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Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

> "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five."

Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label?

The instructors started to teach her after 949 tries - 949 tries, of watching this poor woman fail! - then she did learn, and got it on the 11th try after that. Teaching her was frustrating to them, I think mainly because they weren't really teaching her about driving, but a subset of civil administration and technology concepts, such as "regulations" and "emergency light".

The tragedy is that she could not afford "Middle school", despite dreaming of it so painfully that taking the driving test daily became a joyous wish fulfillment of attending school... an attitude of which the stereotypical student is too invisibly wealthy to properly conceive.

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> > "Sajeonogi," or "Knocked down four times, rising up five."

> Is Korean really that much more efficient than English, or is that word a label?

No, it's a 사자성어 (sajasongoh), or 4 character idiom. They originally come from Chinese, in which they're called chéngyǔ (成语 or 成語, in simplified and traditional characters, respectively), meaning "set phrase", and also exist in Japanese, in which they're called 四字熟語 (yojijukugo, literally "four character Chinese idiom").

Because of their origin in classical Chinese and their brevity, they're impossible to understand unless they're explained to you. In Asian countries, memorizing/understanding these proverbs is a big part of schooling.

I don't know the details of this particular sajasongoh, but I'm guessing that it either comes from classical Chinese or is a modified version of one that does. Modifying these proverbs to fit a particular situation is a common form of wordplay in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. For example, the Chosun Ilbo (a big Korean newspaper) loves doing this in their headlines.

so it's like Brangelina

More like acronyms, I'd say. For example, "HTTP" = hyper-text transfer protocol.

It's funny that the word 사자성어 (meaning: 4-character idiom) is itself a 4-character idiom. East Asians like 4-character groups so much, they even read numbers in groups of 4 digits. For example, 1,234,567,890 would be read 12 억 3456 만 7890.

I doubt they like it. 4 is considered unlucky in East Asia. Elevators always read 1->2->3->5->...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia

Although 4 is considered unlucky in Chinese, decimal numbers is represented in 4-number groups, instead of 60 thousand, we'd have 6 wan, 800 million would be 8 yi, etc

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