I asked some students to compare the Korean and English languages. Stupid me, I should have know that this would provoke all kinds of weird knee-jerk claims that Korean is somehow “superior” to English.
Weird because, if you know anything about language (and I’d imagine someone who majors in foreign language study would bother to learn about language too), you know that there aren’t more and less “primitive” languages, or that “better” and “worse” aren’t really objective qualities of languages. (A language might be better for some purposes, but this does not make it a better language in essence.)
It’s saddening when a mentality focused on hierarchical competition has been so instilled in people, and a sense of inferiority so spread around by, I think it’s fair to say, the media, that people grasp at straws to make claims about superiority with regard to just about anything, even things about which claims of superiority make no logical sense. Ask people to compare, and claims of superiority pop out. That’s a kind of scary mechanism, isn’t it? It reminds me of scary mechanisms, anyway.
Now, on with the gags:
- There’s only one word for the color “yellow” in English. (I wonder what amber, bisque, blond, buff, chrome, cream, gold, ivory, lemon, ochre, saffron, sandy, and tawny mean, then? Courtesy of Thesarus.com, except for “ochre” which is my own addition, and that’s not even mentioning the ones that have to do with specific things like hair color, or which communicate more information, like how “jaundiced” can mean yellowy and ill.)
- English is less expressive than Korean. (Well, maybe for you it is.)
- English is less precise than Korean. (Is that why the working vocabulary necessary for fluency is so much bigger?)
- There is no way to express politeness in English, but Korean speakers are very polite. (Except of course that there’s a difference between courtesy and politeness, and that basic courteous speech is just easier to master in Korean, since it’s mostly — not all, but a lot — about tagging bits of your sentence with the right honorifics. Unlike in English, where one expresses politeness in a more general shift in tone that encompasses sentence structure and diction.)
- There are two different words in Korean to describe the movement of water — one to mean slowly-moving, and the other to mean quickly-moving. Such sensual expressions and precisions of sensual stimuli do not exist in English, unfortunately. (Wow, and I thought he had words like gurgling, babbling, flowing, rushing, raging, and crashing — to name just a few examples — actually are pretty indicative, and varied, descriptor words for the action of moving water. Silly me.)
I really will have to write something up and post it on the blog, so that these students can read my response to these essays. Of course, I should respond to the sensible ideas I’ve run across, that the drastic differences in grammar make it difficult to learn English, that cultural differences come into play… there are a few essays that have wholly sensible ideas throughout. But there’s also a lot of nonsense floating around in some of my students’ heads, it seems. And the bit tha worries meis that some of these claims are rooted in things that — they claim — other professors at the Uni have told them. I could come down hard and call this nonsense, but whose name will I be besmirching by doing so? Who will lose face? And why would anyone even hint to students that English is an inferior, inexpressive, color-words poor, vocabulary-poor language? It doesn’t make sense, especially to people who are supposed to be studying and learning the language. I don’t get it, is all.
Anyway, next time, I’m going to go with something less likely to annoy me. Compare/contrast bbongjjak and techno, or E Pak Sa to Hyori, or compare/contrast watching TV at home to watching movies in the cinema.