The differences between English and Korean
esl.fis.edu
esl.fis.edu
In any case, if you are even remotely interested, I'd also definitely recommend just starting with the alphabet to see how you like it. I recall it being referred to as "the morning language (alphabet?)" in school since you can learn to read in a morning if you're devoted enough. In my experience, this is mostly true but you will need more time to grasp the rules (e.g. sounds change when placed next to each other) and some of the finer points of the pronunciation (어 vs 오, etc).
There are many good resources out there but the Korean subreddit is a great place to start -- https://reddit.com/r/korean
I believe Duolingo released their intro course for Korean recently too if anyone wants to learn some basics.
Here's an Amazon search to get started:
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3...
You're looking for the ones with colorful covers, and the black band on the right side with the name of the target language. Though, it looks like there's not one for Korean.
Interesting stuff -- I wish each one were treated in more detail!
It would also be interesting to have a comparison in the opposite direction: things that English speakers frequently struggle with when learning the respective language.
I am glad that English doesn't try to accomplish this (French is even more extreme in this regard). In English words are roughly spelled in terms of their root meaning, which makes it easier for a native speaker to figure out the meaning of an unfamiliar word. In fact the fashion for "phonics" (trying to learn English starting with phonetic structures) has screwed up reading and spelling for two generations of American kids.
A phonetic approach has a couple of problems. The first is the choice of whose phonemes to use. Any language with many speakers will have several dialects, so one single dialect must be chosen as authoritative. The second is that pronunciation inherently shifts over time so you must continually tinker with spelling or end up with a written language full of head-scratchers (it's no surprise that spelling bees have been prime time TV fodder in France). German is a good example: offical spelling and grammar corresponds with Hochdeutch (which is not used at home by a majority of people, though perhaps recently a plurality?) and which was offically adjusted twice in the 20th century alone to account for pronunciation shifts.
I don't know Korean but with 80 million speakers I'd think that it suffers from the same issues, although perhaps hangul's structure manages to exert a conservative force on pronunciation.
I was under the impression that words are spelled according to their etymology, which only rarely helps with the meaning of unfamiliar words.
> German is a good example: offical spelling and grammar corresponds with Hochdeutch (which is not used at home by a majority of people, though perhaps recently a plurality?) and which was offically adjusted twice in the 20th century alone to account for pronunciation shifts.
I learned Hochdeutsch at home and can't even do a credible impression of the local dialect, but I admit that the experience of others may differ. However, I'm quite sure that the German spelling reforms are not related to shifts in pronunciation, rather they were attempts to simplify the rule system.
More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... :
> From the 16th century AD onward, English writers who were scholars of Greek and Latin literature tried to link English words to their Graeco-Latin counterparts. They did this by adding silent letters to make the real or imagined links more obvious. Thus det became debt (to link it to Latin debitum), dout became doubt (to link it to Latin dubitare), sissors became scissors and sithe became scythe (as they were wrongly thought to come from Latin scindere), iland became island (as it was wrongly thought to come from Latin insula), ake became ache (as it was wrongly thought to come from Greek akhos), and so forth.[
> I am glad that English doesn't try to accomplish this
The spelling of diphthongs in English make much more sense after reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
The process continues. See, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift
Polish doesn't do this, almost everything is phonetic, and I don't have any problems decoding meaning of borrowed words. We have lots of loan words from Latin, German, French, Italian, and it's usually straightforward, because the polonization of spelling works with simple rules (English does this as well BTW).
transposition = transpozycja
position = pozycja
opposition = opozycja
conjugation = koniugacja
computer = komputer
battery = bateria
accumulator = akumulator
engineer = inżynier
logic = logika
mathematics = matematyka
algebra = algebra
> The second is that pronunciation inherently shifts over time so you must continually tinker with spelling
Not really? Last spelling change was before WW2, and it was very minor. Polish texts from renaissance are readably by middle school students with no preparation. Sound a bit archaic, but perfectly understandable. Having smaller country with common media helps I guess.
> Not really? Last spelling change was before WW2
I am not an expert but I've taken a class called language variation and identity, and I can tell you at least that this is a generally accepted principle of language evolution, that one of the most common ways that languages change is by shifting pronunciation over long periods of time.
There is also always a counter-example to every rule such as this one; this is not a hard science like chemistry or physics where the results will be the same every time, but the general principals are definitely reoccurring all the time in all languages.
Consonants that are difficult to say will be "elided," or omitted in colloquial pronunciations, and sometimes this will result in a spelling change. Phonemes will be "assimilated" into the other sounds that they are nearby so that the combinations are easier to say, or easier to distinguish from one another, and sometimes this will also result in a spelling change.
Or you can imagine sometimes language might change for no other reason than because a new large migrant population finds a word is confusingly similar to a swear/curse expression from their native language, and it makes them uncomfortable to pronounce it in the native way... or more predictably because the migrant population does not agree on the pronunciation of a vowel, the regional dialect may change over time to favor their native pronunciation. Or other reasons we won't have thought of, but these changes are often gradual and not noticeable by a person within their lifetime. That the last spelling change in Poland was before WW2 does not sound like strong evidence that it does not undergo the same transformations over time.
Some languages with stricter phonetic rules about how spelling of words maps directly to pronunciation may shift less. Some changes are harder to detect from written records of the language (especially vowel shifts.) Sometimes a linguistic authority will intervene, with varying degrees of success, to prevent (or instigate) a change. Even in Polish, if you go back far enough you might be surprised: this poster on Stack Exchange[1] seems to be saying that there was a big vowel shift in Polish, but it was more than 400 years ago.
In a language like Polish where rules are rules, I think you will be able to see fewer shifts in texts. I think where you would notice a real difference is if you could get a recording of a Polish speaker from 1545. (That is, if you could somehow get a recording from 1545 without somehow also making it available to most of the people since 1545. It's going to be interesting to see 1000 years from now how the availability of recorded media at scale is going to change the basis of new language evolution.)
> After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society.[17] By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography. ...
> .. when Albert Gallatin saw a copy of Sequoyah's syllabary, he believed it was superior to the English alphabet. He recognized that even though the Cherokee student must learn 85 characters instead of 26, the Cherokee could read immediately. The student could accomplish in a few weeks what students of English writing could learn in two years.
Think about the other things our kids could spend time doing instead of learning "i before e except after c or sounding like 'A', as in neighbor or weigh, except for ... oh, just go ahead and memorize this list."
While I agree that a phonetic approach emphasizes one dialect over others, is it really a serious problem?
I mean, Norwegians have two ways to write Norwegian. You mentioned German; in Switzerland, as I understand it, people who speak Swiss German dialect write in standard German.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects describes a variety of dialects, with different numbers of vowels and consonants, and including the Yukchin dialect, which it describes as being a tonal variant.
I personally think we should have regular (every 50 years or so) language reforms. The pros and cons have long been discussed, and are summarized at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo... .
> Think about the other things our kids could spend time
> doing instead of learning "i before e except after c or
> sounding like 'A', as in neighbor or weigh, except for ...
> oh, just go ahead and memorize this list."
Maybe these things matter at the margins, but for the most part it seems that all that matters is keeping kids engaged in the process of knowledge assimilation, regardless of form or substance.
The problem of getting kids to _enjoy_ and _appreciate_ this process... I don't think that's possible. The whinging seems inevitable even when kids are given choice of materials (but notably no choice to opt-out or to focus on something to the complete exclusion of everything else) and only gets worse with age, long into adulthood and then some.
Right now in the US there is a push to focus on those things which are testable on state-wide standardized tests. As a result, schools are cutting back on other topics, and on recess. I would rather have a more regular language, less time spent on spelling lessons, and more time spent on recess and the arts.
Spelling lessons do not (in my opinion) keep "kids engaged in the process of knowledge assimilation." I remember taking home spelling lists of words to memorize, and being tested on it. We had spelling bees, which I think best encourages those who don't need encouragement.
In languages with a more regular spelling, such tasks are less important.
It's obviously hard to conduct this sort of experiment, but I don't think it's hard to see where a more regular spelling would (in principle) help.
As for Chinese, the literacy rate in China was low, in part because of the written form. China carried out language reforms as part of an effort to improve literacy (which in turn was part of a ideological movement towards social equality.) This, I think, supports the hypothesis that there are negatives in having a more complex written form.
Example (English North/South ; Chinese Chinese Japanese):
- work rodong/nodong láodòng 勞動 rōdō
- history ryôksa/yôksha lìshǐ 歷史 rekishi
- woman nyôja/yôja nǚzǐ 女子 joshi
This is the best alphabet I have learned so far.
"Many linguists consider Hangul to be the most logical writing system in the world, partly because the shapes of its consonants mimic the shapes of the speaker's mouth when pronouncing each consonant." https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4684-1068-6_...
It took a lot of practice to actually get all of the syllables of a complicated verb ending, especially some of the nuanced ways of saying maybe, there are so many common ways to hedge your predictions of the future. The double consonants really were difficult to get down.
I spent most of my time speaking in the wrong honorific, even at a basic level you are taught at least 3, and they are applied to every sentence. Thankfully where I was foreigners weren't super common and were always given a large amount of leeway in mistakes with the language/culture.
I still think some phrases or concepts are funny, i.e. to say something tastes bad you say there is no taste. To say you are hungry you say that your stomach is empty, to say you are thirsty you say your throat is dry.
That's interesting.
It's the same in Japanese.
I wonder if it's the same in Chinese.
In contrast, learning English and Spanish were trivial in comparison.
Now I find myself wishing that I learned a tonal language, but it's much easier to say than to do.
I speak four and have studied several languages, including Korean and Japanese, Korean in a hardcore way, and found it about as hard as they come despite some things like hangul. Indeed hangul doesn't always help because reading Chinese words in Korean (meaning the majority), the sounds are clear but the information in the characters is lost. Since characters usually come in pairs or triples, knowing at least one will give insight to the others, and they commonly carry hints about pronunciation, whereas in Korean the purely phonetic approach of modern hangul relies on context. If you can't see what a sentence is about and don't instantly recognize some important words, you'll have a hard way in. That said, the Japanese multiple pronunciations for Chinese characters (native words using Chinese characters plus regular loan words) is maddening.
Korean grammar gets confusing quickly, it's "backwards" or kind of inside out to English-speakers, kind of like the Lisp of natural languages. Written sentences grow into complex labyrinths.
Japanese is another natural language Lisp but more streamlined in grammar and far simpler on pronunciation if outlandish in writing systems.
Listening and pronunciation is also sometimes perilous. I'm not talking about the way that vowels can drift, but actually hearing what someone has said. This problem doesn't really come up you when people learn their hotel and taxi Korean and then claim to speak it.
Anyway of course Korean can be learned but to engage in true discussion about a complex and subtle issue takes several years of focused study and practical experience, and I mean for most people more than five years, though experience in Chinese or Japanese will help almost as much as studying/practicing Korean itself. A year at the foreign service institute is just like a coat of priming paint when it comes to the more difficult languages.