Learn Sloppy Korean

By Ken Eckert

http://keneckert.com

Introduction

May 2008, August 2009, January 2010

"Fake books" are quasi-legal books of musical tablature for guitarists in a hurry, or those lacking skill, who want to learn the basic outline of a song. I suppose this is a sort of "fake book" website for Korean. Purists might condemn this project with some justice, for I have simplified things greatly in order to let you speak not grammatically perfect Korean, but Korean that is passably good enough to make you understood as a foreigner. In short, this is sloppy Korean, written for ESL teachers already in or planning to come to Korea to teach English, or for anyone who wants a brief skiff of Korean for whatever purpose.

Why have I done this when I am not myself anywhere near fluency in Korean? For several reasons. There aren’t any books or sites like this that I know of. Most Korean books that I’ve seen either:

  • teach you an outdated form of Korean that was useful in 1952 but make you sound like Shakespeare to a Korean now,        
  • teach you a pile of preformed phrases without telling you anything about how they fit together or how to say new things, or
  • immediately jump to a skill level so high that you throw the book on to a pile in exasperation, go back to looking at bikini girls on the net, and never come back to it.

So this book will teach you a very rough but serviceable form of Korean that will let you get by and build confidence so that you can move on to better books written by specialists. It will not make you sound like a native Korean speaker, but if you’re not Korean you’re not going to be expected to speak like one anyway. This is a difficult language to learn, but not impossible, and the good news is that Koreans are usually flattered by any foreigner who at least tries. Maybe at some point a Korean will tell you sue-go heh-say-o … good try! That’s all I will try to accomplish on this website.

I must immediately cover myself by thanking my wife Ariel, who, being Korean, will be helping by checking things and helping supply Korean letterings. Most of these phrases have been picked up from her and from co-workers, students, and generally from living in Korea for five years. As my own proficiency rises I will add to this site.

I have occasionally cribbed a phrase or concept from Richard Harris' Roadmap to Korean (Hollym, 2005), a very helpful guide to the language once you outgrow this website. The book is an exception to my complaint that there are no good Korean tutorials in print. Being the internet, I've also shamelessly borrowed from various internet sites and online forums.

A Pep Talk

I have been very lazy to learn Korean myself, partly because as an ESL teacher I am usually surrounded by students who can speak English, and because on so many occasions I was so intimidated by Korean that I gave up. Before living in Korea I taught in Mexico, and this spoiled me, because an English speaker can gain proficiency in Spanish quickly, but it takes years of studying Korean to get anywhere near conversational level. "Let's go to the beach," Vamos a la playa, sounds romantic, and is easy to learn because Spanish is a European language and the word order and vocabulary all feel comfortable. When you begin to learn Korean, and the words and grammar have no familiarity, it is a disconcerting project.

It doesn't help that travel books and even language books romanticize and exoticize Korea and Korean. The assumption many people are left with is that the language is impossible and the culture impenetrably different. Neither is true. Koreans are humans like anyone else with the same emotions and needs; the language has many differences but has predictable rules. Korean children learn it; they are not space aliens. At any rate, it is not an all-or-nothing project. You can learn a little Korean to get by in a few weeks, or spend years mastering it. I am not going to wax poetic about how learning Korean will open new worlds, etc., although I do think that's somewhat true. A language is a tool, and if you have confidence you can learn to use it skillfully.

I'm not fully practicing what I'm preaching, because I am still what I would call a high-level beginner. But because I'm a native English speaker and an English professor, maybe I have an insight into what basic problems most trouble new learners of Korean because I've experienced them too. As I get better I will add to this website. As ever, if you don't like it... take your money back.

Basic Differences Between Korean and English

I wish I had understood these concepts when I first came to Korea in 2003. It would have saved me a great deal of confusion.

1. Korean is a high-context language. English is a low-context language. This is not a value judgment of either tongue but a statement of grammatical difference. English sentences are long but convey a great deal of exact information as free-standing statements. The boy ate some grapes tells us there was a boy, we both understand what boy, there was only one boy, and he ate a certain amount of grapes in the past. Korean would literally say boy-grape-did-eat. English might then say He went to school. Korean would render this school-to-did-go.

Korean has no articles (a, the), pronouns and plurals are usually omitted, and even verb tenses can be loosey-goosey. There is no separate preposition (to); a prepositional marker is simply connected to school. How can the language communicate meaning with so much seemingly necessary information missing? Because in spoken conversation the situation is visibly clear, and because there would be other sentences establishing and supporting what is going on. Written Korean would be perhaps (but not necessarily) more exact.

2. Korean is an agglutinative language. English is an analytical language. By this, I mean that English indicates meaning by word order. In The dog bit the man, we know that the man did not bite the dog because dog came first. This seems perfectly natural and obvious, but not all languages do this. A language such as Latin would say hominem mordet canis, and the word order would be largely irrelevant because the endings (-em and -is) tell us who bit who. Korean would say dog-subject-man-object-did-bite, with the biter and bitee marked with particle endings.

But Korean is agglutinative and Latin is something else (a synthetic language, because conjugations can change as well as add to words). Korean doesn't really make 'sentences' in the sense of linking together discrete words. Rather, it glues them (thus agglutinative) into a statement: dog-subject-man-object-did-bite.

3. The word order is not only different in that the verb is at the end, but Korean does not always even require sentences to have a verb in them like an English sentence does. For convenience, I translate a statement like shib-da as it's easy, but technically shib means easy and da is just a marker indicating that shib is acting as a completed adjective. There is no verb in the sentence! You need to let go of that English concept.

4. Respect. Korean is much more sensitive and nuanced to showing levels of familiarity or respect in its grammar. English used to have two grammatical levels of respect (you, formal, and thou, familiar), but these have atrophied in favor of distinctions in tone and vocabulary. Korean, being a Confucian-influenced society, does not have this easygoing flatness of western society and employs numerous levels of respect, which provides a further layer of meaning. In his book, Richard Harris gives an example of some 24 verb conjugations for respect that could theoretically be used, all in one tense. Fortunately, this site, and many Korean books, teaches only the most common familiar and polite forms which correspond loosely to dual European language forms such as du/sie and tu/usted, but do remember that there are many more levels and gradations.

Some of these differences will feel weird to a non-native speaker, but with time they will feel natural, just as a German or French speaker feels that all nouns need a gender.

Go on to Part 1