Showing posts with label Korean. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Korean. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

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?

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Learning a new language

i -- 1. (particle after subject or object word) 2. this 3. (particle after verb or adjective to make adverb) 4. tooth, teeth 5. two, 2 (hanja) 6. lice 7. person (particle after younger/same age person's name) 8. with 9. ear 10. different


do -- 1. (particle after noun to add meaning of 'as well', 'too') 2. district, province 3. principle, doctrine 4. drawing, picture 5. degree (angle or temperature) 6. (particle after word to add meaning of 'but, however') 7. group of people 8. island

si -- 1. hour, time, o'clock 2. (particle in verb to add politeness) 3. (particle in verb to make polite request) 4. city, town 5. (particle in noun to add meaning of 'in-law') 6. poem 7. to see (hanja)

:<

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

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...



Friday, January 28, 2011

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.