Korean Job Discussion Forums

Jeweltone · Joined: 29 Mar 2005 Location: Seoul, S. Korea

Burning-up-too-late-last-night question:

Does Korean have adjectives and/or adverbs?

My Korean-level is VERY basic (false-beginner?) so I know some basic verbs such as "chuayo" (it's good)- sorry about the spelling - have an adjective-type meaning to them, but what about stand-alone adjectives?

When I try to teach my uni students about adjectives, they get crazy with their thesaurus without comprehending the different layers of meaning. So, I began wondering. My theory is either a) Hangul has no adjectives or adverbs in the sense that English has or b) there are very few adjectives or adverbs.

I have also noticed this when proofreading Korean translations into English; the syntax and grammar is ok, but there isn't a single clarifying adjective in the paper. This leads to ambiguity of meaning.

Can anybody enlighten me?

trubadour · Joined: 03 Nov 2006

nope. only to say that learning translation is no way to learn a language, which is the way most stu's are taught. Though English is, or can be, quite an economical language, they need to learn ambiguity through learning expression. That way every word is given a special meaning..

excitinghead · Joined: 18 Jul 2005

Korean has just as many adjectives and adverbs as English. Probably more. Adjectives can be stand alone, although now that you've brought up the question adverbs can't be come to think of it.

Looking up new words in their thesauruses or dictionaries like maniacs as soon as they come across them is just a bad learning habit, and nothing to do with English or Korean per se.

some waygug-in · Joined: 25 Jan 2003

Korean has "description verbs" which basically function like adjectives.

The difference being that the meaning is something like....

cho ayo (to be good) rather than just good.

I think adverbs are basically the same thing with 은 or 는 endings

Shikeu raw uen mal = loud speaking ...... roughly translated.

Don't quote me on this however. I'm terrible at remembering this stuff.

Gwangjuboy · Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Location: England

Gwangjuboy · Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Location: England

Axl Rose · Joined: 16 Feb 2006

The key here is that adjectives in Korean always take an object, so stand-alone adjectives are less common to non-existent compared to English. Mind you, my Korean is low intermediate at best, so beware. Also, Korean verbs contain 'to be' in them, so a Korean will use a verb where an English speaker will use an adjective. 중요하다 means 'to be important'. English speakers will use good, bad, great, interesting, fantastic etc alone, whereas you'll never hear a Korean reply 좋은, 나쁜, 재미있는 etc. Rather they'll use the verb forms (좋아요, 나빠요, 재미 있어요) and use the adjectives when an object is involved - 나쁜 사람 (bad person).

An example:

English: the weather is good
Korean: 날씨가 좋아요

The bold are the same, but the Korean has one verb (be good) whereas English has one verb + one adjective. There is no adjective in the Korean here.

Adverbs work the same way as in English, I believe - describing verbs. If you ever observe a Korean teacher teaching kids, you'll hear 조용히 해 (shut up! lit: quietly be) and 열심히 공부해 (hard study!). Actually, thinking of the 'be quiet' example, English has a far stricter distnction between 'do' and 'be'. In Korean, 하다 can mean either depending on what is said....공부하세요 (do you study?), 안녕하세요? (hello/are you peaceful?) so that's important too.

Moving on.....Korean a larger vocab than English? Get outta here. 배 in Korean either means pear, ship or stomach. Nuff said.

albazalba · Joined: 27 Dec 2006 Location: Hongdae

Axl Rose · Joined: 16 Feb 2006

VirginIslander · Joined: 24 May 2006 Location: Busan

some waygug-in · Joined: 25 Jan 2003

One problem I have with Korean is that one word can have so many meanings depending on the context.

주 for example.

it can be a drink, a district, give, and or a host of others that I can't remember.

The problem with most translations is that they don't go through the litteral meaning of each sylable, they just give an approximate meaning.

I think I could make a lot quicker progress in Korean if I could get the litteral meanings of things first, and then the approximate phrase later.

excitinghead · Joined: 18 Jul 2005

Okay everyone, enough already! I take it back, I�m sorry! I confess, I hadn�t even had my cup of coffee when I wrote that, and was more concerned about my dentist�s appointment an hour later. In the end, because I was rushed before and couldn�t eat anything for a while after, that cup of coffee was all I bloody had until 12.

Seriously though, while I concede that Korean may well have fewer words than English, I�ve found some of the arguments for that strange. I�m sure that if you give me half an hour, I could maybe find 20 Korean words that have multiple meanings, but that would be pushing it. Maybe others could do better. In contrast, in my experience the number one complaint of English learners above beginner level is all the bloody words have so many meanings. Maybe it seems like that no matter what language you�re studying?

And practically speaking, if Korean has as few words as everyone is making out then yippee, but in the meantime one of my biggest problems studying it is remembering what similar sounding word goes with what noun, or with what social situation. 예매하다 is only for getting tickets in advance for instance, but 예약하다 is for everything else. And also, the first question in the 2003 Level 4 TOPIK test was which word is best for �외국 여행을 가기 위해서 1년 전부터 돈을 ( ) 있다�. Obviously not no. 1, 갚고, but no.2 쌓고 was tempting, and according to absolutely every English-speaking Korean friend of mine no. 3 모으고 and 4 수집하고 both mean �collect�, but only 3 is for money and 4 is for things like stamp collecting.

Sure, my examples are not exhaustive, but I think I�ve made my point. Personally, the more I study Korean, the more almost-exactly-the-same-meaning-to-me-sounding but subtly different Korean words I have to learn. They seem to breed like rabbits.

And I don�t mean to overanalyze some waygug-in, but �주� is usually not a stand-alone word, as least for the meanings you give, and it doesn�t mean different things according to context. Instead, they are all based on different hanja characters, with different meanings, but all have the 주 sound in Korean. It�s like the �anti� in antipodes, antimatter, antithetical, anti-clockwise all obviously have the same Latin or Greek root, but the �anti� in �panties� may sound annoyingly similar to an English learner, and maybe even make some kind of twisted sense in that women�s panties are the �anti� of men�s underwear, but obviously that anti comes from some other Saxon or French root or, more likely, isn�t a root at all, but it still all sounds annoyingly all the same to a learner.

Sorry for the rant, was a muggy exhausting day at work today!

Axl Rose · Joined: 16 Feb 2006

There are loads of double meanings to English words for sure - sometimes more than 2 - a big offender is 'left' (왼쪽, 남다 and 떠났다).

However I'm not aware that double meanings in English are as conspicious as 눈 (eye/snow), the aforementioned 배 and a really big offender, 만 (10,000, bay (Pearl Harbor = 진주만), only, the Buddhist Swasticka thingie) and see also 다리 (bridge/leg).

In Korean, really elementary nouns share the same word and whilst I'm not saying this means Korean is small - I agree that it's not - it's kinda fun to mention.

paquebot · Joined: 20 Jun 2007 Location: Northern Gyeonggi-do

Junkyardninja · Joined: 24 Jun 2007

....I've read, and I wish I could find the source again, that the Korean corpora, ( I think that's the word...crud,) is about 50,000 - 100,000 words.
English is supposedly somewhere between 250,000 and 1,000,000 depending on how you count'em.

I'm trying to learn Korean and I really hope the first part is true. ( Well, 100,000 sounds good, but 50,000 sounds like it could be restrictive.)