Question about speaking Korean

[Thomas]

This is for fluent speakers of Korean

do you feel that in Korean you have to know an entire sentence before you speak it?

I wonder, because Korean sentence structure is very different from english... and in my school I have to teach the teachers english speaking... in the book I'm using to prepare for their class, I'm learning about properties of speaking... for english we can start a sentence without knowing what we want to talk about - because of ways that we pause, and use some useless words to give us time to think about what to say next...

for example
"I'm.... I'm going to the store"
"I want to eat...... samgyupsal"
"Afganistan is...... kind of..... a terrible place to go"

but when I think of korean for the 3 examples, the verbs are at the end, and the objects and subjects are at the beginning, so it seems like you have to complete your thought each time you say it...

슈퍼에 가고 있어요
(I know I'm going to the store)

삼겹살 먹고 싶어요
(I know I want to eat samgyupsal)

I don't know how to say the last one in korean...

So I wonder if this is why many koreans don't answer questions right away (aside from cultural reasons)... or excessive pausing and thinking before giving a whole sentence in english.

[michelle 'the bastet']

Partially yes, and they might feel embarrassed with not-so-fluent speaking of English. At least they apparently don't know that they can start a sentence with just a 'subject' and a 'verb', and add other things. Or they are too obsessive with the differences.

[Ami]

for the last sentence.. something like
아프가니스탄은.. (음../약간..) 가기에 나쁜 곳이에요
should do the trick

and I think your observation's quite accurate. I can speak both English and Korean just fine but I tend to start speaking my mind (even when there's not much on it) in English whereas I actually wire thoughts from my brain to my mouth when I speak Korean. Just a bit more, if I were to compare the two.

However, you neglected the fact that in Korean, the subject is often left out. We don't say I'm going to the store, since I am the one who is saying it so it's assumed I'm the one going to the store.

If you were to drop the 나는 back into the sentences, we can pause between the subject and the rest of the sentence:
나는.. 슈퍼에 가고 있어요.

But of course.. Just like native English speakers don't always use gramatically correct English sentences and yet are still understood, something similar holds true in Korea as well.


(나) 뭐 먹고 싶어요.. 삼겹살?
Translated literally, would mean I want to eat something.. 삼겹살?
As in, I wasn't sure what I wanted to eat but the thought sort of popped up.

Uhm, I'm not exactly sure what the point of this reply was, and I don't want to start going off in tangents at 2AM post-Boxing Day, so I'll end here. Hope it helped gave you some more food for thought! :)