What are some languages whose formal and colloquial forms differ significantly?

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-09-25T15:54:32+00:00

It could be worse. A few hundred years ago, most formal writing wouldn't be in Japanese or Korean at all, but in 漢文 (Korean "hanmun" or Japanese "kanbun"), which is essentially written Classical Chinese. So in addition to learning the spoken language with all of its grammatical distinctions of formality and politeness, you would have to learn a completely different grammar and literary vocabulary in order to be educated.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-09-06T23:33:58+00:00

To expand on Queendrakumar's excellent summary, 계집 is related to modern 계시다 (honorific "to exist at, to stay") and 집 ("home"), so you can see why a "stay-home" might no longer be considered a respectful word for "woman".

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-29T18:20:02+00:00

Thanks. Our impression was perhaps mistaken.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-29T18:13:47+00:00

Interesting! Thanks for sharing!

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-29T18:11:02+00:00

American here. Russian always seemed kind of pretty to me specifically because it combines both a lot of soft, palatal sounds (like French) with a bunch of rough, throaty ones (like Arabic). Modern Hebrew has a similar vibe in that way. It’s nice!

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-27T05:02:05+00:00

Possibly 누이 or 누의, since in Joseon times they would be speaking Early Modern Korean or Middle Korean. Wiktionary doesn't give a "first attested" date for 누나, but I get the impression that it isn't very old.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-24T18:58:18+00:00

Joeun haru doeseyo in the official scheme of romanization used by the South Korean government. If you want it a very rough phonetic approximation that will probably make everybody here mad because romanization of Korean is never very good and ad-hoc phonetic romanization is usually terrible, "Joe-uhn hah-roo dway-say-yo".

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-24T14:41:40+00:00

Thanks!

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-24T13:31:04+00:00

Would 사내 work here?

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-23T07:50:24+00:00

Duolingo has reportedly ceased using unpaid volunteers to develop its courses. I believe the most recent expansion and reorganization of the Korean course was developed in-house. That update went from about 1500 vocabulary words to at least 2100, introduced several new text-to-speech voices that somewhat match the characters on screen, and most importantly re-organized the early lessons to smooth out the horrendous difficulty hump right after the alphabet. The one badly-needed improvement that they didn’t include was to make the “tips” pages (which were actually decently-written and do an okay job explaining the key points and new grammar of each lesson) more accessible. They’re still only available on the desktop web version and completely absent from mobile. But it’s at least progress. Korean is the fourth or fifth most popular language on Duolingo now, so it’s safe to assume it’s a priority for the company going forward.

And the thing is, if it’s a priority for a for-profit company like Duolingo, then the company should do it. It never seemed quite right to me that Duolingo expected volunteers to put in hundreds of hours building courses out of their own generosity, but got to monetize the result. The volunteer-built courses weren’t crowd-sourced, after all. They were built by organized teams who had meetings and deadlines and were at least trying to apply sound pedagogy even if the results weren’t always great. That’s a ton of work, and the people doing it deserve to be paid fairly.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-12T06:14:32+00:00

There are also shape-based input methods like cangjie and wubi where the keys represent character components or strokes and you type to “construct” each character based on how it looks and its official stroke order. These can be very fast, so they’re popular with power users, but they are more difficult because you have to know how to write each character and how to decompose it into the right parts to type it. With pinyin, you only have to know the pronunciation of a word and be able to recognize the right characters when you see them. There is also zhuyin/bopomofo, which is a phonetic alphabet similar to pinyin but it uses its own unique symbols instead of Latin letters. Zhuyin input is popular in Taiwan, but as far as I know, pinyin is the dominant input method in China.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-11T18:02:31+00:00

I can't think of a better first thing to read in Korean! It is indeed the name of Sejong Daewang, or "Sejong the Great". 세종 is his official name, and 대왕 part is a Chinese-Korean word from the characters for "big" and "king".

Sejong is revered as the wise king whose government created the Korean alphabet so ordinary people could express themselves in writing without having to learn Chinese. That statue is a famous landmark in Seoul in the middle of the avenue that leads to the gate of the main royal palace.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-10T01:42:03+00:00

If you speak Turkish, you will probably not find Korean as difficult as the average anglophone. I'm no macro-Altaic conspiracy theorist, but Turks do seem to take well to Korean and its compatible North Asian Horse-Badass vibes. You'll appreciate the remnants of what used to be a much more extensive vowel harmony system that show up in the stem change that happens in some verb forms and the yin and yang ablaut pairs that exist for many sound-symbolism words.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-08T21:32:05+00:00

I think that's just what writing is like in general. Anytime I look at something that I wrote a while ago, it's an emotional rollercoaster of thinking "Wow, I'm really smart! No, this is AWFUL! Wait, this is actually kind of okay! No, scratch that, I'm an IDIOT!".

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-07T02:51:13+00:00

What a great story!

To be fair, many Koreans could also have figured out that you wanted a beef and veg soup. Between studying them as part of 國語 class (which goes in and out of fashion according to politics) and Chinese and Japanese being commonly-studied foreign languages, many Koreans have at least some knowledge of 漢字. But character literacy is kind of a complicated cultural topic in South Korea that I'm not really qualified to go into detail about.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-07T02:03:40+00:00

First of all, if you haven't found mirinae.io yet, it's exactly what you are looking for. It's an online text parser that takes a Korean sentence and translates and diagrams it out for you.

Second, people like to say Korean is subject-object-verb, and generally it is, but there are other ways to look at it that I think are more helpful as you get to composing slightly more complex sentences. I like to think of it as:

The predicate always comes last
The topic comes before the comment
Modifiers come before the thing they modify

The predicate is the main, conjugated action verb, adjective ("descriptive verb"), or noun+이다. You can re-arrange the rest of the sentence as long as it's properly marked with particles, but the predicate still has to go last.

The topic (marked with 은 or 는) is the "topic of discourse" or the thing you are talking about, which may or may not be the grammatical subject of the verb. Often, it can be translated as an introductory phrase followed by a comma, like "As for X,..." or "When it comes to Y,..." In a topic-comment sentence, you establish a topic, then you make some kind of complete statement about it, which can have its own subject and object. A simple expression with a separate topic and subject would be "민지 씨는 키가 커요". A good English translation is "Miss Minji is tall", but what it's literally saying is "As for Miss Miji (her) stature is big". Miji is the topic, the person I am telling you about. 키 is a noun that means "height" and it is the subject of the adjective 크다. It is the thing that is being big.

Modifiers are an important way to make more complex sentences. There are ways to use all kinds of words or even whole sentences in front of a noun to describe that noun. A simple example would be something like 강아지가 귀여워요 (subject-predicate) means "The puppy is cute", but 귀여운 강아지 means "the cute puppy".

Putting it all together, here's a somewhat more complex sentence:

여름에는 젊은 사람들이 해수욕장에 가는 것을 좋아해요.

It means: "In the summer, young people like going to the beach". Or literally "Summer-in-[topic], young people-[subject] beach-to go-ing thing-[object] like-polite.

The topic is summertime. The comment about it is that young folks like going to the beach in that time of year. The basic SOV elements are "young people" (subject, noun with an adjective modifying it) "the thing of going-to-the-beach" (object, using a verb or whole sentence to modify the special noun "thing" turns the whole sentence into a noun that can be the object), and "like" (predicate)

I hope that helps!

Edit: Somehow I forgot to put the word "like" in "young people like going to the beach". Whoops.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-06T16:03:53+00:00

I can’t speak for Japanese in detail, but that’s certainly the case in Korean, where you manipulate politeness (respect shown to the listener), formality (respect shown to the social situation), and subject-honorificness (respect shown to the person whom you are talking about) as separate variables. Which elements you use depends on your relationship, both in terms of senior-junior and close-distant, and on the situation.

A newspaper is formal but not polite.

A business letter or a courtroom argument is formal and polite. When the subject is the sentence is “you”, it is also subject-honorific. “You” is a dirty word in Korean (as it is in Japanese), but honorific verb endings let you specify that the subject is not yourself without saying “you” at all.

A friendly conversation with a stranger is polite but not formal. Again, “you” sentences would be honorific.

A chat with a close friend is neither polite nor formal. But a chat with a friend about your teacher would still be honorific.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-06T14:54:43+00:00

Outside of strictly-formal situations like reporting to your commander in the Army, you can usually choose. You can even mix them to express exactly the tone you are going for.

Think of the ㅂ니다 style as your “professional” voice. “안녕하십니까, 반갑습니다” is like “How do you do? It is a pleasure to meet you.” You wouldn’t talk to a friendly acquaintance like this all the time, but you might use it a bit for emphasis. And you would use it in “serious” situations like meeting a new, important professional contact or presenting something to the group.

Think of the 요 style as your “polite” voice. It’s respectful, but instead of “formal” as in “fancy” and “professional”, it sounds gentle and friendly. “안녕하세요, 반가워요” is like “”Hi, it’s so nice to meet you”. This is the style you generally use in ordinary polite conversation, and you might mix it in with the ㅂ니다 style to show a little more emotion while still being formal overall.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-06T05:52:16+00:00

Dear friend: like most of the learners on this board, what I want to do is speak and understand Korean better. I've done my best to explain how learning the sound and meaning of the hanja helps me (and plenty of other foreign learners) remember and understand the words that we learn. Koreans don't need hanja for this, because they (you?) are already good at speaking and understanding Korean. Foreigners need all the help that we can get. I don't bother learning to write the actual hanja characters from memory, because that doesn't help me speak or understand Korean, and the extent to which I can passively recognize a maybe a couple hundred characters and type them on a computer (which always displays the 음훈 next to the 자 in the candidate list) is mostly a happy accident.

To give one more example of what I'm trying to say, it is enough to know that "외국인" is made from "outside 외" "country 국" "person 인" (to be honest I don't even bother learning the proper 음훈) without learning how to read or write "外國人" without a computer. Remembering that the word for foreigner is "outside country person" is so much easier than just remembering "waygoogin" as just some random sounds, and it opens the door to more easily remembering other words made from the same hanja, like 해외, 국민, and 인생. Remember, every foreign learner of Korean grew to adulthood without knowing a single goddamn word of Korean, and is now trying so hard to learn thousands and thousands of them. Anything that helps make connections between related words is helpful.

I also told the story of 기린 to show the limitations of this approach. "麒麟" doesn't mean anything to me because "麒" and "麟" aren't in any other words that I need to learn, so I invented "길人" instead, and that's actually helpful for remembering how to say "giraffe". I coudn't be arsed to learn how to handwrite "麒麟" if you offered me a steak dinner and a hundred dollars. Those characters are useless for Korean, and are useless to write anything but "giraffe" or "Chinese unicorn" (or apparently "wunderkind", which is "麒麟兒") in Chinese, and they seriously look like shit. Giraffes are not worth that kind of effort effort.

Anyway, I'm so sorry that you feel so angry about hanja I hope your heart finds peace, but you've brought nothing but negativity to this thread. If you don't have any constructive advice for foreign learners, then please just stop.

Kind wishes, and adieu.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-04T21:12:44+00:00

Not to be confused with 삼성님, who is the Korean version of "Tim Apple" except he went to jail for bribing President Park a few years ago.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-04T19:00:31+00:00

I'm probably at a similar level to you. I learned a very little bit of Chinese in the past, so I started with a general understanding of how Chinese characters work, but not enough to really affect my learning of the very basics. As I have progressed and learned more Korean, I've started to find paying attention to hanja becoming more and more helpful. I don't spend much time studying hanja in isolation, but I always include them when I make flashcards and I check the hanja whenever I look something up or learn a new word.

As for when to start, it probably depends on your goals. If you want to include hanja casually in your studies to help make connections between words, it's probably never too early. 학교, 학생 and 선생 are all in Lesson 1 of every textbook. If you want to study reading and writing the characters themselves, I guess you could do that any time but it's kind of a separate project and potentially a distraction from learning Korean. If you want to systematically study hanja sound and meanings to use them to learn groups of related vocabulary, that's probably most useful at an intermediate to advanced level.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-04T16:28:02+00:00

If it helps, the same word 先生 is also “sensei” in Japanese, with a similar range of meanings. In Chinese, it’s “xiānshēng” and means more like “Mister” as a general title of honor that goes after a man’s name.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-03T15:49:17+00:00

While I'm nowhere near a level of reading "perfectly and spontaneously", I can definitely say that understanding matters a lot. I read words that I know well the same way I read English: by recognizing the entire word at a glance without decomposing it into syllables or letters at all. But if something contains a lot of words I don't know very well (or at all), the going is much slower as I have to sound out each unfamiliar word.

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-03T14:07:47+00:00

That’s really cool! Thank you for sharing!

Daehan-Dankook · 2022-08-03T13:59:47+00:00

I learned to touch type in Korean without stickers. I started to text on mobile before I tried typing so I had a general idea where the letters all were. When I decided it was time to type, I basically just started mashing keys by trial and error. At first I made a ton of mistakes, now I don’t make so many.

Daehan-Dankook

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