Monthly Archives: July 2011

Random Progress in Korean I noticed…

Okay so korean doesn’t have the kanji… everything is written in hanguel so in that sense it’s harder to figure out what’s what in the first place and whatnot + RIKAI-CHAN cannot save me lol. obviously the advantage is i have no problem reading it.

For Japanese, what happens is I know all the readings of the 2 kanjis that make up the word but I don’t know which they are or I don’t know if there’s onten etc etc… the only I would know is if i heard it somewhere and then remembered or look it up. So in japanese i think it’s better on focusing on what you understand and not what you can read out aloud… after a while it just gets so tedious and pointless past the useful/everyday stuff…. like when i read books (since that’s what you’re supposed to do to improve speaking and vocab and understanding etc tec) plus with speed-reading or just reading faster in general what’s important is the meaning not whether you prnounced it right? but then i was reading something else online (japanese site) abt training brain by reading it aloud but i didn’t feel like reading it thoroughly.

PLUS I was watching a cli pfrom a quiz show and the category was kokugo and couple of questions were stuff in my anki deck and  of course those dumb idol bitches did not get that stuff correct so I’m tinking should i just stay as dumb as idols? lol. but then again mitsuman glove didn’t knwo what omomuro ni meant (he thought it meant the opposite of its actual definition) and he graduated from keiou which everyone also reacts like OOOOOOOOOOOH this peson’s probably really smart since he/she graduated from there. but arent’ a lot of talent people graduated from these… well not a lot but I know a handful. is it really that good? do you have to be that smart? well i don’t feel like researching that but probably ..

But anyways my little progress was with the Drama secret garden.

(I got the scripts for the drama… obviously ‘s why i’m doing the k-drama – for method to get the script go to the thread in koohii on korean resources)

here’s the link to the secret garden korean scripts  that I downloaded from the site that I mentioend in my koohii post on the koohii forum with the thread title korean resources! It’s in docx format. suck that HPW file handling program! no seriouly, people were like oh you can get around hpw by converting it to pdf by going to print on the hpw-file-handling-program but ever since i replaced the harddrive on my computer i cannot do that shite no more lol. so please download up from the sites i mentioned… convert the shit pdf for me and i upload it and link on the koohii forum lol.

I don’t know how good this drama is but I know there’s people who were addicted to it and loved it as with any comedy/romance K-drama. I tried the first 10 minutes of that drama or so and I was like going WTF at some parts cause it’s like I don’t even know how to look up some of the stuff (I just had no idea what IT was ) even with the conjugation stufff I learned from luke park’s guide.I’m thinking why the hell is the dialogue like this… why don’t they make it more clear and less roller coastery.  but now the dialogue is more clear but that complaint still remains for me. watching the first ep second time around the drama seemed more fun … well maybe it’s because  i saw more of it . but I will stop watching it or skip to last episode if it gets bad… no mercy or anything for boring korean dramas 😉 and what I do to learn from drama is the same thing I do with song lyrics with lingoes and if I REALLY CARE about that line then I’ll attempt to look it up on google translate – j-k (has not happened yet).

there’s one part they used the word 融通性 – WHATEVR the korean version is i don’t remember but it sounds similar (well if you’re used to korean and japanese lol) so even without looking at the script I was like oh she said yuuzuusei in korean . that plus the context. i mean i guess if the word if close enough to japanese it i would have this connection . in that moment i felt like if i watched more k-dramas my korean would get better (b.c. it’s like context + word that sounds similar to j. version) but i really dont like k-dramas (as far as i know). i mean so far this drama is okay/somewhat interesting. I know I dropped full house after 2 eps becaue the way ep2 ended was gay( the main girl is annoying and i wasn’t falling head over heels over bi.) and the same game thing happened in hana yori dango too but for that I waited a whole week to watch the next ep  instead of stopping my watching…

so watching the 1st ep second time around a lot of  stuff became more clear and obvious now…

about a month passed since my first viewing (of the first 10 minuets). I just basically forgot about it for a month. What I did between then and now was read korean books (well obviously parts/pages of books that look interesting and not the whole books)/news articles and look up everything or almost everything and go damn I shoulda recognized that since it’s like similar to Japanese with the kango (kanji words)  and made flash cards for words that seemed more common useful compared to the rest of the words i looked up  (doing my manual srs since I don’t want to stare at the computer screen for that crap unless it’s japanese because hand-writing korean is less time consuming than japanese for obvious reasons) ++ luke park’s grammar thing and more… The reason I did the articles and books is like I said before I cannot stand the talk/variety shows since they don’t talk enough lol. seriously i don’t need to see DANCING OR SINGING OR EATING or whateerother crap that does NOT involve telling interesting stories. and i’d just rather watch the japanese talk/variety – i love their profuse usage of kanji . but serisuly if ther’s anythign like zotto suru hanashi in korean tv TELL ME! But I found a site with korean shows soI’m sure I can find an educational/stimulating show I like…….

from the reading besides the vocab and whatnot if just helps me figure out what’s going on in the overall picture more since there is no kanji to separate anything/help make sense of anything with the verbs and nouns and all that shit so you can actually figure out what the hell should be looked up.

The next step is to go K->K which would be lovely but I want to get more used to korean before. but it might be less efficient if like the dictionary site online is laggy as compared to lingoes which doesn’t lag obviously since it’s on the computer .. but there’s no k-k for lingoes last time I checked.

little tidbit on japanese and the state of anime: um… yeah i stopped watching after 2007 or something. 2006 was fun 🙂 but then as of now it’s like complete crap with shitty characters, horrible animation (in the sense that i see the picture of the show and i can tell it’s crap plus just the laziness with animation with some of the shows but then again i wouldn’t know since istopped watching) and lots of OTAKU PANDERING. so anyways I was on youtube watching my japanese talk/varitey shows and ao no exorcist was like in the top entertainment or comedy video  (that section) so I saw a little bit of it just to see how the low the state of anime is right now. I only saw a few minutes or less but they rubbed me the wrong way . the dialogue was just annoying. It’s just unnecessarily dragged out and umimaginative/boring. it was the scene where the teacher was like saying I’m the teacher blahblah and then the main protagonist goes what? you’re the same age as us etc etc. the reactions they did with the main character over thing that was so bland and tired and draggy and pointless to me.  It’s not enough for me to judge or the show or hate on it but just from that dialogue I felt irritated at it and I felt no value of watching it at all. i’m sure there’s negative reviews MAL explaning stuff more thouroughly but I can just tell just from this scene/dialogue.

and then I was curious about ano hi mita hana~~ and so I read some neg reviews and then I was just curious what it looks like so I just ran some video stream site  with the sound off and MY initial reaction was “this show is unwatchable/ there’s a 99% chance I don’t like it. besides that lame white haired loli + lame guy with red shirt… just from the animation I could just tell this show is not worth watching…. I can’t explain it. I had the same thing with naruto… I can’t stand those colors. Maybe it’s all becasue I’m super apathetic to anime after 2006. For ano hi mita…I can just tell the crappiness or the nothingness of the characteesr from the animation… one of the biggesyot reasons anime is so shtity now a days is that the characters are so shitty…. they just don’t have anything that gives them anything that’s worth so if you have shitty characters you’re not going to get any chemistry… interesting character interactions which was so awesome about dash kappei or slayers next etc etc. that’s why it’s so unwatchable. also, I cannot believe people actually obsesss over k-on characters… I don’t even have an ounce of anything to care about them enough to remember any  of their names not that I’ve seen that anime nor will i ever wach it unless somebody made me watch it lol. they’re really shitty and crappy as anyone tell… but yo know if moe is enough go ahead… you know they uesd to develop characters, give them ddepth/history/character design/ chemistry between the characters…. so much soullessness nowadays or rather i don’t know bc i don’t watch it. thank god!

Learning Korean from Korean Music

Music is a good way to learn… I would know since I did this with Japanese with lots and lots of songs. I think it’s especially easy bc of rikai-chan. you know trying to keep it fun and learn some common and useful words and conjuations/pronounciation

In fact I abused… I mean used music to learn to read the hirgana and the kanji and katakana…. even if i don’t know the meaning ( though i probably knew b.c. of rikai-chan and tae kim). So you could do it for basic stuff to just like reading something meaningful to you. In fact I did it when I read really slowww I mean I would listen to a slow song … slow song and I would literally pause it every 3 seconds b.c. i read so slow but now I read so fast (I read my Japanese books and the internet and all that)… and I’m glad I learned to read (at least to a decent speed by music and the rest by internet article and books and all that fun stuff) by music since it’s fun as compared to some quizzing program online or whatever… I do NOT UNDERSTAND why ppl do that. this is what music for j/k　。。。 It would definitely work for korean too 🙂

As far as how to do it with the resources/websites and everything:

Since this is korean and not Japanese there’s no rikai-chan BUT you can still do it.

I use Japanese to learn Korean which is really working out well… and if you’re doing it like me then Google Translate is really helpful. I’m not sure how helpful it is for English/korean.

Also I use the lingoes dictionary It has this option where you double click the mouse on the word and it shows you the definition and they have j-K dictionaries as well as K-E.

To set it up it took me a while… I think is the end I just went to configuration -> text capture set to mouse-over + control (checked) +  Match phrase is checked ++ checked for double clicking.

(For this I had to unconjugate 바라고which is like really easy.)

The only pain is it doesn’t know how to conjugate for its life…. well it doesn’t do it for your or tell you in what form the verb is conjugated like rikai-chan does… so learn this on your own (via  awesome grammar guide made by korean person) or ask a korean person or ask ppl online. I would do some kind of pre-studying with verb conjugations so you don’t go WTF like every 5 seconds with the songs lyrics but not to the point of  complete boredom/grinding it into your head…. I guess just enough so you can un-conjugate and/or look up the word or enough to know where to look up in the guide to unconjugate it lol) If you unconjugate it it will tell you what it means or if you just open the lingoes dictionary and paste the conjugated verb and erase it lettter by letter you might still find it?

You can also use online dictionaries like NAVER  BUt it loads really slow and the lingoes dictionary file for J-K anyway is based on the Naver dictionary

Also Stuff in this thread might be helpful.

Anyways I’m doing songs to learn all the common words in songs as well as any other vocab I can gain…. hopefully usseful since I’m fine with the grammar as far as undersatnding since my goal is 90% understanding which seems impossible right now. AKATT!!

Here’s a list of songs I’ve done and I recommend if you wanted to learn through music. all the songs I’ve listed are all just really good and makes me want to start singing along and are not too hard to sing along when compared to other songs. They’re all K-indie most likely. I think if you do Kpop music eventually you’ll be like the lyrics are so boring they keep saying the same thing over and over, plus really cheesy, and they keep putting in weird engrish. I mean if you like Kpop songs then go for it… I’m not really into it so.

Search in google with song title + 가사  or song title +가사집 or song title artist + gasa/gasajip

if you still can’t find it then comment and I’ll give you the lyrics… like I said I alrdy did these songs so I definitely found the lyrics somewhere online.


앵콜요청금지  by brocooli something (forgot the band’s name but I won’t forget some of their songs)

기다리다 by 윤하

별, 열일곱의 너에게 By Nastyona

달을 삼킨 소년 by Rune

곁에 by Zitten, Also the songs December and Zoo (동물원)

잔혹한 여행 by 한희정

Paisley Love by 이지형

Everything N’nothing by Melody | ALSO::  You, sad melody, crazy

Let Go by Microkid
yesterday by Taru | ALSO: don’t let me down

stardust by W-Whale

2NE1 – 아파, lonely

10cm 죽네


I’m not linking youtube since videos get removed and stuff is time consuming not to mention I have the mp3s… so i don’t need yt for these songs UNLESS it’s some awesome live performance 🙂

I will update with more songs as I go through more songs. I was gonna do korean shows but I realize I like Japanese TV too much and I have lots of Japanese to watch and I honestly don’t have any korean shows Iparticularly like that much at this point. I hate sebakki/gam shinjang/1박2일.. well not hate but I don’t get what the fuss is about and it’s like not for me. I mean sometimes gam shinjang is interesting and same with 1박2일 but it’s like NEVER with sebakki. I HATE HATE HATE it when they make people sing/dance/or play a game (and it’s like boring as hell watching) and the bgm. I have lots of korean music I love so I’m gonna focus on what I love/enjoy doing for now.

I am interested in the show where they have like 100 women from different countries who all speak korean but I’m scared I might learn bad habits…  since they’re foreigners though I could tell that some of them  speak awesome fluent korean. oh but I don’t know what the show is called in korean. . I know what they call it in japanese but I can’t seem to find it no matter how much korean and Japanese I mix in in the google lol but I think someoen wrote about this in their liveournal entry so if i go to that then i can find out. I’m thinking of watching this later on.

OMg I love Tokui’s impressions of foreigners speaking Japanese

And his impression of Uma Therman SPEAKING Japanese in Kill Bill might be more funny than this…. it was was on of the time’s they did the TSUTAYA corner.


Oh I looked it up… it was the ep with


Korean vs. Japanese. Mostly Korean is harder blahblah :( :( complaints

I do follow/believe AJATT so I’m sure once I go AKATT enough I’ll be like oh korean is so easy and all that but right now I’m not there so I will write this down for my current and future amusement and or shame. Cause right now I’m very AJATT and like think Japanese is really easy except for like speaking perfect keigo etcetc… and i most definitely cannot speak that super keigo.. whatever youcall it. the japanese the store people use just because i’ve never been to japan so i have very little opportunity to hera that type of japanese. though i’ve had some chance to hear it via tv show a couple times………. but i don’t want that job anywhoos.

Japanese has words that have a lot of meanings and yes korean has words that have multiple meanings but I’m pretty sure Japanese has way more of them (esp since it has less sounds than korean)…. which I find makes Japanese easier for me. Like I found these blog entries on tagigo: which I will study funnily. Yes this sentence sounds weird and probably incorrect or maybe it’s not  but that’s what i want to say…. 😦 and it would sound completely normal in korean and japanese. These entries make it seem as if Japanese words… the common verbs all have many many definitions. I find it that assuring. I’d rather learn the multiple meanings behind a verb than learn many separate verbs and their respective meanings (that is equal to the amount of meanings with one verb).

The advantage of the former over the other is that it’s faster to learn (you just have to remember that one verb and just pay attention you hear/see it being used and go oh it has more meanings than that VS. remembering many verbs with diff meanigns).

the advantage of the latter over the former is there is going to be less ambiguity…. guaranteed… i feel like it’s gonna be like at first it’s really hard cause let’s be honest it’s very very arbitrarily whether it’s ㅗ as opposed to ㅜ or it’s ㅓ  as opposed toㅏ  just because you’re not used to it (or rather the more words you leran in korean without knowing hanja this house of cards you’re buliding that is the vocabulary you’re building will implode on itself due the arbitrariness) not to mention it’s just more 3d level than japanese…. cause in korean it’s actually an alphabet so build sounds by putting something at the top left, the top right, bottom right, and sometimes there’s two things at the bottom right or sometimes the thing on the top right doubles (ㄲ) while in japanese the most complicated it’ll ever get is like the small tsu… it’s like 1d… ?  but actually korean has this brilliant system with the vowels like with the verb/adjective conjugations… that i’m sure anyone and everyone will come to appreciate insanely once it gets to the point when he/she can conjugate without much effort.


かける can mean and it not limited to : putting on glasses, putting the fire on, taking up time/money, locking the door. And at least for the stuff I just translated to english all require diff verbs in korean while in Japanese it’s all kakeru. And o’course like I said before Japanese has many verbs that have many different meanigns…. partly it has to do with the thing that the verbs homophones so if you put in the kanji.. it’s a different kakeru. so hard to explain.

めがねをかける　안경을 쓰다
鍋を火にかける　냄비를 불에 올려놓다
常識にかける　상직이 부족하다
お金と時間をかける　돈도 시간을 들이다
誰が勝つかかける　누가 이길지 내기를 하다
看板をかける　간판을 걸다
迷惑をかける　폐를 끼치다
馬に乗って野原をかける　말을 몰고 들판을 달리다
月が欠ける　달이 이지러지다
前歯がかけている　앞니가 빠져 있다
窓にカーテンをかける　창문에 커튼을 치다
言葉をかける　말을 건네다
肩に手をかける　어깨에 손을 얹다
鍵をかける　자물쇠를 잠그다

i love how japanese is not as specific as korean with the verbs. stuff that would be a specific verb in korean is ~~~suru in japanese  or one verb serves as 10 verbs lol in comparison to Korean. i love that. of course korean does have its advantages having so many adjectives and specific verbs for specific whatever because once you’re fluent it’ll be super satisfying expressing yourself with colorful sounds AND AND it should sound like what it means which adds to the satisfaction (though i read somewhere the language sounds different if you learned if you were before 6 vs if you’re over the age of 6… like if you learn it before 6 you can never hear korean as a foreign language because it’s so ingrained in you??/ i can’t explain it well but it’s something about that).

– just today i looked up 타다 yes i know thatmeans to ride but the senence was like 대상을 탔다 or smoething like that. it has to do with an award. i type it in and there’s a billion definitions… then i was like fuck this shit  i’m not reading through that. i’m just gonna assume it means 取る　受賞 OR SOMETHING like that. i’m using a k/j dictionary so it’s easier to skim than english/korean dictionary just because of the kanji but even then i don’t want to. this is one of the reasons i would never go korean/ korean monolingual because i will get something that will have a billlllllllion definitions and i’d have to read through single one to fgirue it out while for japanese/korean i can just go not this kanji and keep moving on. so i guess korean especially  should be learned in context …. there will be times where i GO FUCK THIS SHIT .. i’m not reading through all that. IT REALLY IS RIDICULOUS with the sheer number of verbs…. and koreans.. the korean children or when all koreans were children and toddlers they learned all these verbs through immersion/context. sometimes it just makes more sense to just leave it to immersion and go this verb was used with this subject and this noun it probably x y or z or something between x and z and solidify that as you go on to see more context examples… because reading through all that crap will drive you insane.

so for the reason of the specificity in korean and no usage of hanja (i personally found kanji helpful with learning vocabulary and yes it’s hard at first but once you get over the hill or the mountain,,, however you want to analogize that, it’s such a godsend and doesn’t korean have more vocab based on kanji than japanese anyway? and why the hell won’t they simplify the hanja) and the complexity of grammar (there is so much to choose from for. something in japanese that you would say in 1 way can be at lesat 10 diff ways in korean etc etc so in japanese you hear people saing the exact same sentence/phrase over and over, in korean they do say variations of the same idea/sentence so it’s not exactly the same which makes it harder) korean is definitely harder to speak.

The Kanji… I love it. IT makes Japanese so much easier to learn than Korean…. is my true and honest opinion. I mean Korean is made up of kanji too (they havae lots of words made out of it and i heard they share 75%kango with japanese and I heard they have more kango words than Japanese somewhere? not qutie sure +++ I think korean uses less english… like some of the english/katakana in japanese is insane… to this day I still do not know how to say certain words in Japanese because they always say it in english.) and they don’t use it really use it for writing/printing (except when they print the kanji for girl/guy/north in the newspaper  lol) but like they don’t need to really since korean has way more sounds than japanese so way less homophones for sure and hanguel is easy to read.

But I am honestly am/was conditioned/being conditioned to prefer not being able to read to

not being able to understand the meaning. It’s just been like this for the past 8/9 years.

Also for me, personally, learning korean without knowing kanji is like learning japanese without knowing kanji…. which equals realy really frikin inefficient with learning kango and kanji readings. in fact my master plan is learn japanese, learn korean, get fluent or as good as i want to and then maintain it. as crazy as this paragraph may sound to you, it sounds brilliant to me. It just makes sense because they never write the words with kanji in korean ever so it’s obviously easier to learn abt kanji with japanese since they write stuff in kanji. For the details of my love with kanji and plans with japense and korean go read my lang-8 entry

If you really care to read and can’t read japanese than google translate 🙂 It’s good shit…. ? But anyways I have a childhood memory about hanja. so one day when i was super fluent in korean i was thinking

“heys let’s think of a bunch of words related to fire. then i went heys all these words or some of these words all have the same sound in the word so that must be the same hanja. I was like heys why do i know all these words and their respective defintions so well. well it’s obviously why. at that moment i was thinking if i would’ve learned it faster if i learned about the hanja that is related to fire and its reading. now i would say yes if korean is my second language and no if i’m immersed in korean 24/7 b.c. i live in korea.” I only realized all these words related to fire had this same sound in it only after I listed all the words… I just knew each word from their usage… seeing it/hearing it/using it myself /whatever

I really liked the forum posts collected from how to leanr any language because somebody mentions that learning hanja is useful for korena learnaers while flunet korean speakers dont’ really need to since they got a shitload of immersion over the years.

BUT AT THE SAME TIME I do recognize that there ARE differences between Japanese and Korean and there are reasons why transition of korean to like mixed writing like in japanese isn’t as logical??? is that the word? I do think they should simplify the kanji though…. just legit take the simplified kanji from japanese  (that way korean people can read korean and japanese but then the problem with that is,,, they can’t read the old old text unlss they also learn how to read/recognize traditioanl characters….. some of the traditional charactesr are insane though… like totally over the top compared to simplifiedlol (or is it the other way around that it got simplified a lot! but I think it’s too complicated rather than too simple because it justlooks time-consuming to write lol) like the one for 声 so like big lol and i wouldn’t be ableto figure out it’s koe unless the simplified version next to it, which it was in this book lol)

so I found japanese text about reasons why korean isn’t japanese and the resrevations/reasons for why korena isn’t as ideal as japanese for writing with kanji. LINK BELOW!

check if out if you’re interestetd!! The person makes some good points and just articulated what I’ve been feeling and noticing that I wasn’t able to put into words at least not as concisely as this person did.  So as much as I would love it if they just used as much as kanji as possible like in japanese since japanese i’m just so much more comfortal=ble with korean ie kanji i do see and understand why it wouldn’t make as much sense to do that with korean but then…. I also read in one of the articles that i posted today that somebody in korean history who’s in charge or whtaever was like trying to declare that people can only use HANGUEL and then the newspaper people or whoever was totally against it and they won and so the hanguel only thing didn’t happen… but then the hanguel only thing did happen anyway later on,,,, over time just naturally. i was like wtf lol. this gonna shit just pisses me off!

But you know I think one of the points he/she makes in the article sorta happens with japanese too because reading japanese is a complete frikin’ nightmare for foreigners and japanese people… it’s just too DAMN IRREGULAR WITH TOO MANY DAMN POSSIBILITIES FOR NO OTHER GODDAMN REASON EXCEPT IT CAN BE ( sometimes there is background story behind the reading or how it changed to that or watever but sometimes the background story is that “it is that for no other reason it can be”). Oh and if you don’t agree with me on this statement either you haven’t tried reading japanese books / haven’t read much japanese or you’ve read thousands of japanese books and got really good at reading/used to a lot of unusual/uncommon stuff. like i’ve improved a lot and learned a lot from readinga lot in general on the web and from books ( probably 70 books ta this point, because i’m lazy 😦 )  and other sources.

Because the readings are like irregular it gets into a limbo /gray area where it’s like I know what it means but i’m not sure about the reading or i have no idea how you read it lol.  But you know guessing readings/making up your readings is fun too!!!








I read somewhre on some blog that collects that posts from 2ch about how actresses commit suicide because of the stuff ppl write on the net while that has never hapepned in japan… oh and i also read this lie that somebody wrote… something how about kimchi is bad for you because it has capsaicin in it and that the french health minsitry banned it lol. what bs. kimchi is GOOD for you. this stupid comment was actually bolded and probably had the color changed to red



Awesome posts on a forum about korean vs. japanese and the learn hanja or not
issue – I potsed the ones I like on the tumblr. I love it… it’s one of the best explanation/debate argument I’ve read on the internet.

Usually people just say uh japanese has 2000 kanji so it’s harder. done deal. I’m like no… you still gots to deal with that shit in korean technically… the “well native korean speakers don’t know hanja” so why does it matter to me is complete bs, since we’re learning korean. we are not fluent so that argument makes no sense. but anyways all those points are thoroughly explained in the posts I linked.

WILL UPDATE MORE 🙂 later…. as thoughts pop up as …