Since last time I have continued to another chapter that focuses on the process of purchasing goods in Korean. This new section introduces some vocabulary related to currency, food, and counting. This section also touched briefly on the sentence construction of polite phrases. One interesting fact about the Korean language is that it has two different number systems that are used in counting. The native Korean number system is commonly used for smaller units of counting, whereas the Sino-Korean number system is used for much larger units. This generally starts at around 100. I drew comparisons here with the process of counting time in Korean as when people count time in Korean, both numerical systems are used. For counting currency, the Korean currency system has four types of coins (10 won, 50, won, 100 won, and 500 won) and three kinds of notes (1,000 won, 5,000 won, and 10,000 won). The conversion rate between Korean won and USD is about 1 to 1000 so 1,000 won would be about $1 and 500 won is about $0.50. The actual rate at the moment for accuracy is $1 = 1,129.00 Korean won. The process of creating numbers in Korean is actually pretty straight forward as it is just combining smaller numbers characters with the larger number characters. For example, the number 3 in Korean is 삼 (pronounced sam) and the number 100 in Korean is 백 (pronounced bek). To say the number 300, all you have to do is combine 3 and 100 like so, 삼백 (pronounced sambek). This process carries over linearly to higher degrees of numbers. It was actually refreshing to see and perform number construction in another language because I do not really think about it in English. I remember that this simple process ties back to the initial intentions of the language in making it as convenient and straightforward as possible, especially in modern times. Although having two number systems still is a bit confusing.
One interesting thing I learned from this section is that when counting units, the Korean language has a specific word to enumerate different things. This is similar to the English language where we refer to socks as pairs of socks when implying more than one sock. In Korean, pairs would be 켤레. The sentence structure would be socks + count + pair (켤레) in Korean. Additionally, the Korean language has a general enumeration word 개 (pronounced ge), for counting things that do not have a unique enumerator.
Comments
The fact that the Korean language has two different systems for counting is very interesting. I wonder what the history behind it is and whether there were ever any attempts to simply the systems into one. I also wonder whether the use of two numbering systems effects how people learn and think about math.