Korean Fun Writeing!

Follow the letters easier to write letters to children, pronounced helps.

- Results -
Pay close the line connecting the dots will stroke your baby infant children's fun.
Fine motor development, cognitive development, drawing animals, the brain intelligence brain stimulation study.
Character shapes coloring crayons. Crayons Child Care Education Child Brain Development.
Anniversary of Self-directed learning toys mom mother baby, we focused on our kids.
Alphabetical cat dead dog playing in red potatoes, cacao children.


Android app for, I'm guessing, learning to write in Hangeul (Korean letters) for kids. Long live machine translation. The last sentence is my favorite. Cacao?

Sounds and letters

I wanted to ask something. I found a band logo today for a korean band that pronounced their name as "beast" but the logo was "B2ST". I spent a ridiculous amount of time staring at it trying to make sense of it, turning it this way and that, distorting "two", but my puzzlement only grew. Until my dear friend pointed out that the 2 could be in the band's native language. I'd already thought about that but dismissed it because two in korean is "set" and in their chinese loan numbers "ii".
When she said it though, I realized that "ii" and "ea" in beast probably is the same sound. I say probably, because in my head, it's not. If you recorded me saying the two sounds, I realize that I'm very unlikely to hear any difference myself, but would you ask me when I'm saying it, I'd swear that I'm saying two different things. In my head, when I say or hear "beast" there is clearly both an "e" and an "a" in there. I feel them... it's not quite seeing and not quite hearing.
This probably helps me with spelling, because I would also claim that I can "hear" how a word is spelled (probably it's just obscure grammatical rules that I've somehow absorbed subconsciously, and I'll claim the same even if I spelled it wrong the first time and then learned the right). But it does confuse me when it comes to word-plays like the band name.

So the question is, do you too?

Melodies

Saw a black cat trotting along the road yesterday, carrying a... uh, [sork] so big that the tail was dragging on the ground, it was at least twice the size of the cat's head. Show off.

Listening to Korean radio through shoutcast.com. Partly because normal radio is boring, partly because I like music where I don't understand the words because then I don't get ticked off at stupid lyrics, and partly because listening to it passively teaches me the sounds and melodies of the language. It's also cool to have a normal music radio channel that plays *only* songs in the native language. How many Swedish-exclusive music channels are there? (Not that I'd listen to them.) I've listened to French radio before, but a lot of the music is the same as ours and in English. While it's cool to have like a "universal" language between European countries, I guess that native languages get sidelined. I'm usually not so opposed to that, but it's a tragedy when it comes to music, really. Every language is like it's own instrument. Ever listen to duets by people from Sweden/Norway/Denmark? Chorusing together but in their own language, it sounds awesome.

So if every language is it's own instrument, what instrument would that be? Like, Norwegian would be the ukulele to the Swedish guitar, Italian would be drums and Russian, I think, like one of those stringed square things that lie down and you can play chords on... not the Asian ones, darn it what are they called...

Oil, ink or crayons

Language nerdery:
This sentence: 가격이 너무 비싸요 is transcribed roughly "gagyuk-i nomu bisayo". 가격 (gagyuk) is "price", 이 is a particle that in this instance means "this", 너무(nomu) means "too(much)" and 비싸-(bisa-) is "expensive". 요(yo) is just a suffix to finish a sentence in the semi-polite sense.
Now what is this? A fully correct sentence without the use of a verb? Clearly the meaning is "this price is too expensive", but there is no "is" in there. Those who know their Korean would immediately answer that the base form of bisa- is 비싸다(bisada) which makes it a "verb": to be expensive.
Where am I going with this? Not sure, but it amazes me somehow because if you think about it, if you see the world as if adjectives were verbs and the words "to be" or "is" are void of meaning and useless, it's like looking through a filter; it changes things around in my head. So I don't think that a language can limit your thoughts, exactly, but it can probably adjust the course of your thoughts a bit, since they're the narrow channels we push our thoughts through before they become solid and shareable.
Why am I putting verb inside rabbit ears? Because I'm not sure I agree with that bisada is a verb. That would require pushing Korean through the narrow channels that is western linguistics, which means even more information could be lost along the way. Is it the same thing to say "green cat" as "cat being green"? The same thing saying "difficult girl" as "girl being difficult"? Is it necessary to have the opportunity for both in a language? And how many other different ways to say it are there? How many ways to think it?

To really go off the deep end here; is any single word we ever say or write or think exactly the same as another in the sense that it expresses exactly the same thought or feeling?
But that wasn't what I came to discuss. Rather, if you look at this this way, "is" seems like such a useless word really. "Is" is hardly a word at all. It needs all kinds of support to become something, just like a pronoun. Thinking about it, the Korean(and many more Eastern languages if I remember correctly) way makes much more sense.

She's a killer whale, gunpowder, ginger ale

I'm playing puzzle games to spend time, which incidentally also teaches me new words of the English language, since I've made a point of looking up those I find. At least for a few minutes, because I've already forgotten most of the words I learned yesterday. Well, I'll know them if I read them. The one I remember is "roe" which is a collection of fish eggs or sperm. For whatever reason I should know that word >.>

Today I learned what a "porpoise" is. Either you can see it here, or you can let me explain; it's a kind of small whale that looks like dolphins except they're shorter, stouter and don't have the long nose. They kinda looks like the bastard dwarf children of a dolphin and a killer whale. I think they're much cuter than dolphins. Killer whales/orcas can also be called "blackfish", apparantly, which... I dunno, it sounds a bit... plain. I like "orca". I heard a story when I was a kid where they were sort of "holy animals", and "orca" sounds like something like that. A mythical creature.

Porpoises live in small "herds" of less than ten, and you call these herds "pods". So you'd go; "There's a pod of porpoises at the harbor" which is such an awesome sentence that I think porpoises are my new favoritest animal.

If you're wondering about the header for last post, it's because I was talking to Nallenon, and I said I don't want to write too long blogposts and he said why (sometimes I think the Nallenon-"why" is less out of actual questioning and more a conditioned response to any declarative statement) and I said it's because I have no grasp of how slow/fast people read and I don't want to occupy their entire day. I can tell when I read like an article over someone's shoulder that I tend to finish faster than most, but how fast people normally read... nooo clue. So, uh, I hope I'm not writing too long. Tell me if I do.

Question :D

"What is the difference between a hydrocarbon and an alcohol?"

"Hydrocarbons don't cause car crashes."

On a completely different note:

Korean and Japanese are apparantly a "close-surface languages" pair. What does that mean? Swedish and Norwegian weren't taken up as examples, while Hindi - Urdu and Indonesian - Malayan were, so is it about pronounciation? Grammar? Whatever it is, I have yet to find a single word in Korean that is the same as one in Japanese, or even seems vaguely similar. I am admittedly not an expert on either language, far from, but considering I'm studying their most basic words, like "hello" or "cat" or "I am", then... if only the advanced words like, I dunno, "exoskeleton" are the same, I wouldn't call them similar languages. "No" in Japanese means "yes" in Korean, for crying out loud. Maybe it is that they have approximately the same sounds in their language? But so does Swedish - Japanese, right?

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.

Opiniated Rant

I have an opinion; I am told repeatedly that I seem like someone who has opinions, and that is true. The problem is that when my opinion takes flight from my mouth, it suddenly completely loses its point and I seem to talk in circles. Or so I feel, at least, like what I say don't have a point and core and is far too easy to pick apart. I'm just wondering; is it like this for everyone? Because some people seem to know exactly what they're talking about; they move around in complicated expressions as if it was their own back yard, and they drive a politic standpoint or moralic right as though heaven and hell hung on it. I'm not talking about their drive or conviction or reason, I mean: how do they find the right words, how come they have opinions that fit together with the language so well? I feel like I'm trying to plant a flower using a lawnmower, or whatever weird parallell you want to use for trying to do something with tools that aren't meant for it. I know how to use a lawnmower and I know where I want the flower, but the two doesn't work very well together. Writing, where I have some more time to think, I do better, but it still feels awkward and clumsy. Hardly because the language is insufficient, I doubt that. I'm cutting diamonds with a hammer, and there's nothing wrong with the hammer, that's the best analogy I can think of right now.

This is ultimately why I write fiction; because using fiction I can present an example where eventually as the story develops it can channel the feelings, impressions and opinions I otherwise can't get through to people.

Okay, so I admit, I had philosophy today. I wasn't talked down, we had a rather good discussion, but it felt like the more I tried to explain what I meant, the less it made sense, not because of my audience but because of myself. I don't know if I'm the only one thinking like that. Because it may just be that I think it's bad because I can't go back and look at it. Usually when I write I think what I've written is bad until I read it through. Well, anyway. My question still stands:

Does everyone feel like that?