Korean Job Discussion Forums

[agraham]

Something I found interesting:

Most everyone who's studied Korean a little knows how western languages group thier digits by threes when we say them:
1 one
10 ten
100 hundred

1,000 one thousand
10,000 ten thousand
100,000 hundred thousand

1,000,000 one million
10,000,000 ten million
100,000,000 hundred million

And Koreans group the digits by fours:
1 il
10 ship
100 baek
1,000 cheon

10,000 [il] man
100,000 ship(shim) man
1,000,000 baek man
10,000,000 cheon man

100,000,000 [il] eok
1,000,000,000 ship eok
10,000,000,000 baek eok
100,000,000,000 cheon eok

Thus, it can be difficult for Koreans to get used to speaking English numbers.
But I found this interesting: it's even more difficult for Koreans to speak numbers in thier own language, because the digits are grouped into threes with commas!
Try this in your class: write a huge number on the board:
62,735,438,092
Ask them to read it in English. There will be some halting. Maybe they won't remember to word 'billion', but generally it can be done in a few seconds.
Now ask them to read it in Korean.
You'll see them pointing to the number, moving their finger along it from back to front, and counting off chun and man, typically moving thier lips before you'll hear "yu-baek-il-ship-chil-eok" and then there's another round of pointing and counting before they say the chun part and the last four digits.

Now write a similar number this way:
290,8345,3726
It suddenly becomes much easier to read -- even for people who have never seen numbers written in this way before in thier lives!

So why don't they group the numbers by fours like this? I have no idea. It wouldn't be impossible. After all the french use commas where we use periods and vice-versa so support for that kind of thing wouldn't be difficult to add to computers.