(no subject)

Beijing Welcomes You is an awfully catchy song (I guess that's the point, huh? ;)). I sent the video to my parents just for kicks and because I was curious how many artists they could recognize. I'm ashamed to admit that I only recognized two of them: Jackie Chan and Han Geng. My mom named about half of them, including Jay Chou. I have over 300MB of Jay Chou songs, but I can't recognize him by face. *epic fail* Same goes for singers like Jang Nara, Wang Lee Hom, Lin Jun Jie...I like their music, but I have no idea what they look like. ;;;

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The latest update about the Spider Issue:
My housemate is terribly good at finding spiders -- I could hear her banging on the wall with the sponge mop and occasionally shrieking. Somehow, within ten minutes of arriving at home, she located five spiders, and then I joined her in the shrieking and whacking and the "you kill it"/"no, YOU kill it!" -- we managed to kill three out of the five. 60% success rate: not bad for two bug-o-phobics, right? After I got back to my room and was comfortably seated in front of my computer, I saw a creepy crawly thing scurry across my desk. I immediately smushed it with some Kleenex and mentally congratulated myself for being brave. And then the revulsion hit and I was all, "aldjfadjOMG UGH...! *shiver shudder twitch*" Maybe I should consider exposure therapy. .__.

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I signed up for Korean lessons a few weeks ago, and now I have three weeks of Korean experience. :D [/Horio moment] And by three weeks I actually mean five hours. This is the first time in a very long while that I've wanted to learn something just for myself and not for school, CV-boosting, etc. Aside from learning the language itself, I also want to see how I learn (pick my own brain, or so to speak XD). With both English and Chinese, I'm fairly good with learning and memorizing new vocab. However, when it comes to memorizing a strung-together sentence, I falter. I'm awful with reciting poetry and I have a hard time memorizing lyrics as well as melodies. In other words, I am good at remembering (and making use of the) parts, but not the whole -- I wonder how this will effect the way I learn a foreign language.

Some of the people in the class are able to look at a Korean character and read it aloud immediately. I have to look at the character, decipher the parts, and translate it into a romanized version in my head, before I can pronounce the word/syllable. I'm probably faster at writing than I am at reading. >__O;; The thing that's slowing me down the most is the fact that I'm still thinking in romanized form, rather than instinctively recognizing the vowel or consonant (which will come with practise, I hope). When I think of Chinese words, I come up with vague images of what the character might look like -- the character might not be accurate at all, or I might be thinking of the semantic meaning of the character, but I would not be thinking of pinyin. With both Japanese and Korean, I always think in terms of romanization, which makes sense since the English alphabet is the most familiar to me, and thus my brain's default setting.

This whole "thinking in certain languages" thing has always been of interest to me. In high school, I used to go around to my bilingual friends and ask them what language their dreams were in, and then try to figure out whether their thoughts featured more of one language than the other. Upon occasion, when my thoughts wander, my brain switches between English and broken Chinese with random bits of French, Japanese, and, recently, Korean mixed in.

Speaking of French, I wonder if I will end up with better Korean than French at the end of the ten-week lessons. French was a mandatory class for six years -- I dropped it as soon as I reached grade 10. XD 20-hours versus six years...well, perhaps personal interest matters too since that does determines the amount of practise and use outside of class, so, who knows.

And speaking of Korean, the k/g sound is too subtle for me to figure out under which circumstances the consonant is pronounced "k" and when it's pronounced "g". Also, all the different writings for the "eh" and "weh" sounds drive me nuts. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO USE. D: "ch" and "j" sound the same, and I don't understand the difference between "k/g" (kee-yuhk), "k" (khey-euk), and "double k/g" (ssang kee-yuhk -- and alksdfjl; at the double letters D:). It would probably be easier if I could type out the actual characters. But I can't figure out the Korean keyboard either (I know how to turn the function on...but each key stands for something different and if you press them in the wrong combination something funny comes out D:).

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eta: I originally uploaded this for dear_whimsy, but in case some of you guys are interested, here are a bunch of songs (12, to be exact :D) by 12 Girls Band. Find out more about them at Wikipedia and sample some of their songs on Youtube. (I'm too sleepy to write anything coherent nrrrgh)

(no subject)

Beijing Welcomes You is an awfully catchy song (I guess that's the point, huh? ;)). I sent the video to my parents just for kicks and because I was curious how many artists they could recognize. I'm ashamed to admit that I only recognized two of them: Jackie Chan and Han Geng. My mom named about half of them, including Jay Chou. I have over 300MB of Jay Chou songs, but I can't recognize him by face. *epic fail* Same goes for singers like Jang Nara, Wang Lee Hom, Lin Jun Jie...I like their music, but I have no idea what they look like. ;;;

--
The latest update about the Spider Issue:
My housemate is terribly good at finding spiders -- I could hear her banging on the wall with the sponge mop and occasionally shrieking. Somehow, within ten minutes of arriving at home, she located five spiders, and then I joined her in the shrieking and whacking and the "you kill it"/"no, YOU kill it!" -- we managed to kill three out of the five. 60% success rate: not bad for two bug-o-phobics, right? After I got back to my room and was comfortably seated in front of my computer, I saw a creepy crawly thing scurry across my desk. I immediately smushed it with some Kleenex and mentally congratulated myself for being brave. And then the revulsion hit and I was all, "aldjfadjOMG UGH...! *shiver shudder twitch*" Maybe I should consider exposure therapy. .__.

--
I signed up for Korean lessons a few weeks ago, and now I have three weeks of Korean experience. :D [/Horio moment] And by three weeks I actually mean five hours. This is the first time in a very long while that I've wanted to learn something just for myself and not for school, CV-boosting, etc. Aside from learning the language itself, I also want to see how I learn (pick my own brain, or so to speak XD). With both English and Chinese, I'm fairly good with learning and memorizing new vocab. However, when it comes to memorizing a strung-together sentence, I falter. I'm awful with reciting poetry and I have a hard time memorizing lyrics as well as melodies. In other words, I am good at remembering (and making use of the) parts, but not the whole -- I wonder how this will effect the way I learn a foreign language.

Some of the people in the class are able to look at a Korean character and read it aloud immediately. I have to look at the character, decipher the parts, and translate it into a romanized version in my head, before I can pronounce the word/syllable. I'm probably faster at writing than I am at reading. >__O;; The thing that's slowing me down the most is the fact that I'm still thinking in romanized form, rather than instinctively recognizing the vowel or consonant (which will come with practise, I hope). When I think of Chinese words, I come up with vague images of what the character might look like -- the character might not be accurate at all, or I might be thinking of the semantic meaning of the character, but I would not be thinking of pinyin. With both Japanese and Korean, I always think in terms of romanization, which makes sense since the English alphabet is the most familiar to me, and thus my brain's default setting.

This whole "thinking in certain languages" thing has always been of interest to me. In high school, I used to go around to my bilingual friends and ask them what language their dreams were in, and then try to figure out whether their thoughts featured more of one language than the other. Upon occasion, when my thoughts wander, my brain switches between English and broken Chinese with random bits of French, Japanese, and, recently, Korean mixed in.

Speaking of French, I wonder if I will end up with better Korean than French at the end of the ten-week lessons. French was a mandatory class for six years -- I dropped it as soon as I reached grade 10. XD 20-hours versus six years...well, perhaps personal interest matters too since that does determines the amount of practise and use outside of class, so, who knows.

And speaking of Korean, the k/g sound is too subtle for me to figure out under which circumstances the consonant is pronounced "k" and when it's pronounced "g". Also, all the different writings for the "eh" and "weh" sounds drive me nuts. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO USE. D: "ch" and "j" sound the same, and I don't understand the difference between "k/g" (kee-yuhk), "k" (khey-euk), and "double k/g" (ssang kee-yuhk -- and alksdfjl; at the double letters D:). It would probably be easier if I could type out the actual characters. But I can't figure out the Korean keyboard either (I know how to turn the function on...but each key stands for something different and if you press them in the wrong combination something funny comes out D:).

--
eta: I originally uploaded this for dear_whimsy, but in case some of you guys are interested, here are a bunch of songs (12, to be exact :D) by 12 Girls Band. Find out more about them at Wikipedia and sample some of their songs on Youtube. (I'm too sleepy to write anything coherent nrrrgh)