So...I'm reading Harry Potter in Korean. No, my Korean is nowhere near good enough to justify the endeavor. I'm learning lots of awesome vocabulary, and making guesses at grammar I have yet to learn, but so far it is a long, long trek with lots of help from Daum.net's online English dictionary (love it ( Read more... )

주다 - ju-da, to give, is probably the most awesomely versatile verb I have ever met. You can use as "to give" directly, as in "give me a pencil," but it's used faaaaar more often appended to nearly any verb when you want someone to do something FOR YOU. I think it's a much better expression that "Please _____ for me" - not only is it shorter, but it ( Read more... )

Dear people who post translations of Korean pop songs ( Read more... )

Last week, my school gave me Thursday and Friday off, so for the long weekend I went to Tongyeong, on the southern coast, for four days. I spent all of Thursday on a bus, and spent the night in Jinju. I stayed in the cheapest love motel yet, and ate ddeokbokki (rice "cake" and fish "cake" in hot pepper sauce) at one of the many tents always set up ( Read more... )

Korean class yesterday did not end on a good note. I remarked to someone afterwards: "I really need to learn to let go of grammar structures I can't understand, and my teacher can't explain." He remarked, "You'll learn, someday." After a brief pause, I said "Well, Korean is my sixth foreign language, so I think I should have learned already...bad ( Read more... )

The Korean class offered by the Samcheok Office of Education has done wonders for my Korean, mostly in giving me confidence in my accent and ability to construct full grammatical sentences. This has been a mostly uphill struggle, however, as my Korean teacher doesn't appear to like me very much ( Read more... )

What a long f-ing weekend! I hope everyone had fun at Mom's wedding reception, et cetera, but I spent most of Saturday on a bus ( Read more... )