One, Second, Trice, Quad...

I am still making the effort to learn some Korean. Last week, I tried to learn how to tell time, but did not get far. You see, a long, long time ago, the Koreans came up with their own words for counting to ten. More recently, but still a long time ago, the Koreans borrowed many words from Chinese, including words for the numbers one through ten. Now, they mix the two sets of Korean vocabulary in a manner that almost seems designed to confuse the novice.

When telling time in Korean, you use the native Korean numbers for the hour. For the minutes, you use the borrowed Chinese numbers. So, in order to tell the time, I have to learn how to count to twelve - twice!

I asked some Korean co-workers why they use the two different systems. They said they never realized that they did. Of course, they could not come up with a good explanation.

The next day, I discovered that when counting days in Korean, you use the native vocabulary for one, four and five days. The Chinese originated numbers are used for counting two and three day periods. I pointed this out to the same Korean co-workers. Again, they said they never realized this and don't know why they do that. By this point, they thought I was making fun of Korean, but really, I was just enjoying the quirks of a new language.

Like many languages, Koreans don't use fancy names for their months. They just have 1-month, 2-month, 3-month etc.. I figured that a long time ago, they must have had special names for the months and that you could still come across them in poetry. I asked my co-workers about this. It turns out there were other names for the months, but nobody could remember more than one or two.

After my last round of questions, they all wondered why I don't ask normal questions like "How do you say 'This is a pen.'?" They declared me a genius, and stopped answering my questions.

I never got the chance to point out that in English, we also use numbers to keep track of our months, but only for the last four months. And, for our own historical reasons, they are mis-numbered. October is not the eighth month anymore. So, we number, but we can't count.