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> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.

Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always suspected that it might feel significantly different to construct sentences in languages with different word ordering, and I think that confirms that.

Just for your curiosity, my favourite explanation of Japanese sentence structure is that it is an outside in language, where English is inside out. Since Japanese doesn't follow a conrete word order like SVO, it was very helpful to see it that way.

The kids had lunch in the park at 12pm today.

vs

The kids, Today at 12pm in the park had lunch.

The grander more ephemeral concepts go first in Japanese, with some common exceptions (persons tend to go at the start as it does in the example). In English we tend to start with the closest concept and work our way out.

That really helped my understanding and sentence creation.

Some languages don’t even use word order as the primary mechanism for forming sentences. Latin and Ancient Greek are two examples. They are “inflected” meaning you change the word to show how it functions in a sentence.

Pronouns in English still function this way a little (for example he = subject, him = object).

Are you describing case systems/declension here?

Seems so.

Yep. Take German for example. Any subordinate clause puts all verbs at the end in reverse order (SOV; it used to be all clauses but as with many languages it started to shift toward SVO).

    I like cats, because cats like me.

translates to

    Ich mag Katzen, weil Katzen mich mögen.

which directly translates to

    I like cats, because cats me like.

This is a simple example but gets sufficiently complex as the sentence does. All of the verbs get pushed to the end, which as an English speaker means you have to mentally construct the sentence first and know which verbs you need to use prior to using them.

It gets further complicated because verbs also change the tense of the sentence, which ultimately dictates which articles to use (der/die/das/den/des/etc. - all meaning "the" - or ein/einen/eine/eines/etc. - all meaning "a").

And yes, native speaking Germans screw it up all the time, too. Just like English speakers mess up "a" and "an", "me and my friends", "your/you're", etc.

What makes you think that native German speakers screw it up "all the time"? I'm German and I did not encounter any of these mistakes in years, despite being a grammar nazi.

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as:

"Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

Using the wrong register is a form of humor as well just like in English and other languages but with different impact due to the politeness level being so important to the syntactic structure just like in Japanese. Being overly polite or using too low of a register works much better than sarcasm for comedic purposes for reasons I can’t quite explain. In English sarcasm is commonly how I joke around and involves an intonation cue but it doesn’t really work in Korean even with intonation (possibly because intonation and vowel lengthening is used for a lot of word distinction perhaps although homonyms exist in basically all languages) and if you try it native speakers will oftentimes have trouble telling if you’re serious or not. Although these days due to Western influences IMO most Koreans understand sarcasm as a style of humor and can apply it for all languages although for older generations it’s going to be less natural. The country’s had massive, massive social and economic changes in the past 100 years, it’s kind of wild

There are many levels of honorifics, from very low form to very polite form. Most aren’t used on a daily basis though, just like how most people don’t speak like they’re a lawyer addressing a courtroom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_honorifics#Addressee_...

I tried translating it with a tool:

"존경하는 각하, 맥주 한 잔만 드시게 해달라고 겸손히 부탁드려도 될까요?"

Does that sound about right?

Close. But 드시게 is not correct in that place because its an honorific form given to yourself when you're trying to honor the other person. And I'd rather use 감히 instead of 겸손히, which can be roughly translated into "dare to"

"존경하는 각하, 맥주 한 잔만 마시게 해달라고 감히 부탁드려도 될까요?"

Another Korean here. Usually in Korea, one could refer to an unknown someone as "선생님(teacher)". "각하", on the other hand, has been referred to the President of Korea. So it really sounds weird to a Korean. When someone calls you "각하". If I were to be a customer, then I would be called "고객님". Where "고객" means customer and "님" is like "sama" in Japanese, and "sir" in English.

Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules.

Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence.

The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.

How do noble or formal titles work then?

It seems very unlikely to just be a suffix ending.

The rules for how you speak to people and how you address people you are speaking about are different.

The whole thing is a bit more complex than suffix changes alone especially with more out there titles but generally speaking,

I think you've seen a bit on how the endings would change depending on your relationship to the hearer.

For the latter(addressing people you're speaking about)

For instance, You would basically never call an acquaintance just by name

Take the name 김영철

If you were on relatively equal social standing, you would generally address 김영철 as 김영철 씨 or 영철 씨

If you wanted to take it a step further in respect, you would replace 씨 with 님

For a senior in age or experience in say the workplace, it would become 선배 but this can be used to address the person on its own without the name attached.

There are also different words for how you would address different members of the family. Unlike in English, you would basically never call an older brother or sister by their actual name. It's more a generic brother or sister word that changes depending on if the speaker is male or female.

오빠 - female referring to older brother

형 - male referring to older brother

누나 - male referring to older sister

언니 - female referring to older sister

For royalty, there'll be different titles for different members of the royalty.

Forgot to mention. The brother/sister words don't necessarily need to be referring to an actual brother or sister.

They can be used endearingly to refer to older males/females you are close to.

오빠 can be used somewhat flirtingly/romantically as well

> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.

This is quite interesting to hear, but I assume you mean that you always knew if you were going ask a question before you asked it. So the issue was the actual construction of the sentence itself?

If not, there are plenty of ways to bail out of a statement midway through a sentence.

- Korean is more efficient than English... right?

- Korean is more efficient than English, isn't it?

- Korean is more efficient than English? (raising intonation at the end)

In a sense, sure I guess my brain almost always knows whether I wanted a question or not - after all, native English speakers have no problem asking questions. However, it's hard to get used to it, when I've never done it before.

It's like a habit. Imagine you make coffee every morning - after a while it becomes second nature and you don't even think about what you're doing, you just get up and mindlessly start the coffee grinder. Once in a while your girlfriend visits, and she wants milk in the coffee, no problem, I'll pour some milk on her cup at the end.

And one day you have a different girlfriend, and she doesn't like coffee at all, so when she's visiting you have to make tea! So you just get up, start grinding the coffee, and half a minute later, "Oh damn, not again!" Even though making coffee and making tea take about the same effort, it just throws a wrench in your morning routine until you get used to it, which make take a long time.

> If not, there are plenty of ways to bail out of a statement midway through a sentence.

Sure you can also do it in English, but you can't do it as gloriously as in Korean, where you can start the same sentence and end up with:

한국어는 영어보다 더 효율적입니다. Korean is more efficient than English.

한국어는 영어보다 더 효율적...(read the room, oh no, bail out)...이라는 헛소리를 하는 사람이 다 있더라고요 하하하! => I found an idiot saying Korean is more efficient than English, ha ha!

Working with many IT workers from Indian origin, their English always frustrated me in that when they ask questions they won't say it in the interrogative form. It was always in the declarative.

"We are deploying the code, right?" versus "Are we deploying the code?"

"This is Boolean, correct?" versus "Is this Boolean?"

Is this cultural, or are they afraid to ask questions? It's almost as if by stating the question in the declarative form they are hedging their doubt. As an American English speaker, I find this annoying. If you don't know, be bold to ask straight, don't doublespeak it.

English actually has this one backwards. Just think about the concept of a question mark. You're already specifying at the end of your sentences "the preceding was a question". Some languages have a literal spoken grammatical word that functions just like a question mark at the end of a sentence. In Chinese this word is "ma" (specific to yes/no questions). Also in Chinese, the way to pose a more general question mirrors the answer you are trying to get. You just substitute the information you don't have with the question words who/what/when/where/why. Eg "The bathroom is where?" "The bathroom is out back". When you stop and think about it, its actually kind of strange for English to pull the question words to the front, completely changing its sentence grammar for this one particular use case. I can't think of any other context where you can pull the verb to the front, violating the usual SVO ordering. English is weird, they aren't being timid (I think), you're projecting an interpretation of how they phrase things which actually has a simple linguistic explanation.

I suspect they meant what they said - you're probably used to deciding that your statement is going to be a question because you must in English. You are probably forgetting all of the times you have started saying something only to realize that you werent sure of what you were talking about.

Can you say, if this makes it more difficult to tell jokes?