Blogger Notes

Lawd, lawd! So here I am on the Arirang website trying to pull down some more episodes of Let's Speak Korean only to discover that the links no longer work. The website is still there but the videos are disabled. For two days I'm like, What the heck?! until I randomly search the pull down menu and see "Let's Speak Korean (Season 4)". Um, ok. I'm not sure why you need a new season to teach the same thing again or why that means the old season has to disappear...


Lisa Kelley is still the host but this season she's joined by Kim YoungChul, a really wacky comedian that I could sware I've seen before but don't remember where. In other news, it appears that this season will include a mini drama called "Homestay Story" and we all know I love me some drama! It's terribly corny but I'll probably remember the vocabulary better. Here's to starting over...again...

Sooo, the fact that I'm crazy busy isn't really encouraging me to spend more time studying Korean. The Survival Korean book is a little frustrating in that there's no transliteration at all. I can understand separating the romanization from the hangul but not offering it at all is quite a strain for an absolute beginner!

Even so, I've taken a liking to Arirang's Let's Speak Korean series from '07. Each segment is 10 minutes long and admittedly, 5 minutes of each is pretty much foolishness. Still, I suppose the relational elements help keep the learning lighthearted.


Hopefully I'll settle on a method soon enough. Until then, no worries. I have my SMOE interview on Sunday. If that goes well, I should be all set! *fingers crossed*

After a few more episodes of SangDoo, I realized the sunsingyim bomb is getting dropped everywhere. The teacher is sunsingyim. The doctor is sunsingyim. The principal is sunsingyim. I'm just going to think of the word as meaning "honored person." Hopefully, sometime in the near future, I'll get to the bottom of it...

Then there's ajumma as a greeting, ajumma as an entreaty, ajumma as a title, ajumma as a description. I feel as if I've learned the two most useful words in Korean even though I couldn't properly define either one if I tried!

Thusfar, Survival Korean is just ok. The first few segments on the alphabet were quite a bother because no one thought it helpful enough to seperate the audio into tracks or at least provide an audio marker in the track-that-never-ends to seperate them. So, on pages 30-31, there are 5 different audio segments which are stuffed away in the middle of a 16-minute track on the accompanying cd. I kid you not, it was so annoying, I used an audio editor and divided it into 20 different tracks. That way, I can easily go back to any particular section of consonents or vowels without having to fast forward or rewind like it's 1999.

My only other beef is the fact that there are lists of "Bonus Vocabulary" at the end of each chapter that are NOT on the cds. Folks, how much does it really cost to keep the talent in the studio a few more hours? Seriously.

On a positive note, this is the first Korean language material I've picked up that didn't start off by introducing the concept of kimchi or devoting more than a paragraph to the scientificness of the Korean alphabet and how smart and fabulous King Sejong was.

That said, I've got the alphabet about half memorized. I haven't been able to make any proper flash cards since my printer broke. In the meantime, I'll try not to devote too much brain power to what the heck is up with two different methods of counting--one of which is supposed to be based in Chinese but sounds NOTHING like Mandarin. What's up with that? Do they match with Cantonese or something? *sigh*

...well, at least easier than Korean.

I don't think--actually, I'm pretty sure--that probably won't be true in the long run but I'm impatient with myself. Learning to hear the difference between 안녕(an-nyeong) and 아녕 (a-nyeong) or 안영 (an-yeong) for that matter, might take a good long while. It took me 3 months just to even hear the tones in Chinese. Telling them apart was another matter entirely. Even now, I'm still limited to about 200 Chinese words! *sigh*

I should stop panicking. There's two days left in my "week".

...or at least I will be according to this book:


While the cover irks me to no end--Who was the designer on this one? Weren't you the least bit perturbed about this pose? What's he doing with his hands? Were they supposed to be holding something?--it seems like a good enough place to start. I'm completely uninterested in starting off with anything academic because it's usually chapter nine or so before you learn how to say what it is you really want to say.

Also, I absolutely must take the opportunity to brag on Hanbooks.com because if you're going to pay way too much for an import + S&H, at the very least, it ought to be delivered fast. And it was! Lightening fast. I placed my order on Monday and it was in my mailbox on Wednesday. That's what I call service! Hanbooks makes the Good List.

You may, or more likely may not, recognize the author and "guy on the cover" Stephen Revere as host of one of the incarnations of Let's Speak Korean a mini microseries on the Korean state-funded channel Arirang. More recently, he did a similar series Traveler's Korean. Both programs seem pretty useful BUT being the nerd that I am, I prefer to sit down to more than 1 minute of instruction a session.

So, this week's (ok, week and a half) goal is for me to learn the Korean alphabet - Hangeul. Hopefully, by next week, I'll have figured out how to type it...