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Grammatical superiority of Korean

  Tags: Korean
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery Post Reply
16 messages over 2 pages: 1
parasitius
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 Message 9 of 16
02 February 2009 at 9:04am | IP Logged 
This thread prompted my discovery of The Passing of Korea online, which is old enough to be public domain. It's an utterly fascinating book! Even if I had no interest in Korea, it is worth looking at for its comments on Japan and China, wonderful typography, and the superior prose with which it is written; writing of a standard I don't recall running across in any modern books I've read. I have to look up words on every page.

Another nice thing about it was written before modern philosophies ushered in the era of political correctness and relativism and corrupted the style of all our history books.

Edited by parasitius on 02 February 2009 at 9:09am

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Deecab
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 Message 10 of 16
10 March 2009 at 6:51pm | IP Logged 
I can certainly believe that some languages may express certain mood better than other languages do but that doesn't make Korean superior grammatically, let alone holistically.

In English, we can express words like de-moron-ify and still be understood although it is grammatically wrong. Korean can't really do that effortlessly.

What do we mean by superiority? The difficulty or the expressiveness? If we go by the former, Korean grammar is hardly anything compared to Slavic languages and even English.
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sebngwa3
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 Message 11 of 16
25 January 2010 at 1:27am | IP Logged 
I edited the original post to add the rest of the essay on Korean by Homer Hulbert.

Edited by sebngwa3 on 25 January 2010 at 4:15pm

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Captain Haddock
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 Message 12 of 16
25 January 2010 at 10:18am | IP Logged 
Japanese is also incredibly rich in modal constructions — second only to Korean, perhaps — and there are entire
books written about Japanese modality. While I'm not touching the subject of superiority, I can say that I think I
understand what the author is talking about. A rich and intricate verbal system really makes it easy to attach
complicated and nuanced meaning to even basic expressions.
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zooplah
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 Message 13 of 16
06 February 2010 at 10:28pm | IP Logged 
I detect a note of sarcasm.
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sebngwa3
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 Message 14 of 16
11 February 2010 at 8:41pm | IP Logged 
I edited to add a section of the article right before the "The grammatical superiority...."
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cm006j
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 Message 15 of 16
05 July 2010 at 3:15pm | IP Logged 
I think the very reason to learn many languages is that they all do something better than others. They all have some area in which they shine.

Korean is better at some things and worse at others than English.
English is better than some languages in certain aspects and worse in others.
Same with every other language.

It all evens out and leaves me with the idea that I would like to know every language there is!


ETA: Sorry, I just realized that I'm in a special thread. I'm new here. I got excited to express my ideas, I hope that's okay.

Edited by cm006j on 05 July 2010 at 3:19pm

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clumsy
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 Message 16 of 16
27 September 2010 at 1:39pm | IP Logged 
Can I write something?

Well, I must say I don't agree with this statement~~

Even though, I myself feel fascinated by korean grammar.. and its many gramatical endings.

You can express many interesting subtle things.

But...
there are still areas in which Korean is irregular, or one construction i used to express two different things.


for example transitive and causative verbs are very irregular :(




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