I like to pick up those free community newspapers when I see them lying around, like in the lobby of my apartment building. I will scan through, looking for examples of Korean that I might actually understand.
Opening at random, I found an advertorial alongside an ad for an English hagwon that was actually quite intriguing – a discussion of that question that utterly fascinates Koreans: “why is English so freaking difficult?”
The answer, according to this particular hagwon owner, is that it’s all about grammar and sentence structure. This is a commonplace, and hardly controversial, although it’s a rather one-dimensional argument. English and Korean essentially have maximally divergent sentence structure, on the spectrum of all the world’s languages. In syntactical terms, one might generalize that Korean mostly builds its (chomskyan) parse trees right-to-left, while English builds its parse trees left-to-right, or maybe center-out (English is more complicated in that it has trees growing in either direction, in this matter, but it shares this trait with all of its Indo-European siblings).
What intrigued me were a pair of graphics, which showed mappings of Korean phrases to various other languages. The first graphic shows how all the phrases had to shift position in the movement from Korean to English, but how those phrases and grammatical elements essentially “stay in position” in the mappings between various European languages. The second graphic shows how the phrases and grammatical elements “stay in position” between Korean and Japanese. The take-away is that, for Korean speakers, European languages, including English, are therefore more difficult, while Japanese is easy. This is an observable phenomenon, but I’m genuinely impressed with how clearly these simple graphics illustrate what is a difficult concept to explain.
Here is a picture I took of the article – you can click it to see a larger image and hopefully make out the two graphics I’m talking about.
I mean, if you’re interested. I’m kind of weird.
And since I was unloading my camera, here’s a random picture of some springtime blooming trees in a parklike area not far from here.
