青春

I rewatched a couple episodes of my favorite Japanese drama (野ブタ。をプロデュース) with Korean subtitles recently.  That was quite the experience.  My brain felt like it was doing gymnastics at the Olympics.  The awesome thing is that I understood maybe 85-90% of the Korean subtitles I read, while my ears also understood maybe 10-15% of the Japanese.  My brain kept trying to connect the two, but the synapses just didn’t seem to be forming.  Haha.  Well, I’ll keep watching and see if it gets easier.

I won’t write about how much I adore this drama but it is, hands down, out of all the Asian dramas I’ve ever watched, my absolute favorite.  It is the perfect story of youthful earnestness, camaraderie, and life in general.  And it never ever fails to makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.  After rewatching it though, this part from episode 1 really stuck out.

彰：青春ってさ、いまいちよくわかんないんだよね。
修二：まあ、俺が思うに、誰もやったことのないようなことをしてみるとか。あと、挫折するまで、自分の能力を出し切って見るとか。まあ、そういうことなんじゃ。
彰：で。何やりますか？
修二：それは自分で考えろよ。

AKIRA:  Youth – I’m not really sure what that means, you know.
SHUUJI:  Well, to me, it’s kind of like trying to do something no one else has ever done before.  Or giving it your all until you collapse.  Something like that.
AKIRA:  Hm.  What should I do?
SHUUJI:  That’s something you have to figure out for yourself!  

The word that really got to me was 青春「せいしゅん」 (청춘 in Korean), which means youth or (rather floridly) “the bloom of youth.”  It made me sit back and reexamine my life.  In high school, my dream was to become a published writer before I graduated college.  That was the big thing I desperately wanted to have accomplished while I was still in my 青春.

For better or worse, that didn’t work out and here I am.

Ever since I started graduate school, I’ve been wondering if I’ve just doomed myself to wasting away my 青春 at the lab bench, in the tissue culture hood, or in front of the microscope (though microscopy is fun), in a futile attempt to “do something no one else has ever done before” (which is the essence of a scientific discovery).  The doubts are making me realize that I’m still at the “figuring out” stage in my life and, meanwhile, my youth is flying past me.  

And I don’t think I’m the only one feeling like this.  Several of my friends have hit a “Quarter-Life Crisis,” if you will, where they feel like they need to be doing something great but just don’t know what.  Is society to blame for this in some way?  Have young people just been conditioned to feel like they need to have changed the world before the hit 35?  Or is youth really about attempting the impossible?  I’m not even sure anymore.  In any case, when I was feeling my lowest, I saw this comic -

- and it made me feel better.  It’s time to get over this existential crisis and move on before I worry my 青春 away.

お久しぶりの日本語！

My interest in Japanese has continued to wax and wane for about, oh, seven years now?  But I never seriously tried learning it until I took two semesters of introductory Japanese in college last year.  I didn’t hate it, but considering I was at the peak of my Korean studies and in the throes of graduate school applications, I just could not immerse myself in Japanese as easily as I could Korean.

But, at very very long last, I think I may have found the right stimulus.

credit:  rkgsflumpool

Flumpool.  Flumpool.  Flumpool.

Where have you been all my life?!

I feel silly because I’d known of Flumpool for ages but never bothered to listen to them because I used to kind of have this mental block against Japanese music (not sure why; it’s a beautiful language but maybe I’ve just been listening to the wrong things till now).  It’s very rare for me to stumble upon a band I like so much that I can pretty much enjoy every single one of their songs – and Flumpool is one such find.  I will unabashedly admit that I have been looping the song above for the past three days.

I’m excited because this is the first time I’ve been really excited about something in Japanese entertainment and, initially at least, I’ve found that a good dose of fangirling can be quite conducive to language learning.

And good music makes me happy wheeeeeee!

But I won’t jump the gun and say I’ll start studying Japanese wholeheartedly again.  I need to re-accustom myself to the language by ear first and I have no idea how long that will take.  I don’t even know if this will be enough to get me to started in the first place, but it certainly is a step in the right direction.

In any case, until then, MOAR FLUMPOOL~

東方神起 – 忘れないで 한국어 번역

TVXQ’s 忘れないで (“Don’t Forget”) is one of my favorite songs ever by the first K-pop group I ever liked (*sob*) and now… I’ve tried to translate it into Korean!!  My Japanese is deplorable so looking up every single grammar point and vocabulary word I didn’t know was time consuming, but in the end I managed to get a sense of what the song was about.  Please be warned, this translation was only for practice.  I still have a long way to go before my Japanese (and Korean, too, for that matter) is good enough to provide a decent translation.  After I did my translation, I compared it to one I found online and I was surprised to see that a lot of the lines matched!  That sure raised my confidence in understanding Japanese and writing Korean.  Video below and lyrics after the break.^^

video credit:  s3adolphin

 

What’s in a name?

One of the reasons I love watching Korean and Japanese dramas is because language often plays a role in the progression of a relationship.  Sometimes within just sixteen episodes of a Korean drama, we can hear the shift from honorific language to polite language to plain language; and, I don’t know if it’s just me, but hearing the change from polite to intimate language makes me giggle and spazz and flail more than physical displays of affection.

In particular, I love hearing the use of honorific suffixes.  I’m sure students of the Korean and/or Japanese language are no strangers to honorific suffixes.  In Japanese we have most commonly  さま (sama)、さん (san)、くん (kun)、ちゃん (chan)、先生 (sensei)、先輩 (senpai) and, unless you’re addressing a peer by his/her last name only, it’s pretty uncommon to hear a name without one of these suffixes.  In Korean, we mostly see 씨 (ssi), 군/양 (goon/yang), -님 (-nim), 선생 (seonsaeng), and 선배 (sunbae), which are similar to but do not directly parallel their Japanese counterparts.  Another related concept is that of occupational titles.  I know in Korean at least, it’s not uncommon to address a person by his/her title such as 양 작가 (Writer Yang) or 김 검사님 (Prosecutor Kim).

Anyway, I love that the intimacy between two characters can be shown through the use (or lack) of honorific suffixes.  For example, I always found it amazing that couples in Japanese anime or dramas would address each other by their last names even though they were “dating.”  For example when I was reading 君に届け (Kimi ni todoke), Kazehaya and Kuronuma fantasized about calling each other by their first names (no honorifics) but just the thought would make them blush, as if it was too intimate to even think about.

In Korean dramas, I’ll admit the most heart-fluttering moment for me is when the guy drops honorifics with the girl.  Best example of this?  Lie To Me.  Throughout the first half, we have Kang Ji-hwan’s character calling Yoon Eun-hye’s character “Gong Ah-jung ssi” and then when he suddenly starts calling her “Ah-jung-ah,” not just once but over and over again?  I just about melted.  Clearly, it had that effect on Ah-jung too, since she kept replaying the recording of him saying the diminutive form her name.

Another one of my favorite examples is in 건빵선생과 별사탕 (Biscuit Teacher and Star Candy) when Tae-in says “Na Bori ssi” instead of “Na Bori seonsaeng-nim,” showing that he regards their relationship as that of a man and woman instead of  student-teacher.  This type of courtship is something you can only appreciate if you understand the language and  the culture to some extent.  And to someone who grew up in a culture that oversexualizes everything, it’s refreshing to watch romance unfold through language.  It almost makes me cry with happiness.

Romance aside, I also love relationship terms following a person’s name:  오빠 (oppa), 언니 (unnie), 형 (hyung), 누나 (noona), all of those terms literally make me squeal.  I remember being surprised but also happy when a Korean-American friend of mine called me 언니 once when we were chatting in Korean, even though I’m not Korean myself.  Haha.  All of a sudden, it made me want to act all elder-sisterly.

In Act II scene 2 of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare writes “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose //By any other name would smell as sweet” to mean that an object is an object, regardless of what it is called.  Though that may be the case in English, we see that in other languages, how one uses another’s  name is indeed a significant matter to consider.  Whether or not you say that person’s name with an honorific suffix, an occupational title, or a relationship term matters.  Whether or not you say that person’s name at all matters too. In Korean and Japanese, the way a person addresses you can give you insight into how that person perceives your relationship with him/her.  It can be a tricky thing to grasp… but I still wish English had some sort of thing like it.

Fishing for compliments

No matter what language you’re trying to learn, if you’re learning by yourself, you’re bound to get discouraged at some point – especially if it’s a language that you don’t get to practice on a daily basis.  Unless you have the opportunity to communicate with a native speaker, there’s still a degree of unreality, a sense of “foreignness” associated with that language that I feel has to be overcome before you can aim for fluency.  For example, when I first learned Hangeul, typed my first Korean sentence, and submitted it as a comment on TTMIK, I still felt like I didn’t know what I was doing – until one of the teachers replied back.  It’s really hard to describe the amazing feeling of being understood by native speakers of the language you’re studying.  That, in itself, was a powerful motivation to learn more and to keep improving.

I don’t live in Korea nor do I really live in place populated with many Koreans but still, as I learned more Korean, I kept trying to find ways to communicate with native speakers.  (My best friend is Korean-American, but she’s also a second-year medical student so I’d rather not bother her!)  I’ve talked to some people on Twitter, left comments on Talk To Me In Korean, communicated with my fellow Korean-language bloggers, posted on Lang-8, and even messaged people on tumblr.  I’ve been so fortunate to get incredible feedback from so many people.  One person mistook me for an actual Korean person!  And my fellow language-learners have been more than generous with their compliments.  I even received this incredible comment from someone on Lang-8 that nearly brought tears to my eyes.

정말 훌륭합니다. 1년밖에 배우지 않은 실력에 이렇게까지 쓸 수 있다니 놀랍습니다.

Sometimes, a person might just say 한국어 잘 하시네요 simply to be polite but even that can be encouraging to a self-learner.  What I’m trying to say is that when you feel deflated and discouraged some time during your language-learning pursuit, or when you just feel stuck in a rut, FISH FOR COMPLIMENTS.  Not in the crude sense of belittling your ability in order to be complimented – rather, put yourself out there to the language-learning community, to the community of native speakers to be motivated.  Sometimes that motivation is a compliment, sometimes it’s a correction or a suggestion, or sometimes it’s just an answer to a comment or question you made in the language you’re learning.  Nothing is more motivating than being able to communicate in the language you labored to study by yourself.  The important thing is to not just bury yourself in an academic atmosphere of language-learning – among books, professors, and exams.

Of course, after reaching a more advanced level, compliments or communication without criticism, can be more frustrating than motivating; people tend to just say you’re good without giving you any points to improve on.  I’m guilty of that in English – I prefer not to point out every single English grammar and/or spelling mistake an advanced English-learner makes, even if he/she asks to be corrected.  For now, I don’t have to worry about that in Korean.  Whether it’s compliments or criticism, feedback of any kind always motivates me!

Diminutives

Yesterday, I finished watching Devil Beside You – which, quite possibly, might be the last Taiwanese drama I’ll ever watch.  For reasons I won’t go into here.  Heh.

Anyway, I watched DBY with little to no knowledge of Chinese, other than basic “A is B”-type sentences so I was intrigued by the way the characters addressed each other.  Why did everyone call Jiang Meng “Ahmeng”?  Why was Yuan Yi so offended when Ahmeng called him “Ahyi”?  Why did Qi Yue’s friends alternatively call her Qi Yue and Xiao Yue?  Why was Yuan Yi the only one who called Qing Zi “Xiao Zi”?  You see what I’m getting at.

Well, I kind of figured out through context that ah (阿) and xiao (小) were diminutives, basically forms of words (usually names though they can be other nouns) that are used to signify either smallness or endearment/intimacy.  In fact, in Chinese xiao (小) actually means “small.”  What is interesting is that some languages, like English, do not have a strict way of forming diminutives while other languages, like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese do.

English
A lot of diminutives for proper names English (i.e. nicknames) end with an “-ie” sound.  Examples:  Christine = Christie; Samantha = Sammy.  Some other nouns follow this pattern as well, like cat = kitty.  But English doesn’t really have set rules for forming diminutives of proper nouns (nicknames just are what they are, I suppose).

Indian languages (e.g. Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, etc.)
Of course, I can’t forget to address my own native language…  Most Indian names have diminutives ending in a u (or sometimes ee or ya) sound, unless they are very short.  Since Indian names are usually quite long, the nickname is most commonly the first syllable + u.  Examples:  Ramachandran = Ramu; Ashwini = Ashu; Namrata = Namu.  BUT names like Satya, Puja, Meera, don’t usually change.

I have to say, however, unlike English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, Indian diminutives are almost always reserved for very close family members and sometimes very very close family friends.  Of course, a degree of familiarity is a prerequisite for nickname use in all cultures… but I just feel that most Indian people would not have even their closest friends call them using their diminutive nickname.  It’s almost always reserved for parents and grandparents; and once you get older, people tend to leave it off anyway.  (As an example, my mom and dad call me by my childhood nickname but my aunts and uncles do not.  Incidentally, you might be able to guess what that nickname is from what I’ve said here!)

Japanese
Suffixes like kun (くん) and chan (ちゃん) are usually added to male and female names respectively to make them diminutive.  Sometimes ちゃん can be added to other nouns to make them sound “cute” (e.g. 猫ちゃん = kitty)

Korean
Like Chinese and Japanese, Korean has a pretty standard way of forming proper name diminutives – add 아 (ah) at the end of names ending in a consonant and 야 (yah) at the end of a name ending in a vowel.  In the case of Korean (though not in the other languages I’ve mentioned), this diminutive is also the vocative case – this is basically the form of the proper noun that you use to call a person.  In most languages, the diminutive and can be used either as the vocative case or not but in Korean, the 아/야 diminutive MUST also be the vocative case.  Korean also has a diminutive that is not vocative –  for names ending in consonants, you can add 이 (i).  This is how I understand it:

1. 혜원이가 김밥을 먹는다. (O)
   [Adding 이 to 혜원 makes it diminutive but it's still nominative - meaning, it's the subject of the sentence and therefore marked by the subject marking particle]
2. 혜원아,  김밥을 먹어라. (O)
   [Adding  아 to 혜원 makes the diminutive now vocative - meaning you are calling Hyewon to come eat kimbap.]
3. 혜원이, 김밥을 먹어라. (X…?)
   [Now that I think about it, I wonder if this is really wrong?  It sounds odd to me and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say something like this.  Hm.]
4. 혜원아 김밥을 먹는다. (X)
   [This is definitely wrong because you only use 아 when you're calling someone, not when that person is the subject of a sentence]

Whoops, sorry for the grammar overload.  I just find stuff like this interesting.  One of my favorite things to watch in Korean dramas is when 2 characters go from addressing someone as “so-and-so 씨” or by the full name  to the diminutive.  I remember feeling all giddy at the end of Full House when 영재 addresses 지은 as “한지은.. 지은아…”

Just another thing I enjoy about the Korean language, I guess.

私は日本語ができるかな.

My penpal Dina assured me that if I learned Korean, Japanese would be easy.  LIES!  Strangely enough, I know a lot of Korean learners who struggle with Japanese and vice versa.  I can’t pinpoint what my problem is with Japanese but I know that it started before I started learning Korean.

I tried to teach myself Japanese in high school but only got as far as learning hiragana and the basic “AはBです” type sentences before I got sidetracked with Kanji.  Kanji was a whole other beast… I got so into trying to learn Kanji that I forgot that I actually had to understand some Japanese grammar before I could use it.  Then, I stumbled into Korean (with no intention of learning it!) and it came so naturally to me that I abandoned Japanese until last year.

I thought maybe formal instruction would help me with Japanese but it doesn’t.  It’s not that my grades are bad; I just feel sluggish.  It takes me a long time to memorize things and I forget sentence patterns easily – stuff I’ve never had a problem with in Korean.  Why can’t I seem to find my momentum with Japanese?  These might be some of the reasons:

1. The regularity of Japanese frightens me. (Only 2 irregular verbs?!)  This is probably a positive thing for most people but… I don’t know, it just seems unnatural to me.  It’s easier for me to deal with irregularities in Korean because I liken them to English.
2. It’s hard to look up Kanji. I don’t know how to look up Kanji using radicals (is that how you do it?) so when I encounter Kanji that I can’t read, I’m stuck.  Even simple sentences like 今晩は時間がありません becomes hard when you don’t know what all that Kanji is!  (Incidentally, yes, I do know those particular ones.)  In Korean, I learn a lot of grammar and vocabulary just by reading stuff that’s beyond my level.  But Kanji prevents me from taking this approach in Japanese.
3. I have a weird inability to recall and write Kanji. I can recognize Kanji with no difficulty.  Give me Kanji that look similar – like 読 and 話 I have no difficulty distinguishing them in meaning.  But then ask me to write sentences using that Kanji and… I can’t remember how they look exactly.  Like yesterday, I forgot how to write 金 as in 金曜日!!  I mean, I learned days of the week years ago and I have no problem recognizing that 金曜日 = きんようび  but I couldn’t remember the strokes for 金 and 曜!  So frustrating!
4. There are 3 types of verbs and 2 types of adjectives.  Korean has really spoiled me.  I REALLY love the fact that adjectives are pretty much verbs in Korean.  I hate how much Japanese grammar patterns change based on the type of verb and type of adjective you want to use.  It’s really hard to memorize.
5. I can never remember て-form.  Guess more practice is the solution for this but, seriously, we learned this last semester and I STILL have to keep looking up how to make the て-form of  う-verbs.  If you can’t master て-form and plain form, you’re pretty much screwed for more advanced grammar.
6. Plain form is more complicated than polite form.  And I need to master plain form if I want to understand anime, dammit!  No, but seriously.  I always have to pause and think when I want to use plain form. It’s embarrassing.
7. Japanese seems more rigid.  This is just based on the two semesters of beginning Japanese that I’ve taken, but I guess with regularity comes rigidity.  With Korean, I love the fact that you can move around different words in a sentence and choose to omit certain particles without greatly affecting the meaning of the sentence (obviously this doesn’t work in all cases).  But with Japanese, the sentence patterns seem fixed and you will be struck down if you leave off a particle!  (Or at least that’s how my textbook makes it out to be.)
8. My mouth feels funny when I speak Japanese.  Is it the consonants that are tripping me up?  I don’t know.  A lot of people find Korean, which is a relatively vowel-heavy language (all those i, eu, eo, yeo, yo, yu, u, o sounds), more difficult.  To my untrained ear, Korean has a more gliding, guttural sound than Japanese which sounds very crisp and staccato.  But for some reason, the consonants make it harder for me to speak fast in Japanese.  It’s like the words just get stuck in my mouth.
9. I just wanna study what I wanna study.  This is more my gripe with formal instruction.  Every chapter in our textbook (and most language texts out there) is “themed” so we learn a lot of related vocabulary at the same time.  Next chapter, for example, we’ll be learning about seasons and weather.  My immediate thought was, I’m not going to be a meteorologist in Japanese, why do I need to learn this?  (Rain, snow, etc. is fine but why do we have to learn stuff like “the air pressure is rising”??)  My brain shuts off when I see vocabulary that I’m not interested in.

Calling all Japanese learners out there!  Did you have similar issues when you were starting out with Japanese?  How did you overcome them and hit your stride?  Do leave me a comment and let me know.

Kotoba!

Learning Japanese?  Have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad?  Then you have to check out this app!  Kotoba! is one of the best electronic dictionaries I’ve ever come across – scratch that, it’s possibly the best overall app that I’ve ever come across.  I use it almost every single day and it’s helped me tremendously with my Japanese.

Features:

• Look up words in either Japanese or English
• Look up a word using Kanji (make sure to install the Traditional Chinese keyboard on your device), kana, or Romaji (yes, even Romaji!)
• In each entry, you get the reading, the part of speech, the major conjugations (if it’s a verb), the type of adjective (い- or な-), example sentences, and Kanji decomposition.
• If it’s a verb you can view the following conjugations:  present/future tense, past tense, continuative/て-form, presumptive, past presumptive, provisional, conditional, and alternative forms.
• If it’s a compound word, you can click on the individual Kanji and get 音読み (onyomi) and 訓読み (kunyomi) readings IN ADDITION to pinyin and Korean readings!
• MY FAVORITE FEATURE:  Animations of Kanji stroke order!  I love using this to learn how to write new Kanji!
• Search for Kanji based on reading, Korean, pinyin, meaning, or Chinese radical
• View Kanji compounds, stroke count, JLPT level
• Browse JLPT Kanji
• Browse Japanese “school grade” Kanji (that is, the Kanji that Japanese students learn at each grade level)
• Does not require internet

And the best thing about this app is that it is COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY FREE. Yes, you read that right.  It’s unbelievable.  I’ve seen super-expensive apps and electronic dictionaries that can’t do half of the things this app does.

For more information and screenshots, check out the official website.

Like what you see?  Download from iTunes.

Seriously people, this app is a dream come true.