Korean Job Discussion Forums

[bosintang]

I picked up a piece of conversation in the FAQ's that reminded me of something, but I didn't want to go off on a tangent on that thread...

When I used to teach very young children, I noticed they would consistently mix up their greens and blues, even after several weeks when they didn't seem to have trouble distinguishing other colours. There were only three children (5yr olds), yet I still found that curious.

Is colour blindness common in Korea, or is there another linguistic or culture explanation for this? Did it just happen that the children I was teaching were an anomaly?

[casey's moon]

What a great question! There may be others who can give more information, but I'll tell you what I think. First of all, there are tons of words to describe colours. Most of our words (that we use on a daily basis, not when we're picking out paint or something) are all related to the basic colours. Blue, dark blue, baby blue, etc. In Korean, they have totally separate words for each of those colours. On the other hand, they do have a word that encompasses both green and blue (Ǫ���� I think), that is usually used to describe scenery. I think the kids are getting confused because you're calling a whole bunch of thing "blue" and a whole bunch of things "green," and they aren't sure which ones are which.

I'm not sure I'm making sense.... anyway, I don't think it is at all related to colour blindness.

[the eye]

by your description, bosintang, your students are not illustrating colorblind vision.
there are two major types of color blindness.....

the most common is: red / green....objects of those colors appear shades of yellow or brown. it affects 1/12 people...mostly males.
the next type, very rare, is: blue / yellow...objects of those colors appear similar. it affects 1/300 people.

if your students have difficulty distinguishing between blue and green, they would coincidently have problems with yellow and red. full color blindness is highly unlikely, especially in so many children.

i think this is a cultural phenomena. as casey's moon said, the terminolgy is applied differently.
i've asked students what color the sun is....they say 'red'.
the use of color in korea is not always applied 'realistically' by western standards...blue/green trees are one example.

[kimchikowboy]

One of the most famous and controversial examples of a culture where colour perceptions were limited to two terms was the Dani tribe of New Guinea. They had two terms for what they saw: mola (white) and mili (black), although further study demonstrated that they were able to perceive the full range of colours despite the lack of colour terms in their language. Current experiments conclude that perceptions of colour are not as naturally determined as biological determinists have argued and that perceptions can be altered through linguistic categories, though not to an extent that would justify the conclusions of the empiricists or the culturalists.

At the opposite end of the range is the English language. Wilson concludes that English has eleven terms to describe colour, although others have only identified eight: red, blue, green, pink, purple, orange, yellow and brown. In addition, the Russians have an additional blue hue.
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/006521.html

Green and blue in Japanese
I suggest to erase Japanese from the sentence "The English language makes a distinction between blue and green, but some languages, such as Japanese, Vietnamese, and Tarahumara, don't have a separate words for green and refer to that color using either a word that also can refer to yellow, or one than includes blue."

I don't know about Tarahumara, but this seems correct, as long as I know, for Vietnamese (actually Vietnamese does have words to distinguish between green and blue, but they are not currently used in ordinary language). But Japanese certainly has a word for green (midori �ߪɪ�,��緑) as opposed to blue��(ao ����,��青), and everybody use both words to refer to green and blue objects respectively. It is true that Japanese did not make such a distinction commonly in the past, and some specific "green" things are still referred as "ao". The most common of them is that a green streetlight is referred as "ao". But a the color of a green sweater, the color of trees, the color a green plate or cup etc. will not be refered as "ao", but as "midori" nowadays.
--Milaiklainim 13:03, 19 Mar 2004 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Green

I recall (was it Bruce Cummings?) a speaker at the last KOTESOL conference talking about blue-green disctiction in Korean (which is why they so often say "sky-blue." I don't remember the details, only that your observation reflects a linguistic or cultural differentiation, not color-blindness.
On a side note, I once worked as a painter as a summer job in Uni. One of my co-workers was colorblind. So someone always had to follow him and touch up the spots he missed. Imagine a color-blind house painter...

[Paji eh Wong]

In a class of 8 kindy kids last year, I had one who was red/brown color blind. His sister was fine. He also had a bundle of other health issues.

[ajuma]

Interesting thread!!!

I have a sweater that is a dark "rust" color. I would say that this color is more "orange" than "red" but my Korean friend insists that it's red!!

Different ways of "seeing" perhaps??

[bosintang]

[peppergirl]

[Ya-ta Boy]

Yes, interesting thread.

I have noticed my students also have a problem with brown and black.

[casey's moon]

[peppergirl]

[matthewwoodford]

We all have slightly different concepts of where one colour ends and another one begins. I had this argument as a kid with some others over whether a certain colour was yellow, green, or yellow-green. This wasn't just my idiosyncrasy as others also disagreed over what to call the colour.

Every language has slightly different concepts of colour boundaries so this kind of disagreement will occur more frequently between people of different nationality. Koreans actually have lots of different words for varying shades of blue and green but they do have one word, translated as 'blue' or 'green' with connotations of pureness that I think is at the root of this confusion. This is why they call green traffic lights 'blue'.

I don't think this means people actually see things differently although that's impossible to prove. If you think of a colour as 'yellow' and not 'green' that probably alters your perception of it too.

[matthewwoodford]

The Korean word I was trying to think of before that variously translates as blue or green or azure is û (or û��). û is the Chinese character, and the original Korean word is Ǫ��.

The English translation(s) is:-