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Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와
by neom 4y ago
Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language.
맥주 한 잔 주세요
Beer one please
화장실은 어디에요?
Toilet where?
와이파이 있어요?
wifi is here?
You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!
- rcme 4y agoIn English you can say "One beer please."
- photonbeam 4y agoOr “Beer me”.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mirthflat83 4y agoOr “Beer”.
- hinkley 4y agoNORM!
- Affric 4y agoYou can even get two of them down to a single syllable. "Beer?" "Loo?" "Wifi?" Written with an extra character which indicates tone. English has the meaningless 'do' but even that can be done away with should you so choose. I always think like whenever these comparisons are made people they're from people who must think in quite stilted English because of their education. There are some interesting comparisons to be made but comparing highly formalised english as though it's the only way to speak it is not how they should be made.
- bee_rider 4y agoThis definitely is the one that comes to mind. It is a special case though, it would be unusual to say “soup me.”
- actionfromafar 4y agoVerbing. It's a thing.
- bee_rider 4y agoSure is. It is funny that verbing is thought of as a sort of language hack. Meanwhile, nouning is basically built into the language via the -er suffix.
- ummonk 4y ago"You have wifi?"
- retinaros 4y agohum… there is a saying in korean 한국말은 끝까지 들어봐야 한다 that literally translate to the opposite you are saying « You should listen to Korean until the end«
- steele 4y agoItem specific counting suffixes are a pain though
- freshbakedbread 4y agoOn the other hand, the question template build up can be useful when initiating contact with someone. They have the space of “Could I have…” or equivalent in other languages to get tuned in to the fact you’re asking a question. Much of speech comprehension is being able to anticipate what’s coming.
- y7 4y agoYes, or just getting attuned to the specific voice patterns of the speaker.
- localplume 4y agoespecially when you have great words like 눈물 = 눈 + 물 = eye + water = tears 물고기 = 물 + 고기 = water + meat = fish (although this only means the animal, not the food, which is weird. 생선 is the fish meat like cow v beef) 돼지고기 = 돼지 + 고기 = pig + meat = pork etc. there is a lot of other examples I'm forgetting but its cool. The modification of the verb root to denote tense and formality as well is pretty intuitive. Korean is a great language. The problematic things IMO are the counting of items and the uses of the Korean v Chinese number systems, plus the random Hanja here and there.
- LudwigNagasena 4y agoIsn't English (and other Germanic languages) very similar in its propensity for noun+noun compounds? There is crab meat, horse meat, shark meat, etc. And if it weren't for the Norman Conquest, pork would probably be called pig meat. After all, it is simply called Schweinefleisch in German.
- schwartzworld 4y agoAll these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?
- aeternum 4y agoIt does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity. From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-different-languages-ad4fce32a828 https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-differe...
- gibolt 4y agoCompared to many European languages, sure, but English still has plenty of filler. Chinese, for example, can be extremely information dense.
- pessimizer 4y ago> English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. I think that it's the grammar rules that make English fairly efficient, and also effectively add to its vocabulary, because word order in English is so strong that it twists whatever word you put in a particular position into whatever part of speech it needs to be. In less order-based languages you have to learn a bunch of elaborate formulas to change the word; in English, it's basically just Subject, Verb, Object and a few mathematical rules about commas, prepositions and conjunctions to make that basic structure recursive or flowery. All of English's core vocabulary is horrifyingly irregular, and you can ignore almost all of that irregularity, prefixes and suffixes, and still make yourself pretty easily understood. I think the massive vocabulary of English makes it less dense. We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. We find ourselves arguing about the innuendo around words or the "actual definitions" of words almost more than material issues, constantly invoking contradictory authorities. We're also constantly repeating ourselves and pretending like we've understood because using obscure words is a sign of intelligence, and not understanding them a sign of stupidity. Romance languages seem to have a lot fewer words with specific meanings, and do most of their playing with grammar (making a lot of sentences into horrifying mazes.) And irt the center and north in Germanic Europe, the most interesting thing about "Uncleftish Beholding" is that to English speakers it reads like stupid cavemen talking about magic, but it's basically a unit-by-unit direct translation of how Danes, Norwegians and Swedes really talk. English speakers never use the common word for anything if they want to sound like they know what they're talking about. an aside: I've always heard that Vietnamese is the most efficient by syllable. IIRC some paper came up with a metric where it was about 1.4x more efficient than English. There was also someone who figured out that universally, human languages expressed ideas at the same rate, but the people who spoke less efficient languages just talked faster.
- okdood64 4y agoEnglish can be pretty much as efficient... It's up to the social context on how much you want to dress it up.
- famouswaffles 4y agoNo it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly. In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise. Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ? And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents "Do they have friends ?" "Do you have a friend ?" "Do you have friends ?" "Does he have a friend ?" And so on. If you wanted to say, "I have a friend" "He has friends" "They have a friend" etc, you'd simply remove the question mark and change the tone of the last syllable (when speaking). 친구 있어요. The exact meaning would have to be divided from surrounding context. Lots of composability that simply doesn't exist in English.
- creamyhorror 4y agoSimilar story in Japanese, which is also high-context and encodes less information explicitly. Listeners have to do more interpretation using context than in English, since sentences out of context can mean more things.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoHold up, if information is being encoded on tone, and tonal marks aren't part of the written language, then you've at least somewhat bait and switched us. Its not literally one identical phrase for 4 situations. Its several slightly different phrases that happen to not have their difference transcribed within this writing system. The information is still there!
- yongjik 4y agoIt's not tone - at least not in the same sense Chinese is a tonal language. Standard Korean does not have tones. Maybe a better term would be intonation: it's similar to how the same English sentence could have multiple meanings, e.g., "I certainly did not see him" vs. "I certainly did not see him." GP's example sentence would have just two different way to say it, either a plain statement or a question. In either case the pronoun is omitted, so you're supposed to infer it from context.
- posterboy 4y agoAll I learned from reading this is that your translation skills are abysimal. I only know the script and can tell that the encoded information is a little more complex. > You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence That would likely break the Curry-Howard-Correspondance. So I can only concure, it is "incredible". Good on you if you reached a point where you don't notice the difference.
- BalinKing 4y ago> Curry-Howard-Correspondance Did you mean the Church-Turing thesis? (I still don’t really see the connection though….)
- DiscourseFan 4y agoAnyone can argue that any language is efficient based on some ability to express a (relatively) complex idea in (relatively) few words. In Sanskrit, for instance, one can express entire metaphyiscal/philosophical systems in a single word, using compounds, and in philosophical commentaries this is actually quite frequent (which is what makes reading philosophy in Sanskrit so difficult, because everything is so condensed). The compounds can be of an arbitrary length, and feature extraordinarily complex syntactic system that allows for such complexity of expression. See the Wikipedia article below, for more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_compound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_compound
- yawaramin 4y agoYeah but there is a difference between efficiency of theoretical concepts and efficiency of expressing practical tasks.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kleton 4y agoTea, Earl Grey, hot
- sasaf5 4y agoIt depends... if the topic of the sentence is the verb you need to wait there in suspense till it comes out.