Similarities and Differences Between Writing Essays in English and Korean

            

            In any country, writing essay must be one of the most difficult tasks for college students. For me, writing an essay is number one challenging thing in college because I had never written essays properly before I came to college. Also, there are so many differences between writing essays in English and Korean because obviously, English and Korean is different language.            

            The major difference between English and Korean is sentence structure and word structure. English has a strict Subject-Verb-Object order. The speaker or writer addresses what a subject is going to do to an object. For example, I(S) play(V) the violin(O). Unlike English, Korean uses a Subject-Object-Verb order in which the speaker or writer addresses the subject then the object and then what is going on to be done to the object. For example, I(S) violin(O) play(V). Also the subject can sometimes be left out of a sentence in Korean. In addition, because Korean is an agglutinative language, verb information such as tense, mood and the social relation between speaker and listener is added successively to the end of the verb. This is in contrast to English which makes extensive use of assistant words(auxiliaries) to convey verb meaning.

            All of these differences between two language make me hard to write essays in English. Writing essays in Korean is tough enough for me as it is. However, even though it takes double time to write essays in English, I’m adapting slowly but consistently in writing essays in English. In any language, it takes time to write an essay, and it needs a lot of practice to write a good essay.