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Mockery of Christianity
- The God of Earth is Kami, an alien from the planet Namek
- Mr. Satan (Hercules in English) acts as the Savior of the world at the fight with Majin Buu, and Goku calls him a "true saviour of the world" before launching final blow to Buu.
Korean is the hardest language
Alexander Arguelles
A polyglot named Alexander Arguelles stated that Korean was the hardest language he has ever encountered, and that he saw a chart of difficulty of languages based on the number of hours it took for the American GI's to master them, and Korean was at the very top, above both Japanese and Chinese.[1]
User Dbachmann's confirmation that this is not original research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Dbachmann
\Someone claimed that this is original research. Would you agree? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Laws_dr#hardest_language — Preceding unsigned comment added by Laws dr (talk • contribs)
since you are citing a source, it is not original research. Your source is "Arguelles, Alexander. January 12th, 2005. How to Learn any Language forum".Alexander Arguelles appears to satisfy our BLP criteria and would thus in principle tend to be quotable. The question is, does this source qualify for inclusion in this particular case. For this debate, use the article talkpage, or ask for more input at WP:RSN. --dab(𒁳) 14:55, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
Eminent persons learned Korean because they perceived it to be the hardest language
Alexander Arguelles learned Korean because of the challenge (as opposed to Chinese or Japanese, because he was convinced that Korean was the hardest)
어릴 때 콘코디아 언어마을의 러시아촌을 5년간 다녔는데 그때 촌장 선생님이 ‘러시아어가 어렵다고 하는데 한국말을 한번 배워보면 진짜 어려운 말이 무엇인지 알 것이다’고 말한 적이 있다. 이 말이 늘 기억이 나서 도대체 한국말이 어떨까하고 늘 호기심을 가지고 있었다. A professor of Korean, Ross King, said: I was in the Concordia language village's Russian program and my teacher said "Russian is said to be difficult but if you try learning Korean you would really know what 'difficult' is." http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=110&oid=028&aid=0000010548
Korean is a very expressive language
Comments on the expressiveness of the Korean language by foreigners
A Presbyterian missionary named John Ross (missionary), who translated the first Korean bible, remarked on the beautiful flexibility and expressiveness of the Korean language, as surpassing even that of ancient greek,[2] which made the Korean New Testament translation far more easier to understand than the one in the Chinese language. [3]
Furthermore, Ross said that the simplicity of Hangul made it more widely accessible to even the unlearned, unlike the Chinese, and because of the expressiveness of the Korean language, the uneducated Korean could understand the bible better than the educated Chinese.[4]
A 19th century author on Korean grammar stated that there are complex inflection and agglutination that shows almost every varying shade of thought or action[5]
HK
"Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language whose development is marvellously complete and symmetrical. We find no such long lists of exceptions as those which entangle the student of the Indo-European languages. In Korean as in most of the Turanian languages the idea of gender is very imperfectly developed, which argues perhaps a lack of imagination. The ideas of person and number are largely left to the context for determination, but in the matter of logical sequence the Korean verb is carried to the extreme of development.
"The Korean's keen sense of social distinctions has given rise to a complete system of honorifics whose proper use is essential to a rational use of the language. And yet numerous as these may be their use is so regulated by unwritten law and there are so few exceptions that they are far easier to master than the personal terminations of Indo-European verbs. The grammatical superiority of Korean over many of the Western languages is that while, in the latter, differences of gender, number and person which would usually be perfectly clear from the context are carefully noted, in the Korean these are left to the speaker's and the hearer's perspicacity, and attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of ideas, which is often secured in the West only by a tedious circumlocution.
"The genius of the language has led the Korean to express every possible verbal relation by a separate modal form. The extent to which this has been carried may be shown only by illustration. Besides having simple forms to express the different tenses and modes, it also has forms to express all those more delicate verbal relations which in English require a circumlocution or the free use of adverbs. For instance, the Korean has a special mode to express the idea of necessity, contingency, surprise, reproof, antithesis, conjunction, temporal sequence, logical sequence, interruption, duration, limit, acquiescence, expostulation, interrogation, promise, exhortation, imprecation, desire, doubt, hypothesis, satisfaction, propriety, concession, intention, decision, probability, possibility, prohibition, simultaneity, continuity, repetition, infrequency, hearsay, agency, contempt, ability. Each one of these ideas can be expressed in connection with any active verb by the simple addition of one or more inseparable suffixes. By far the greater number of these suffixes are monosyllabic.
"To illustrate the delicate shades of thought that can be expressed by the use of a suffix let us take the English expression, "I was going along the road, when suddenly —" This, without anything more, implies that the act of going was suddenly interrupted by some unforeseen circumstance. All this would be expressed in Korean by the three words naga kile kataga (내가 길에 가다가). The first means " I," the second means " along the road," and the third means "was going, when suddenly —" The stem of the verb is ka (가), and the ending, taga (다가), indicates the interruption of the action. And what is more to the point, this ending has absolutely no other use. It is reserved solely for the expression of this shade of thought. Again, on the same stem we have the word kalka (갈까), in which the ending ka (가) gives all the meaning that we connote in the expression, " I wonder whether he will really go or not." If, in answer to the question whether you are going or not you say simply kana (가나), it means, "What in the world would I be going for? Absurd! " ... "No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in the matter of euphony. The remarkable law of the convertibility of surds and sonants has been worked out to its ultimate results in this language. The nice adjustment of the organs of speech, whereby conflicting sounds are so modified as to blend harmoniously, is one of the unconscious Korean arts. The euphonic tendency has not broken down the languages, as is sometimes the case. Prof. Max Müller speaks of a law of phonetic decay, but in Korea it would be better called the law of phonetic adjustment. Korean is characterised by a large number of mimetic words. As their colours are drawn directly from nature, so their words are often merely phonetic descriptions.
"The Korean language is eminently adapted for public speaking. It is a sonorous, vocal language. They have grasped the idea that the vowel is the basis of all human speech. The sibilant element is far less conspicuous than in Japanese, and one needs only to hear a public speech in Japanese and one in Korean to discover the great advantage which the latter enjoys. The lack of all accent in Japanese words is a serious drawback to oratory. There is nothing in Korean speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other Western tongue. In common with the language of Cicero or Demosthenes, Korean is composed of periodic sentences, each one reaching its climax in the verb which is usually the final word, and there are no weakening addenda which so often make the English sentence an anticlimax. In this respect the Korean surpasses English as a medium of public speaking." Hulbert, Homer. The Passing of Korea (1909) pg. 302-304
Info to be incorporated into the article
difficulty of writing is significantly less when the spoken language is learned first
99 If we inquire how it is that English has been rendered the most difficult language in Europe and why Chinese is regarded as the most difficult in the world we find that it springs from the crazy notion that if we are to learn to speak a language we must begin with the spelling and reading But there can be no doubt that any one who masters a few long sentences containing altogether 200 words may converse freely in either of those languages without learning to read If reading and writing should be deemed necessary they may be attained with much greater facility afterwards than by going through the blundering obstructive process of learning them first At the same time the colloquial power may be rapidly extended by daily intercourse with the natives and the stock of words will be simultaneously increased in proportion to the amount of time daily devoted to conversation Prandergast, Thomas. Handbook to the Mastery Series. (1879) pg 86
Ernst Oppert found Korean to be much harder language than Chinese and even Japanese
- "The difficulties in acquiring and properly speaking the Corean language are by no means inferior to those which beset the study of the Chinese; they are even considered by many to be infinitely greater, and they cannot be likened to the comparatively easy manner with which even foreigners are able to acquire a knowledge of Japanese in a proportionately short time.[6]
Korean the Hardest Language for children
The question of the hardest language to acquire can be considered by determining when children are able to speak grammatically correctly, as judged by adult speakers.
According to Wexler, the constructions that take children the longest to master are long-distance dependencies. The long-distance dependency of the reflexive pronoun in Korean is not implemented correctly by Korean children until the age of five (Wexler 1990, p. 109), making Korean the most difficult language for toddlers to master, according to Wexler's study.[7]
Google search of the title of the document named 'The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns in Korean" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22The+acquisition+of+reflexives+and+pronouns+in+Korean%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
testimony that Korean is harder than Chinese
When I called home, my brother asked me how hard it was to learn Korean, and after a lengthy explanation, “But Chinese is easier than Korean.” I concluded.
The average person, normal people who haven’t dedicated their lives to being language and martial arts study-monks, would imagine that learning Chinese is about the hardest things someone could do. But two weeks into my study of Korean, I began to suspect that Korean was harder. Six months later, when I could read and write with ease, and possessed thousands of vocabulary words, and countless grammatical structures, but still couldn’t order off a menu, I was convinced, Korean is the hardest of the ten languages I have studied.
...
First off, Korean is the only language I have learned, so far, where there are two separate counting systems. They have a Chinese counting system (based on Manchurian dialect, not Mandarin) which is used for counting certain things, other things are counted with a Korean counting system. As a student of the language its frustrating trying to remember which set of numbers to use.
When reading stand alone numbers, such phone numbers, addresses, ID card numbers and bus and train numbers, you use the Manchurian numbers. When counting things, you use the Korean numbers. When telling time, however, the hours are counted with Korean numbers, but the minutes with the Chinese numbers. So 5:05 would be dasot shi o bun.
Dasot being five in the Korean system and o being five in the Chinese system. Twenty-four hour shops, however, are called by the Chinese number yisip-sa shi instead of the Korean seumel net shi.
If you have ever taken Tae Kwan Do in the States, the exercises are always counted il, i, sam, sa, o, yuk…but this is incorrect because these are the Chinese numbers. When you study martial arts in Korea, the exercises are counted using Korean numbers, han, dul, set, net, dasot, yosot…
My personal waterloo in learning Korean language is the social register. In Korean language there are special ways of addressing people depending on their status. So you use one verb form for talking to a friend, and another for talking to your parents. You would use yet another for talking to your grandparents. You also use special forms for talking about people who are more important. Just when I thought there couldn’t possibly be another verb form, I stumbled onto a sentence I couldn’t make heads or tales of. My teacher explained to me, “this is how a mother talks to her son, if she is talking about the grandfather.”
Of course!
In addition to the various address forms, Korean is the only Asian language I have studied which has a full compliment of grammar. In addition to having numerous verb tenses, Korean also has grammatical moods to convey concepts such as probability, suggestions, orders, requests, doubt… and then each of these moods will have various forms dependent on who you are talking too.
Chinese is simple in comparison. Almost everything is in the indicative and there really aren’t any tenses. Once the tense has been established, you no longer need the various indicators. Korean also has particles which follow nouns to tell whether the word is a name or an inanimate object, a subject, an object, plural or, a single subject which is similar to a subject already mentioned.
And so I sit, frustrated. I have memorized, at this point, literally more than one thousand main words, verbs, nouns and adjectives. And yet, every time I open my mouth I have to think, who am I talking to? What are we talking about? How sure of this am I? When did it happen? By the time I sort out all of these details, the person I wanted to talk to is home in bed. And I am left alone and speechless. The good news is, the average American male has a life expectancy of 78 years, so I still have 38 years to learn to speak Korean. Maybe by then I will have learned to like kimchi.
Korean the Hardest Language in the Navy
In the Defense Language Institute of the US Department of Defense (DLI), Korean is seen as the hardest of the Category IV languages, which are Arabic, Chinese, and Korean. Korean is 75-week course, longer than the other Category IV languages, and they are even trying to make it a Category V language all by itself. [8]
Homer Hulbert commented on the efficiency of the expressive style of the Korean language as follows:
The Korean's keen sense of social distinctions has given rise to a complete system of honorifics whose proper use is essential to a rational use of the language. And yet numerous as these may he their use is so regulated by unwritten law and there are so few exceptions that they are far easier to master than the personal terminations of Indo-European verbs. The grammatical superiority of Korean over many of the Western languages is that while, in the latter, differences of gender, number and person which would usually be perfectly clear from the context are carefully noted, in the Korean these are left to the speaker's and the hearer's perspicacity, and attention is concentrated upon a terse and luminous collocation of ideas, which is often secured in the West only by a tedious circumlocution.
The genius of the language has led the Korean to express every possible verbal relation by a separate modal form. The extent to which this has been carried may be shown only by illustration. Besides having simple forms to express the different tenses and modes, it also has forms to express all those more delicate verbal relations which in English require a circumlocution or the free use of adverbs. For instance, the Korean has a special mode to express the idea of necessity, contingency, surprise, reproof, antithesis, conjunction, temporal sequence, logical sequence, interruption, duration, limit, acquiescence, expostulation, interrogation, promise, exhortation, imprecation, desire, doubt, hypothesis, satisfaction, propriety, concession, intention, decision, probability, possibility, prohibition, simultaneity, continuity, repetition, infrequency, hearsay, agency, contempt, ability. Each one of these ideas can be expressed in connection with any active verb by the simple addition of one or more inseparable suffixes. By far the greater number of these suffixes are monosyllabic.
To illustrate the delicate shades of thought that can be expressed by the use of a suffix let us take the English expression, " I was going along the road, when suddenly — " This, without anything more, implies that the act of going was suddenly interrupted by some unforeseen circumstance. All this would be expressed in Korean by the three words naga kile kataga. The first means " I," the second means " along the road," and the third means "was going, when suddenly —" The stem of the verb is ka, and the ending, taga, indicates the interruption of the action. And what is more to the point, this ending has absolutely no other use. It is reserved solely for the expression of this shade of thought. Again, on the same stem we have the word kalka, in which the ending ka gives all the meaning that we connote in the expression, " I wonder whether he will really go or not." If, in answer to the question whether you are going or not you say simply kana, it means, " What in the world would I be going for? Absurd! "
Another thing which differentiates Korean from the languages of the West is the difference between " book language " and " spoken language." Many grammatical forms are common to both, but there are also many in each that are not found in the other. The result is extremely unfortunate, for no conversation can be written down verbatim; it must all be changed into book language. This fact is probably due to Chinese influence, and it is but one of the ways in which that influence acted as a drag upon Korean intellectual development. I would not belittle the enormous debt that Korea owes to China, but some of her gifts had been better ungiven. None of these endings are borrowed from the Chinese language, but as Korea had practically no literature before Chinese influence led up to it, it was inevitable that certain endings should be reserved for the formal language of books, while others were considered good enough only to be bandied from mouth to mouth. It is of course impossible to say what sort of a literature Korea would have evolved had she been left to herself, but one thing is sure; it would have been much more spontaneous and lifelike than that which now obtains.
Korean has no dialects. There are different brogues, and a Seoul man can generally detect by a man's speech from what province he comes; but it would be wide of the truth to assert that Koreans from any part of the country could not readily understand each other. There are some few words that are peculiar to particular provinces, but for the most part these are mutually known, just as the four words " guess," "reckon," " allow " and " calculate," while peculiar in a certain sense to particular sections of America, are universally understood.
No people have followed more implicitly nature's law in the matter of euphony. The remarkable law of the convertibility of surds and sonants has been worked out to its ultimate results in this language. The nice adjustment of the organs of speech, whereby conflicting sounds are so modified as to blend harmoniously, is one of the unconscious Korean arts. The euphonic tendency has not broken down the languages, as is sometimes the case. Prof. Max Müller speaks of a law of phonetic decay, but in Korea it would be better called the law of phonetic adjustment. Korean is characterised by a large number of mimetic words. As their colours are drawn directly from nature, so their words are often merely phonetic descriptions.
The Korean language is eminently adapted for public speaking. It is a sonorous, vocal language. They have grasped the idea that the vowel is the basis of all human speech. The sibilant element is far less conspicuous than in Japanese, and one needs only to hear a public speech in Japanese and one in Korean to discover the great advantage which the latter enjoys. The lack of all accent in Japanese words is a serious drawback to oratory. There is nothing in Korean speech that makes it less adapted to oratory than English or any other Western tongue. In common with the language of Cicero or Demosthenes, Korean is composed of periodic sentences, each one reaching its climax in the verb which is usually the final word, and there are no weakening addenda which so often make the English sentence an anticlimax. In this respect the Korean surpasses English as a medium of public speaking." [9]
About Homer Hulbert: http://www.dynamic-korea.com/opinion/view.php?main=FTC&sub=&uid=200500010249&keyword=&page=10
Reference
- ^
- The FSL courses grew out of the US army's need to rapidly develop translators for various "exotic" langauges for the first time ever around the period of WWII.... they at some point developed a chart of difficulty of languages based on the number of hours it took for American GI's to master them....At any rate, Korean was listed in the very highest level of difficulty, a notch above both Japanese and Chinese in fact.
- Everyone I have ever met who has learned both Korean and Japanese agrees that their grammars are almost as similar as those of any two Romance languages, but that that of Japanese has been streamlined, while Korean remains comparatively much more complex.
- I have made good progress in a number of other "difficult" or exotic languages such as Russian and Arabic. Compared to Korean, both of these languages are much easier, i.e., if you apply yourself well, consistently, and intelligently every day for a number of years, after a single handful you will be rather advanced. However, with Korean you will still be in a fog. I have studied scores of, and Korean is unquestionably the most difficult one I have ever encountered.
- ^ "Indeed, the beautiful flexibility of the Corean verb, can find no equal in the west among modern languages; old Greek being the only language it appears to me, which can compare with it. " The Passing of Korea (1909) pp. 302-304
- ^ "...The Chinese Bible is to Corea what the Latin was to 'Old England;' and Corean literary men can understand it as well as can Chinese. But I am not surprised at the information that the rudest translation which has been made would have been far more easily understood by even literary Coreans than the Chinese version. This results from the beautiful flexibility, the manifold expressiveness, and the accurate rendering of shades of meaning of the Corean verb; while their verbal mode of punctuation connects clauses, subsidiary and main sentences, more closely and definitely than any language I know. Ross, John. The United Presbyterian magazine: "The Corean Version of the New Testament; How I came to make it. Part II." (1883) pg. 209
- ^ "The importance of this work can be understood from the facts that Corean is the language of about twelve millions of people, subject to only slight and unimportant provincial differences, and that all the people, because of the remarkable simplicity of its phonetic alphabet, can read. If, therefore, this translation is to the Corean literary man what the Chinese version cannot be, it goes to the women of that country, and to the lowliest and illiterate poor, to speak to them plainly, in language which all understand and employ in daily life, of the wondrous love of Him who is the Saviour of the world. Ross, John. The United Presbyterian magazine: "The Corean Version of the New Testament; How I came to make it. Part II." (1883) pg. 209
- ^ "The most characteristic feature of the Corean language is the complex mass of inflection and agglutination whereby the verb is modified to express time, mood, condition, co-ordination and subordination, interrogation, official rank, etc.—in short almost every varying shade of thought or action. Scott, James. A Corean Manual. (1893) pg. 71
- ^ Oppert, Ernst (1880). A Forbidden Land: Voyages to the Corea. S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington.
- ^ K. Wexler, 'On Unparsable Input in Language Acquisition', in: Lyn Frazier, Jill G. De Villiers (eds.), Language Processing and Language Acquisition (1990), ISBN 0792306600. The research paper used in the book is: Lee, H. and Wexler, K.: 1987, 'The acquisition of reflexives and pronouns in Korean', Paper delivered at the 12th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development.
- ^ The Defense Language Institute in About.com"Right now only 8 Languages are being taught (for Navy). Cat IV: Arabic, Chinese, Korean. Cat III: Persian-Farsi, Serb-Croatian, Hebrew, Russian. Cat I: Spanish. Those are your only "options" and I have not received my language yet, but I did give them my top 3 selections of Korean, Russian, and Arabic. Everybody is telling me this about my selection. Korean I probably won't get because I only have a 103 DLAB. Korean is the hardest language here, apparently it is 75 weeks long now, and they are trying to make it a Cat V language."
- ^ Hulbert, Homer. "The Passing of Korea pg. 302-303 (1909)