Comma Usage In Korean

[jorjai]

Is comma usage in Korean significantly different from English? I noticed a few instances of it in the transcripts, but not so much. And the few naver news articles I just looked at had a grand total two commas.

And heck, while I'm at it, anyone know any other significant punctuation differences with English, or just Korean writing oddities in general?

[austinfd]

Well, I can tell you that Korean really doesn't make use of the comma...I think the comma is a western invention...so it's sort of been thrown into Korean.

Korean has words that accomplish just about everything those punctuation marks do. Korean loves to combine a lot of phrases into one one super long sentence that would make your 7th grade English teacher cringe.

[javiskefka]

Since English is my native language, sometimes I carry my comma habits into Korean writing, like putting a comma where I would pause naturally in a sentence, or in a list. I like to think that I don't carry them all though. You definitely don't need a comma after a coordinating conjunction in Korean, because the conjunction itself suffices. They really help in long lists, though. Single quotation marks are used in the news these days to mark unusual words used by other people, like the "air quotes" that we make with two fingers on each hand in America. Double quotation marks are used to separate direct quotes from the rest of the sentence.

You don't really need any punctuation in Korean, though. Even a full stop or a quotation mark is implied by the sentence ending.

[the_haunted_boy]

I too am used to using English punctuation so much that I use it in Korean. I cannot think of any commas that I have seen in any Korean text that I have read, but I mostly read really basic stuff because my Korean is basic.