Sunday, October 26, 2008

Tongue

Orenmanieyo - It's been a long time!

My Korean is progressing, if not at all at the pace it would with actual real lessons. Self-learning does appeal to me in many ways, though. The optimal would perhaps be to just know someone personally to ask if you have questions.

Anyway, I do love languages. I had my sights on something like Japanese or Arabic before, but I like Korean better and better, even disregarding the fluff. I love the sounds and the way people look when they speak it and the way it makes perfect sense even thinking through the filter of western grammars once you cut through the initial layer of prejudice. I'm not going to pretend it's easy, but what language is, really? One of the hardest part is how f***ing fast they talk natively. I mean, French doesn't stand a chance. Another complicating factor is that I briefly studied Japanese not long ago, and tend to mix up words sometimes. Not because they sound alike, because they don't. I actually have no idea why. I guess they have similar base sounds or something.

Having listened to, say, the same song in both Korean and Japanese, though, I can officially state that Korean is a much more beautiful language. And whether or not it could prove useful to me I will learn it. And when I know enough to survive (vague term, right? but I know what I mean, you I don't bother about) I will go to Korea. Maybe find my family? Maybe.

1 comment:

Sara said...

I have to agree with you that Korean sounds more beautiful than Japanese. I think I'd still like to learn Japanese though simply because it's the language that would be most useful to me.