Politics is a complicated thing.
정치는 복잡한 것이다.
When it is examined closely the big picture is lost, and when the big picture is seen the details become a blur.
그것은 자세히 조사하는데 전체적인 상황가 어두워지고 잊어게 됍니다. 다른 한편으로는 전체적인 상황만 보면 상세가 없어진다.
점점 나의 한국어가 좋아지고있지만 아찍도 말할때 자신 없다.
I read a few Japanese blogs the other day, blogs written by foreigners living in Japan, and they tend to throw in lots of Japanese words. For instance if they see a movie they will write the name of the movie in Hirigana or Kanji. Or if they take a trip to somewhere in Tokyo all the place names will not be written in romanji. I think this is kind of interesting. In my experience foreigners who live in Japan are almost always much more proficient at Japanese than (Western) foreigners who live in Korea are at Korean. So maybe the audience of these blogs is able to read the Japanese and understand it. Or maybe the writers just like to practice typing in Japanese.
In my case I don't think I'll be adding any Korean to my blog posts anytime soon. Unlike the Romance languages, adding Asian Characters to your writing just doesn't look good. If I want to add some French to my post English readers will be able to at the very least make an attempt at pronouncing it and most likely, if it's short, they can make an educated guess about the meaning. But with Asian Characters unless you have studied them or grew up reading them they are completely meaningless. And maybe in the case of Japanese it is different, but in Korean the number of people who would be able to even pronounce the characters is extremely small. I know the Japanese language is way more popular than Korean so perhaps there are a lot more people who can pronounce Hiragana and Katakana and enjoy doing that, but there are very few people interested in being able to read Hangul who don't live in Korea. And in my experience those people also taught themselves Hiragana and Katakana and did so so they can read song lyrics...
Tomorrow is the last day of finals for my last quarter at Seoul National University. So I guess all this language talk is my way of looking back at what I've done. I'm certainly considerably better than where I was when I started taking classes. But I still have a long, long way to go before reaching even basic proficiency in the language. This last quarter I didn't study as hard as the first quarter, but often these days I will be in situations where I feel I understand everything that is going on. It's a nice feeling and I wish it would last longer. Most of the time I miss the majority of what is being said, and I'm not great at inferring the meaning from what I do understand.
As the classes wind down though I have been thinking about starting to learn another language before I go to Hawaii. There are three languages I'm thinking about. First is Japanese because I've studied Japanese Culture, Society, History, etc and watch a lot of Japanese movies and enjoy visiting Japan so I could get lots of listening practice and be able to use the language. Because I learned Hanja (Chinese characters in Korean) I can already read and write a lot of basic words in Kanji, which is usually one of the things that potential learners cite as being hard. The grammar of Korean and Japanese is extremely similar and it is just a matter of learning how to say the grammar patterns in Japanese. That is, once I learn the words I can just plug them into the Korean grammar I already know. Now the grammar patterns are not all exactly the same and some have different nuances, but I would have a huge head start there as well. So the two things I would have to do are learn the Hiragana and Katakana, which I'd imagine can be done in two or three weeks, and learn the vocabulary, which is the thing I am worst at when it comes to language learning. I always forget words and have to review constantly. Pronunciation in Japanese should be easy. I'd imagine there are some pronunciation rules that make it a little difficult but for pronunciation the more you speak and listen the more you get the hang of it so I think think that's something that just naturally falls into place. Japanese also has the benefit of having tons of learning material available freely all over the place.
So learning Japanese might be fun. And it might reinforce my Korean as well. The next language I'm thinking about (I would pick only one of these) is Chinese. Again, I know a lot of the Chinese Characters from studying Korean and I enjoy reading and writing them and I can memorize them fairly easily. It's much easier for me to remember the form and meaning of a character than the sound. Korean uses the Traditional Chinese characters so I would have to learn the simplified versions of some characters but, as the name implies, this should be simple! I already know the complicated version so the simplified form shouldn't be that hard to learn, and I've picked up a few of them from chatting with Chinese and Japanese friends. Besides all that I'm mostly interested in learning classical Chinese. So I could read the classics and maybe some Wuxia novels and things like that.
I've heard the grammar is very similar to English and doesn't pose many problems and from the few phrases I know that seems to be the case. So that shouldn't be a problem. The problem is the pronunciation; which is impossible. The concept of how the sounds are made is the same as Korean (and maybe Japanese?) in that everything is based on syllables with a starting sound a vowel sound and a final sound and it's just a matter of learning all the different combinations. The tricky part is the pitch. The pitch is really important and it seems really difficult to do correctly. Even the basic phrases I know like 'thank you', 'hello', and 'i love you' I can not pronounce correctly. I'm I'm repeating a Chinese person saying the phrase over and over eventually I will say it one or two times that are comprehensible. But if I try to say something basic in Chinese to a Chinese person that doesn't know what I'm going to say they have no idea what I'm saying. This could be really frustrating. I had some similar problems when I first came to Korean, but Chinese seems like those Korean difficulties times ten. And even though I mostly want to just read Chinese, I think it's important to at least be able to pronounce things correctly. And I think I would need to study full time in classes to be able to pronounce things well. So Chinese is probably too hard.
The last language I'm interested in is French. It would be really great to be able to read, write, and speak in French, though if I could only read the language that would be ok. I have a French textbook for beginners and it looks really good, but what I'd forgotten is that the beginning stages of learning a language are really hard. It's really embarrassing to pronounce things wrong and sound like an idiot when you try and make sentences. For some reason when I was starting to learn Korean it wasn't too much of a problem for me, or at least I never thought about it, but with French I'm a little terrified of speaking it poorly, which I would inevitably do for a least a year, at which point I would begin speaking it badly, and maybe after two years I would be able to speak it fairly. I definitely agree that it takes 2,000 hours of intensive speaking and listening to become proficient at a language. I am about halfway there in Korean (I need to update my progress chart). Anyway, French might be an interesting hobby language and would probably help improve my English, something studying Asian language definitely doesn't do.
Asian languages also have the dis-advantage of using completely different rhetorical strategies. The ways of thinking about problems, discussing, and arguing as carried out by intellectuals is completely different in Asia and the West. So learning French and reading newspapers and things in French would help my English rhetorical skills a lot, but knowing Asian languages is like learning something completely new; it doesn't reinforce anything you already know and doesn't improve any already existing skill sets.
Yesterday I was listening to Bill Simmons podcast and he had Dudley from the Phoenix Suns on the show. Dudley revealed (after being outed by Simmons) that he is flat footed. I recently have been thinking I am flat footed as well. It doesn't seem like it's much of a problem and I've never had any problems with injuries or foot pain and am pretty athletic...in the sense that I'm in control of my body when I'm moving, not that I'm 'in shape'. But Dudley was saying if you're flat footed you can't jump as high. This struck a chord with me because after my senior year in High School I really wanted to dunk and went to the gym a lot and did leg work outs and practiced jumping and did wall sits and stuff, but I was never able to elevate enough to throw it down. Now I'm wondering if the reason I couldn't do it was because I was flat footed? People my height in the NBA can dunk and there were people much shorter than me in High School that could dunk. It was something that always eluded me. This summer I might start trying to do it again. I can still get the rim so it's just a matter of elevating a little higher and getting the technique right. I have a new mission for the summer!
