth and decoding the most "refined" way to phrase something together.

[PatrickGHBusan]

[mithridates]

I wonder if it has something to do with languages being similar to / different from each other. Japanese and Korean were fairly easy to learn with enough effort, while languages like French and German for me tend to stay at a kind of half-fluency where they are easy enough to read and understand but I don't see myself getting anywhere near fluency. On the other hand I haven't ever lived in France or Germany so I can't say whether it's the language itself or just the lack of overseas experience. But since Japanese and Korean have so many untranslatable terms (or terms that just sound awkward) it might be easy to slip into a completely different mode of thought with them.

E.g. how would you even phrase something like 뭐 하시는분이신데? Could you even begin to come up with a translation or an equivalent in your mind that shows both respect for the person being talked about but familiarity to the person the speaker is currently talking to? Someone asking his friend about what his dad does for a living, for example.

So maybe French, German and the rest are just similar enough that the temptation to keep translating into and out of English is tough to resist.

[lonestarteacher]

[Vagabundo]