Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to think in a different language?

To change the language of the voice inside your head.

Would you see the world differently if there wasn’t a word for an idea? Or if the language emphasized one thing instead of another?

That’s what I wondered while studying Korean.

Korean is the first language that I consciously studied. As a child, studying French and Chinese felt like a memorization chore, but Korean showed me a different perspective.

Korean focuses on verbs.

It ends sentences with verbs and often omits nouns—the object and subject. So the Korean translation of, “I eat kimchi” is “kimchi eat” (김치 먹어요). But because of the missing subject, the phrase also means “I/you/he/she/they eat(s) kimchi” or with any subject you want. Like understanding who he/she/they are in a sentence, you use context to infer the subject, but Korean uses context more often.

Adjectives come in the form of a verb, such as the verb “to be good” (좋다). Otherwise, they become adverbs rather than adjectives. So it’s strange to literally translate, “I read all of the book,” because “reading” (the verb) applies to “all of the book” (the adjective and object). Instead, you say, “I did all of the reading for the book” (책을 다 읽었어요) or more naturally, “I finished the book.” A common example of straying from adjectives is translating “it is delicious” to “taste exists” (맛있어요) and “it isn’t tasty” to “taste does not exist” (맛없어요).

Focusing on verbs might sound weird, but the West’s focus on nouns has weirdness too.

Why are apples feminine in Spanish (la manzana), but masculine in German (der apfel)? What’s feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a “she”, and why does she turn into a “he” when a tea bag is dipped into her?

German women are sometimes referred as “it”: das mädchen (girl), das fräulein (unmarried woman), and das weib (woman) .

English used to have a strange three gender system too. Most of its use was lost after the French Norman Conquest of England in 1066, until the English reclaimed their land during the Hundred Years’ War ending at 1453. After using Norman French for four hundred years, people forgot many noun endings, including the ones related to gender. But even before then, people confused the gender of nouns. There wasn’t enough clues for people to figure it out.

The plural noun ending (-s) exists in English today. The Irish still cling to gender endings. And there are traces of genderizing nouns in American English—in case you wondered why boats have female names.

The reasons why inanimate objects are male and female are unclear, but here’s a theory. If the moon represented a male god, it’d be natural to make “moon” masculine. Later, “month” derived from “moon”, so “month” became masculine. And then “day”, “time”, and so on. It makes sense here, but it’s hard to remember these rules for every noun you know.

Many languages force you to recall the gender of nouns before using them, so children learning new words may arbitrarily assign the wrong gender. If one word sounds like another, they may assume they’re the same gender. And eventually, the random assignment just sticks. Spanish, French, and Italian lost their neutral gender when it naturally merged with the masculine gender, so all inanimate nouns are arbitrarily masculine or feminine.

Since the Ancient Greeks, the West has mostly thought of the world as the sum of it’s parts. They described an object’s properties in order to explain the world. In other words, nouns and adjectives are important.

This is the basis of Western science. If you go back far enough, you’ll learn that the word “science” comes from the word “to divide.” Dividing and dissecting is what scientists do.

Scientists isolate objects, break them down, record abstract properties (color, size, etc.), give names to common parts, and categorize objects based on their properties. Finally, they form rules on these categories and stretch those rules to other objects in the same category.

But the focus on objects can lead to myopia. Aristotle believed that a stone falling in the air had the property of “gravity”. This is untrue. We now know that gravity is from the relationship between the stone and the Earth. And it would be the Chinese who recognize this two thousand years before Galileo.

The Chinese focused on verbs, the interactions between objects. And thus, they pioneered many concepts that involve this, including gravity (or “action at a distance”), magnetism, and acoustics. Feng shui and acupuncture are about harmony and balancing things. For medicine, the Chinese would never conceive of invasive surgery because removing parts of the body would disrupt the body’s harmony.

The East didn’t look at objects by themselves. They didn’t believe in permanence. They believed that things will always change. What’s the point of studying objects if they’re always changing? This is reflected in the name of Mount Kŭmgang in South Korea—it’s Kŭmgang (금강) in the Spring, Pongrae in the summer (봉래), Phung’ak (풍악) in the fall, and Kaegol (개골) in the winter. Famous Asians from long ago also changed their names to represent personal change. For example, Tokugawa Ieyasu (a famous Samurai in video games, anime, and manga) changed his name several times.

The East also believed that the world is too complex to separate ideas from the situation. But separation and simplification creates a precision that allowed universal rules to build up over time. That’s why Western science is powerful.

From language to science, relationships and objects are what distinguish the East and the West. Eastern languages focus on verbs, family, and hierarchy. Western languages focus on precision and nouns.

But can language influence the way we think?

Consider Pormpuraaw, an Aboriginal language of Australia, which focuses on cardinal directions. Instead of saying, “move your cup to the left,” they’d say “move your cup to the south south west a little bit.” Instead of saying “hello”, they say “which way are you going?” and the other would reply, “north north east in the middle distance,” but with even more detail, as there are about 80 different scales for distance and direction.

About one third of all languages have this cardinal direction property.

Young children speaking Pormpuraaw are always able to state their cardinal direction. No matter where they are or how complicated the path they walked. They do this by imagining themselves from a bird’s eye view, like a compass in a video game.

Linguists use Pormpuraaw or similar languages to exemplify the influence of language. But correlation does not imply causation, it still doesn’t prove that languages influence thought.

I have found that language can:

Accentuate the development of different skills by focusing on an aspect of reality (Pormpuraaw is an example)

Introduce us to new ideas, which can enable new abilities from new vocabulary

Give associations between different ideas (with word gender)

Give defaults for separating the world (such as direction, color, verbs and nouns, etc.)

Ultimately, changing the language in your head is like changing your occupation. Working as an engineer will make you see the world differently. You’re constantly thinking like an engineer. And if an engineer became a manager, he’d eventually default to management thinking. He’ll always be able to think like an engineer again, but probably forgets to apply his engineering thinking. The major difference is that language applies to things outside of work.

That’s my theory anyway.

So yes, if the voice inside my head was Korean, I’d see the world a little differently.

Korean is a reflection of Eastern values, which still influences South Korea today, including it’s strangeness. I’ll get to that in a later post.