Language Classes...oh dear.
Korean class yesterday did not end on a good note. I remarked to someone afterwards: "I really need to learn to let go of grammar structures I can't understand, and my teacher can't explain." He remarked, "You'll learn, someday." After a brief pause, I said "Well, Korean is my sixth foreign language, so I think I should have learned already...bad habits."
Since I'm going to go into a bit too much detail about this confusing structure, I'll stick it behind a cut for those of you who aren't passionate about Korean. If you want to hear about the grammar structure, .
We've been reading a children's book in class, 감기 걸린날 - The Day I Caught a Cold. It's about a girl whose mother buys her featherfilled winter clothes, and she falls asleep and dreams that naked ducks asked for the feathers from her clothes. She gives them, and plays hide and seek, and then wakes herself up with a sneeze. Here cometh the troublesome sentence:
엄마는 내가 이불을 잘 덮고 자지 않아서 감기에 걸렸다고 하셨다.
Literally and grammatically rendered into English:
Mom-subj. I-subj. blankets-obj. well covered-and sleep-negation-because cold-locative caught-and did/said.
The translation that makes the most sense to me, in context, is:
Mom said because I wasn't well covered when I slept, I caught a cold.
Now, you know me - I'm pretty decent at bending my brain to fit a language's grammatical structure, instead of bending the language to fit my brain. I'm also not overly attached to literal translations - as long as I can understand how to get from the literal word order to the proper glossed translation. But you probably also know that I worry at unexplained grammatical structures like a dog with an annoying bone. Or perhaps an annoying dog with a bone.
Taking out the easy parts (mom said I, blankets, caught a cold, because), we're left with:
잘 덮고 자지 않다
well covered-and sleep-negation.
자다 is "to sleep", here featured minus 다 in order to add the negation "didn't" (as opposed to 못 - can't) verb지 않다. While understanding and intuitively grasping that the sentence had to mean "didn't cover well" somehow connected to sleep, my brain couldn't figure out how not to translate it as "didn't sleep" - when, since the entire book is about her crazy duck dreams, she patently DID sleep.
Our poor teacher, bless her, said the negation spplied to both verbs. So - "didn't cover well and didn't sleep". But the girl did in point of fact sleep... Mark proposed that the 잘 - well, applied to both verbs as well = "didn't cover well and didn't sleep well". Our teacher said this was not the case. Charlie suggested that, though appended to the second verb, the "않 다" negation applied only to the first verb - "didn't cover well and sleep". That both contradicts our teacher and also makes little sense to me, considering that an essential part of the negation structure - 지 - is suffixally latched onto the verb "to sleep". We ran out theories. I asked for futher examples:
영숙은 펜을 열고 쓰지 않다.
Yeongsuk-subj. pen-obj. open-and write-negation.
Following her directive that both verbs are negative:
Yeongsuk did not open the pen and did not write, with the apparent implication that she *could* not write *because* she did not open the pen. I've no idea if this is a good example, or if this causative relationship is merely logical deduction from the utterance (obviously a closed pen would not write).
Going over it again now, I may have a plausible explanation - I will just have to see if it checks out. If the 고 - and, is not implying a sequential or causative relationship but instead is indicating the *simultaneity* of the actions, then both sentences would make more sense to me: Because I didn't at the same time cover well and sleep. I didn't at the same time uncap the pen and write (even though I tried to write with an uncovered pen). We shall see - I'll update this post after class.)
I think I broke our teacher's brain, and definitely shattered my classmates' patience. Class finished a half an hour later than usual. As usual, however, the most irritating part was not the grammar or Yeongsuk's inability to explain exactly what it was. It was my classmate insisting that I must misunderstand, either the *intended* meaning of the sentence, or the simpler piece of the sentence - the ~지 않다 negation structure. He literally said "I think what you're confused about is simpler than that, this part, the 지 않아, with another verb." And also kept telling me what the sentence, properly translated, meant. I brushed him off with increasing degrees of angry frustration. The child in me - "Don't tell what I do and don't understand! Don't tell me what to do!" *annoyed raspberry*
There you have it: I'm a class-delaying, teacher-stumping, world class linguistic bitch. My true nature revealed! I feel like I've spent half my life either bored or frustrated in language class - in both cases mostly due to my classmates, but often enough because I build comprehension-blocking mountains out of grammatical molehills. Deep breaths.
The easiest language class I've ever had, all respect to Alexei Ditter as a professor, was taking Arabic from Abbas Al-Tonsi, since he's not only a native speaker, but also quite literally wrote the book for English speakers learning Arabic. I never had to ask about underlying grammar structures because he not only explained it, but also told us the Arabic names for the grammar structures. I think I know Arabic grammatical terms better than I know English ones. He was so excited to tell us in technical detail about the language, so there were a lot things I've had to beat out of other teachers than he volunteered without my saying a word. Of course, my classmates didn't have quite the same appreciation for it that I did, and class was extremely painful in terms of waiting for other students to come up with the meaning of al-Tonsi's utterances or to come up with a sentence of their own...I just don't understand why people would take a language CLASS if they don't intend to study the material and do well, and -you know- accumulate knowledge? Although I think I made a pretty poor showing in class during my last semester of Chinese. :/
Anyway, I hope today goes more smoothly.
Since I'm going to go into a bit too much detail about this confusing structure, I'll stick it behind a cut for those of you who aren't passionate about Korean. If you want to hear about the grammar structure, .
We've been reading a children's book in class, 감기 걸린날 - The Day I Caught a Cold. It's about a girl whose mother buys her featherfilled winter clothes, and she falls asleep and dreams that naked ducks asked for the feathers from her clothes. She gives them, and plays hide and seek, and then wakes herself up with a sneeze. Here cometh the troublesome sentence:
엄마는 내가 이불을 잘 덮고 자지 않아서 감기에 걸렸다고 하셨다.
Literally and grammatically rendered into English:
Mom-subj. I-subj. blankets-obj. well covered-and sleep-negation-because cold-locative caught-and did/said.
The translation that makes the most sense to me, in context, is:
Mom said because I wasn't well covered when I slept, I caught a cold.
Now, you know me - I'm pretty decent at bending my brain to fit a language's grammatical structure, instead of bending the language to fit my brain. I'm also not overly attached to literal translations - as long as I can understand how to get from the literal word order to the proper glossed translation. But you probably also know that I worry at unexplained grammatical structures like a dog with an annoying bone. Or perhaps an annoying dog with a bone.
Taking out the easy parts (mom said I, blankets, caught a cold, because), we're left with:
잘 덮고 자지 않다
well covered-and sleep-negation.
자다 is "to sleep", here featured minus 다 in order to add the negation "didn't" (as opposed to 못 - can't) verb지 않다. While understanding and intuitively grasping that the sentence had to mean "didn't cover well" somehow connected to sleep, my brain couldn't figure out how not to translate it as "didn't sleep" - when, since the entire book is about her crazy duck dreams, she patently DID sleep.
Our poor teacher, bless her, said the negation spplied to both verbs. So - "didn't cover well and didn't sleep". But the girl did in point of fact sleep... Mark proposed that the 잘 - well, applied to both verbs as well = "didn't cover well and didn't sleep well". Our teacher said this was not the case. Charlie suggested that, though appended to the second verb, the "않 다" negation applied only to the first verb - "didn't cover well and sleep". That both contradicts our teacher and also makes little sense to me, considering that an essential part of the negation structure - 지 - is suffixally latched onto the verb "to sleep". We ran out theories. I asked for futher examples:
영숙은 펜을 열고 쓰지 않다.
Yeongsuk-subj. pen-obj. open-and write-negation.
Following her directive that both verbs are negative:
Yeongsuk did not open the pen and did not write, with the apparent implication that she *could* not write *because* she did not open the pen. I've no idea if this is a good example, or if this causative relationship is merely logical deduction from the utterance (obviously a closed pen would not write).
Going over it again now, I may have a plausible explanation - I will just have to see if it checks out. If the 고 - and, is not implying a sequential or causative relationship but instead is indicating the *simultaneity* of the actions, then both sentences would make more sense to me: Because I didn't at the same time cover well and sleep. I didn't at the same time uncap the pen and write (even though I tried to write with an uncovered pen). We shall see - I'll update this post after class.)
I think I broke our teacher's brain, and definitely shattered my classmates' patience. Class finished a half an hour later than usual. As usual, however, the most irritating part was not the grammar or Yeongsuk's inability to explain exactly what it was. It was my classmate insisting that I must misunderstand, either the *intended* meaning of the sentence, or the simpler piece of the sentence - the ~지 않다 negation structure. He literally said "I think what you're confused about is simpler than that, this part, the 지 않아, with another verb." And also kept telling me what the sentence, properly translated, meant. I brushed him off with increasing degrees of angry frustration. The child in me - "Don't tell what I do and don't understand! Don't tell me what to do!" *annoyed raspberry*
There you have it: I'm a class-delaying, teacher-stumping, world class linguistic bitch. My true nature revealed! I feel like I've spent half my life either bored or frustrated in language class - in both cases mostly due to my classmates, but often enough because I build comprehension-blocking mountains out of grammatical molehills. Deep breaths.
The easiest language class I've ever had, all respect to Alexei Ditter as a professor, was taking Arabic from Abbas Al-Tonsi, since he's not only a native speaker, but also quite literally wrote the book for English speakers learning Arabic. I never had to ask about underlying grammar structures because he not only explained it, but also told us the Arabic names for the grammar structures. I think I know Arabic grammatical terms better than I know English ones. He was so excited to tell us in technical detail about the language, so there were a lot things I've had to beat out of other teachers than he volunteered without my saying a word. Of course, my classmates didn't have quite the same appreciation for it that I did, and class was extremely painful in terms of waiting for other students to come up with the meaning of al-Tonsi's utterances or to come up with a sentence of their own...I just don't understand why people would take a language CLASS if they don't intend to study the material and do well, and -you know- accumulate knowledge? Although I think I made a pretty poor showing in class during my last semester of Chinese. :/
Anyway, I hope today goes more smoothly.