February 16, 2011
About me:
안녕하세요. 아르차나라고 합니다.
Hi! Welcome! This is Archana. I’m currently a first year PhD candidate at Stanford University. Aside from science, I’ve always had a great interest in language. Not just learning it, but all aspects of language. Everything from grammatical structure, to linguistic history, to how the brain interprets and creates language is absolutely intriguing to me. I took French for four years in high school, dabbled in Sanskrit, Hindi, Italian, and Japanese. But my greatest, most time-consuming and enjoyable hobby is self-studying Korean.
I started teaching myself Korean around the end of December 2009, almost on accident. One of my best friends, who’s Korean, exposed me to K-pop early on when 동방신기 (TVXQ) debuted but I wasn’t interested in the language until I (quite on accident) started watching 꽃보다 남자 (Boys Before Flowers). That was the first time I had ever actually heard spoken Korean. I was struck by how similar the sounds of Korean were to the sounds of my own native language of Marathi (a language of northern India); some words even sounded similar! I kind of randomly started to look up a few things here and there on Korean and stumbled upon Talk To Me In Korean and that was the beginning. Armed with TTMIK’s solid lessons along with a basic grammar book and some useful college websites, I decided to take on the Korean language.
About this blog:
This blog was inspired largely by some other great language-learning bloggers who I’ve had the pleasure to interact with. I didn’t realize there were so many people out there with this passion; I’d love to be a part of that language learning community and contribute in any way I can!
This blog is going to be filled with everything and anything about the languages that I’m studying and/or find interesting. Most likely, it’ll end up being a lot about Korean, a little about Korean music and dramas (I’ll try to keep the fangirling to a minimum) and occasionally about Japanese. A lot of my posts will also probably be about how I self-study languages, so hopefully that’ll give other self-learners ideas about how to study.
And now, about the title of this blog: 반짝반짝 [panjjak panjjak] is one of my favorite Korean words and it roughly means “dazzlingly” or “glitteringly.” I wish I had something intelligent to say about how that relates to my blog… but I don’t really. It’s just an awesome sounding word and, incidentally, the title of one of my favorite Big Bang songs.
Well that’s about it. Happy reading! Feel free to leave comments and tell me what you think! 잘 부탁드립니다. ^^
Cheers,
Archana
yay~! ^^ glad to see you on wordpress! ^^ your korean learning journey will be 반짝반짝 too :D :D
I hope so! :D
Hi Archana!
Korean sounds similar to Marathi? Is there any conection between them or just coincidence?
There is probably no linguistic connection between the two. Marathi is derived from Sanskrit which is of Indo-Aryan origin while Korean and Japanese are of Altaic origin (Although that is debatable. Some linguists consider Korean to be “isolated” – as in having no linguistic relatives). I just think that sometimes the phonology of Korean can be similar to that of certain Indian languages. And some grammar patterns are similar too, surprisingly! For example, in Korean, you can use VERB + 아/어/여 보다 to mean “try doing something” and you can use an equivalent construction in Marathi. In Marathi, it is VERB + “and” + paa (paa = the verb “to see”).
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Thanks for the explanation :) I love this kind of things. They’re so interesting.
Hi there! I’m also a language learner and I was visiting some friend’s blogs and luckily found yours! (blog-hopping is nice! lol)
It’s very interesting to meet fellow language learners. Shall add you up on my list. haha.
keep blogging!
–kat
Hi Kat! Thanks for stopping by. I’ll add you as well. We seem to have a lot of blogger friends in common haha.^^
yeah. i noticed that too! :))
Hey, katecdet, I’m interested in doing a couple skype interviews with people who have been studying Korean. . . are you interested?^^
Hi, sorry, were you talking to me or Kat? In the latter case, I’d suggest contacting Kat directly at her blog. :)
Oh sorry! I meant to contact you. . . I was thinking of the author of this blog but I got confused what your blogging name was. . . sorry!
My name’s Archana hehe. And sure, I’d love to be interviewed. It will have to be some time at the end of next week though, since I have finals and projects to take care of first.
Cool. Shoot me an email and let me know what day your free. I’m pretty flexible.^^ Email is hangugeohakseng [at] gmail [dot] com
Hello Archana, this is Shashwat. Was just getting some language reference via blogs and found yours. by the way, I’m a Marathi as well, tuzha blog kharach khup chan ahey, especially with everything Korean, I’m also a fan of K-Pop. K-Rock but I’m more of a crazy fan of Japanese visual 2D art known as Anime, an Otaku ofcourse. Well I want to ask you something as how in our language there’re consonants, the “Bara Khadi” which we say. The thing is that, how do we compare our consonants i.e. A AA, E EE, UU with the Japanese consonants? You know any chart or site that would provide the information about the similarity between these two languages? I want to learn Japanese and need some help, hope you’ll come up with an answer. ^_^
Oh my, hello Shashwat and thank you!
To answer your question, you should be able to find a Japanese syllabary (either Hiragana or Katakana) chart by just doing a simple search on the internet; however, I don’t think there are many similarities between our bara khadi and Japanese consonants (I actually think Hindi/Marathi is probably more similar to Korean than Japanese) so I doubt you would find a chart correlating the two. There are fewer consonants and vowels to learn in Japanese. For example, while we have “ka” and “kha” in Marathi, in Japanese, there’s only one “ka” (which is similar to the English “ka” sound.)
Just as we have “a” “aa” “e” “ee” etc. but unlike Marathi, there no separate characters or diacritic marks in Japanese for long vowels. Long vowels in Japanese are indicated by writing two vowels next to each other, either “あ” (a), “い” (i) or “う” (u), depending on the vowel. For example, in the word ありがとう (“arigatō”), the last syllable “tō” has a long “o” sound at the end so you write it as と (“to”) + う (“u”) which is then pronounced as “tō.”
Hope that helps. Good luck with your Japanese studies. :)
Hi Archana :)
I have followed your blog and added to my blogroll ^^ Keep writing :)
Thank you so much! ^^