"연필 한 자루는 얼마입니까?"
Translation:How much is a pencil?
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I think counters would be an interesting thing to study as a linguist. Similar to I think it would be cool to study how languages define if a word is plural.
I haven't come across any such study but I would love to read it if it exists. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Story of Human Language as well as The Adventure of English lectures. You can find both on Audible, just make a free trial like everyone else.
There is a specific counter for "long things" ?! Why would someone make a language so complicated...
It always looks more complicated in a language you're learning, but only because your own language is second nature to you. Think BLADES of grass, STRANDS of hair, SLICES of pizza/pie/cake (but not slices of, say, lasagna). The more you think of it as difficult or complicated, the more difficult and complicated you'll find it to be. Try (though it can be tough when it gets a bit confusing) to find it fun and interesting! A good challenge.
Ikr I am German and have learned both Russian and English, and Korean is way harder than both of them.
When the Korean language was first created, its nefarious designers, the Confucian Scholars, wanted to make sure that foreigners would never be able to communicate with the native speakers, so they decided to make several random, arbitrary rules as part of the language. The counter for "long things" is one of them.
But in all seriousness, people don't just make languages, and inquiry about why "someone would make" languages or rules for languages doesn't make sense.
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I treat it as similar to collective nouns in English. In which case six types including the general type is refreshingly few compared to English collective nouns. Is not murder in a murder of crows a counting unit?
aaah, i love seeing this linguistic discourse in the comments;;; also i hate when people dismisses some part of a language bc it's difficult or bc they can't understand why it exist when it's just another way of perceiving reality!! every language has their own particularities, and that's why they are so cool. for example, the fact that korean has a counter for different things make it a very specific/exact language compared to english or spanish in my opinion?? or german's cases, for example: many people struggle with them, but even so they are useful make even more clear what is happening bc they specify what kind of action is happening at the moment. idk, it's so interesting to see! im a nerd for words lmao
counter for long things!?!? korean i really love you as a language but this is taking the piss lol
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shayisnthere...thank you for putting some perspective on the use of 자루 "long things category "...it makes more sense when we can relate to something we do/say in English.
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One advantage that i got while learning korean is that my mother tongue (i.e. urdu) has the same sentence formation as korean, so i guess they can be translated word to word.
The web version has TIPS for each lesson. This the link for Numbers 1: https://www.duolingo.com/skill/ko/Numbers_1/tips-and-notes