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Comment by lacampbell | Hacker News Reader

In Chinese there's a word I don't know how to write but sounds something like "uh" that means more "I acknowledge" without implying agreement. Actually, I don't know if it's a word, but I hear it a lot.

嗯 ?

Speaking of which, "OK嗎?" is used in mandarin a lot, at least in Taiwan.

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> Speaking of which, "OK嗎?" is used in mandarin a lot, at least in Taiwan.

This reminds me: I've worked closely with several people born in Korea. They're the only people I've notice who say "OK..?" all the time. Asking about it, they translated it as meaning "OK, continue" or "OK, keep going."

Also have noticed that essentially all they say in quick conversations on the phone talking in Korean to close relatives, is "uh"... I guess people talking on the phone in English say "OK"/"Yeah"/"Sure" a lot.

I've encountered that from multiple cultures: ending almost every sentence with "OK". I'm curious about the origin of it.

Same as answering complex questions with yes. (whether or not you understood or agree) Aggreableness is valued in the east, as is deference to authority.

You mean like how Swiss Germans are parodied as ending every statement in "..., oder?" ("..., or?")?

Interesting, and good to know. "Ok...?" from one of my peers would definitely be read as sarcasm, something like "I guess you want me to agree with that but I really don't" and there's an implied eyeroll. So when I've seen it from people outside my culture, I usually do a double take, think "there's no reason for them to want to be offensive here, maybe it means something else to them..." I guess just learned what it means.

Amusingly, Google translates it as simply "OK". Maybe because there isn't a more neutral English word for OK than OK.

https://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#zh-CN/en/%E5%97%A...

As far as I know, Google translate is broken when it comes to the word "OK", because the word is used in every website to mean "Press here if you want to continue." For example, translating OK to Korean gives me 승인, which means "approval".

Google Translate is not good for this sort of thing, since it has no clue what words mean or why they're used. Vide: https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/4352/118

You're better off using a real dictionary for single words IME

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%97%AF

https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=...

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