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The more I teach English the more I respect how good some our non-English posters English is.
There are many Koreans who, after years of Middle School, Elementary, and HS, and even after 4 years of university, are still at the 'taxi cab driver' level, at least when it comes to spoken English.
Yet many of our posters here are so fluent it hurts. Stefu knows many of our colloquialisms, Provost Harrison is very good, and even Giancarlo cannot really be told apart from a native speaker.
Is there something I'm missing? Korean kids study english all the time, why don't they 'get it' like Euros do?
Every time I get that irrational 'are you just stupid?' feeling, I have to tell myself 'this is a person who thinks in a language with NO articles, no plurals, no gendered words, and no S O V word order, no progressive 'ing' words'. It's actually amazing how fast they do learn anything.
I also find myself thinking about how crazy and interesting English is, what with it's strange patchwork. Kith and kin, clan, marvellous, Famous, fabulous, who what where when, Mister, question, all betray the roots of very historically wierd pastiche. (quiz: name the different ethnic backgrounds of those words)
Korean borrows many words directly from Mandarin, and a number of corruptions. They tend to be words that deal with elevated concepts like 'harmony' 'nature', universe' etc. (korean 'gi'= Chinese 'chi')
They also betray words with the background of the vast Ural-Altaic group (mongol, uighur, turkic,).
Then there are their words that are plainly ancestral to Japanese words (compare Sun sang neem to Japanese Sensei-ni, in pronounciation almost the same, mountains are 'san', harabogi, halmoni, etc).
In addition to grammar problems, Koreans have the extra hurdle of differing alphabetic sounds, which makes it difficult for foreigners to find consistent translations of anything.
Korean have one sound for the following letters:
g=k
p=b (pap, bap sound the same)
l=r
The mind blowing thing is that they aren't substituting. They have no L OR R sound, they have a sound which sits right on the middle, same for the others.
They often confuse:
f=p
e=i
Koreans have no 'hard A' sound, so that 'make' is said 'mek', 'crack' 'crek', etc.
They also don't use the following sound combinations and mangle them 'ket' as in basketball', 'ro' as in 'rope', the long l of 'ball' (pa), th=d (dis dose dese), and many others.
There are many Koreans who, after years of Middle School, Elementary, and HS, and even after 4 years of university, are still at the 'taxi cab driver' level, at least when it comes to spoken English.
Yet many of our posters here are so fluent it hurts. Stefu knows many of our colloquialisms, Provost Harrison is very good, and even Giancarlo cannot really be told apart from a native speaker.
Is there something I'm missing? Korean kids study english all the time, why don't they 'get it' like Euros do?
Every time I get that irrational 'are you just stupid?' feeling, I have to tell myself 'this is a person who thinks in a language with NO articles, no plurals, no gendered words, and no S O V word order, no progressive 'ing' words'. It's actually amazing how fast they do learn anything.
I also find myself thinking about how crazy and interesting English is, what with it's strange patchwork. Kith and kin, clan, marvellous, Famous, fabulous, who what where when, Mister, question, all betray the roots of very historically wierd pastiche. (quiz: name the different ethnic backgrounds of those words)
Korean borrows many words directly from Mandarin, and a number of corruptions. They tend to be words that deal with elevated concepts like 'harmony' 'nature', universe' etc. (korean 'gi'= Chinese 'chi')
They also betray words with the background of the vast Ural-Altaic group (mongol, uighur, turkic,).
Then there are their words that are plainly ancestral to Japanese words (compare Sun sang neem to Japanese Sensei-ni, in pronounciation almost the same, mountains are 'san', harabogi, halmoni, etc).
In addition to grammar problems, Koreans have the extra hurdle of differing alphabetic sounds, which makes it difficult for foreigners to find consistent translations of anything.
Korean have one sound for the following letters:
g=k
p=b (pap, bap sound the same)
l=r
The mind blowing thing is that they aren't substituting. They have no L OR R sound, they have a sound which sits right on the middle, same for the others.
They often confuse:
f=p
e=i
Koreans have no 'hard A' sound, so that 'make' is said 'mek', 'crack' 'crek', etc.
They also don't use the following sound combinations and mangle them 'ket' as in basketball', 'ro' as in 'rope', the long l of 'ball' (pa), th=d (dis dose dese), and many others.
), making english harder to learn. But the random german person has dubbed TV programs, I'd say it evens it out. I think the swedes have it pretty nice, they have language very similar to english, and to my knowledge they use subtitles, and play lot's of videogames. 
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