This website was found by my mother, of all people, and I think that she’s going to use it to learn a few words in the Korean language.

The site is called Word Showers, and their service is available for free. Their website seems specifically focused on helping you increase your vocabulary, which is the all important part of learning a foreign language.

I like what I see so far. Each vocabulary group is broken down into a simple 10 words, and the words start out very easy. Both the English and the Korean spelling of the word is provided, and MP3 files are provided for each group of 10. That, of course, allows you to hear how the word is correctly spoken (or you can listen to each word directly from the website).

The word collections are broken down into nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.

They do exaggerate a bit in their self-promotion, but that’s to be expected from any service. Word Showers is a website that I’m definitely going to begin using.

Technorati Tags: Korean, Korean language, 한국어, foreign language, languages, language

Here’s some quick info bits for anyone who is studying the Korean language. This is just some super simple stuff, but will be helpful in understanding the language, or at least the intention of a particular sentence.

This is a re-post of what I posted on JiNi’s Forum. You’ll need to read that thread in order for this post to make complete sense.

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I just came across something interesting, and I can’t help but wonder why this hasn’t been mentioned in our Korean language classes.

Apparently, the word “Korea” was originally spelled “Corea”. Additionally, just about every language other than English seems to still spell it this way. There seems to be a great deal of history wrapped around this spelling, but most data (apparently) points to the spelling being changed during the Japanese occupation.

Is it just not that important? It seems to me like it should be. I will have to ask a friend of mine when we meet on Friday.

Primarily, I wonder if it would be more respectful to spell the country’s name as “Corea”?

Technorati Tags: korean, corean, korea, corea

The grade for my mid term was 94/100, but that is because the instructor graciously decided that the written segment was extra credit.

As I said before, my main problem is writing the language. I made multiple silly, small mistakes, many of which I thought that I had worked so hard to fix. lol so much for that! I’ll just have to continue studying the written form of the words.

My plan is (ideally) to write some of the words every day. Hopefully this will straighten certain things in my thoughts and hands, such as the evil ㅏ and ㅓ (and to a lesser extent ㄱ <-> ㄴ) confusion that I seem to experience. I speak the words correctly (or at least I seem to!) but I can have such a frustrating time trying to write them.

For example, 학생 (“hahksang”) means “student” and I pronounce it correctly, but on the test I wrote it as 한생 (“hawnsang”) which I hope means nothing.

There is much to learn, but that’s what it’s all about yes?

Later folks,
~Steph

Technorati Tags: Korean, Korean language, foreign language, 한국, 한국어

Our Korean mid term test was this evening. I’m expecting to miss up to four and it was four or five pages long, so I shouldn’t get a very bad score on the test.

I can speak it (well, what we’ve learned anyway) much better than I can write it, but of course we had to write a great deal on the test. This isn’t to complain but rather to explain where most of my difficulty is.

Much of what we’ve learned is technical stuff; where / when to use 이, ê°€, 은, 는, 를 을, and other endings. We’ve also memorized how to introduce ourselves, along with five additional sentences and various useful words. It’s basic stuff, but this is the level 1 class.

The instructor has made the class an enjoyable experience… but I digress. That’s enough ramble for now.

Bed time is quickly approaching. Good night folks.
~Stephen

Technorati Tags: Korean, language, Korean language, foreign language, 한국, 한국어, 한국어를

Image says it all. I have to decide in time!

Technorati Tags: Korea, Korean

안녕하세요!

The typing issue that I’ve had in the past may be resolved. As expected, the cause of the problem/s turned out be fairly simple. It comes down to character encoding, the email application that I use, and a simple lack of understanding of the language.

The email application that I use, Mozilla’s Thunderbird, does not seem to be friendly to Asian languages. Or if it is then you have to do some annoying technical nonsense to make it work, and I simply don’t have the patience to do that these days.

Thunderbird would always prompt me when sending the email, asking if I wanted to send the email in UTF-8 or to send it in the existing encoding. Regardless of the option that I chose the Korean language would appear as odd, seemingly random symbols to the person reading the message.
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This is just a quick update on my “progress” so far in trying to type in Korean.

It turns out that Windows Vista automatically installs fonts that support East Asian Languages. Thus, unlike Windows XP you do not need to install the fonts for Japanese, Korean, Chinese, or what have you if you’re running Vista.

If you’re seeing blank squares or question marks as you type in Hangul (or other East Asian languages) then you may need to change the font to Malgun Gothic.

This still does not solve the issue that I am having with the characters not arranging themselves correctly for longer words, but it may help address the problem of the Hangul not transmitting correctly in email. I have tested it over Trillian and confirmed that the characters are displaying correctly to the person receiving my IMs, so there’s that at least.

Good night folks,
~Steph / 스타ㅣ판

note: edited to rephrase a paragraph for clarity.

Technorati Tags: Korean, Hangul, 한국, Vista, Windows Vista, fonts

안녕! 저눈 ∙ 스타ㅣ판 ∙ 입니다. 저눈 ∙ 미국 ∙ 사람입니다. 만나서 ∙ 반나습니다!

Above is the longest string of Korean text that I’ve typed thus far, and it’s what we’ve studied the most in class (as far as sentences go). It should translate something like “Hi! I’m Stephen. I’m from American. Nice to meet you!”

You could say that it’s another way to ask to be lynched when traveling abroad. Heh. Anyway….

You’ll notice that there’s a dot ∙ between each word. So far this is what I need to do if I want my computer to properly position the Korean characters. Otherwise everything gets out of whack. Like this:

• 안녕 – It’s going great up to this point… but…
• 안녀오아서ㅣ요 – everything falls apart as you type the word!

Talk about frustrating!

This is preventing me from properly typing in the Korean language. The same behavior is what caused me to use the ∙ dot character in the opening quote. Using that character (for whatever reason) forced the computer to position the Korean characters correctly. The punctuation worked the same way (of course).

Frustratingly enough however, this doesn’t always work. You could say that I got fairly lucky when typing out the above.

Blah! Me thinks that our Korean class should have a typing course as well. This is going to drive me flipping nuts.

~Stephen / 스타ㅣ판

Technorati Tags: Korean language, Hangul, Korean, Korean typing

    언녕!

The Korean keyboard stickers arrived a little earlier today and I just finished applying them to the keyboard. This seemed like the perfect time to use the camera.

They look pretty good, ya? For $6.⁰⁰ USD (after shipping) I’m pleased with them. Of course, only time will tell if they hold up over continued usage. I sure hope so because applying these small stickers with these big hands of mine wasn’t frustration-free… heh heh… but hey, it’s only $6.

I still need to learn how to get the characters to arrange themselves correctly. Writing them by hand is easy, but I don’t know how to get certain characters to properly arrange themselves when I’m typing them. That’s for later though… One step at a time!

Later folks!
~Steph

Technorati Tags: Korean, Korea, Korean Language, Hanguk, 헌곡