The Kitchen. I’m Out of It.
So no updates for today or tomorrow. Its going to be nearly 100 degrees on both those days and it got close tonight. Even late it stays at 85 or 90+. In my heat-packed room its not only impossible to focus, but it creates a serious overheating risk on my computer. Monday should be back down so I'll resume once again then.
Eight Basic Vowels
I'm going to give some sound examples here is a nice quick reference for an audio sound of the vowels I'm going to list.
I'm not a professional linguist. The English translations I'm trying to provide are the best I can provide according to my notebook translated to my keyboard along with the help of multiple sites. If anyone ever reads this and can provide some advice of better translations please tell me. So without anymore wait, the vowels as my reference notes go;
아 ="a"=father
어="aw"=ball
오="oh"=boat
우="u" or "ew"=lewd
으="ou" or "oo"=through
이="ee"=me
에="i"=my
애="ai"=air
Apparently I don't have the "으" down quite right and I'm suspect of the last two. Maybe I can rehash these later. Remember this is a lesson mostly for myself rather then anyone else. Also I'm finding that typing it out is a major help as I'm spending a lot more time focusing on the symbol.
오 Yea, I Almost Forgot.
Look at me being clever with the titles, even before I've introduced any sounds. Don't get it? You will later.
I know that my first post was intended to be about vowels. In it, I wanted to mix talk into the construction of the Korean character. However, I had forgotten that I should probably introduce one particular consonant so that I can actually pretend to be a bit more grammatically correct. I'm also doing it so that I don't have a fuss with the keyboard in its placement of characters.
The Korean alphabet, essentially, consists of 40 different phonetic symbols. If that sounds like a lot, I'll only be focusing on a select core of 22 letters, which consist of the simple vowels and basic consonants. This means only eight vowels and fourteen consonants. To the more educated people, I'm going to leave dipthongs and glottal consonants for later as I write them off as the more advanced versions of the select 22. Some forms how many symbols are the core letters, but I'm trying to construct a system that is widely easy to understand to an ignorant person like myself. Compare these many vowels to the deceptive English alphabet, where each of its only five vowels actually take two or three different roles at different times. Korean breaks these sounds into single purposes that remain the same.
Now you need to take these symbols and form them into syllables. Each character block is broken down to, at most, three letters organized into a strict syllable. Each is written as consonant, vowel, consonant. For example, the word Hangul is a an excellent example. Sometimes there is no need for a consonant in the third block, and it can be ignored. Some syllables can be just a vowel sound, yet you're not allowed to drop the first consonant in the same way you can drop the third. How does that work? As when I wrote '어', sounding only the vowel which sounds like "Oh", the ㅇ in a character is silent when placed in the first consonant space. When in the third space of the syllable, it gains a sound that is pronounced "Ng." 엉 becomes, as best as I can describe it, "Ong." Silence + Oh Vowel + Ng consonant.
From now on while I'm describing vowels, ㅇ is just going to be an empty space in front of the character in order to form a good habit. There is a whole new concept for definitions and base words, but I'll have the time to catch up on that later as I start to form words.
Its Called Hangul
When announcing that you want to learn the Korean language, some smart mouthed person might ask what style. More likely anyone unfamiliar might be surprised to see different forms of a written script for the same spoken material. For simplicity purposes, I'll be trying to learn what is the world Korean standard known as Hangul. No surprise there, but why are there different forms of written Korean?
To understand why its important to know that there was a historic difference between the spoken and written language. The two parts haven't evolved together. Going more by grammar and structure, Korean has greater resemblance to Turkish or Mongolian styles rather than Chinese. The written form seems to have gained its resemblance from the Chinese style only because of cultural influences. Before the 15th century there were numerous written styles, mostly used by styles, used for transferring Chinese materials into Korean. These written standards were unwieldy and used almost exclusively within the political kingdoms that came and went. What survives today from that era is known to us as Hanja and, to my own untrained observations, its a complicated and unsimplified writing that is well beyond my interest. I made myself aware of it only to keep from being surprised since it still appears in certain scholarly places. Being aware of its look keeps me from mistaking it from Chinese.
Formally created in the 1440's, the Hangul script, which is what I'll be learning, gave a streamlined native language to the Koreans. It brought a standardization to the various regional dialects, of which there are many. Linguistic accents are now being pulled further thanks to the divide between north, south, and native Koreans in China north of the Yalu.
There is no reason to dive in too deep about the history. The important thing is to know that its common to run across the distinction of "Hangul" rather than "Korean" when looking among written materials. My own computer, in its settings to write in other languages, does it. Hangul is a phonetic script and will provide a textbook basic to start learning. In effect, by the end of a few months of study you might be more able to write more then you can speak.
Today I learned more about the history specifically from the wikipedia pages on it here. Tomorrow I'll be posting a few tables of the alphabet starting with vowels, then consonants in the following day. It'll be good practice for myself as I only about half the alphabet well memorized.
Game Plan
So I'm going to quickly explain the gap between this post and my first. No, I did not skip over the site and this is not a sign of me dragging my feet right on the first step. I've been debating over a few things, especially on how to conduct this learning experiement and don't want to start a project haphazardly. At the suggestion of one of my friends, while doing that I'll also be establishing a sim-game over the next few months based around in 900 AD Korea. However, in doing that I feared that this whole thing would look like some sort of weird swoon over Korean culture and no one wants a creepy blog about that. My intent is here on the main page is strictly the language and the interest to learn something new and different. The setting of game, which might be referenced from time to time, is just a coincidence. It happens to be a perfect setting for the game while at the same time helpful for researching interesting material for my blog.
Now, before we start, we need to go over three points. My Korean Sim game is going to be developed on the tag /korea. Currently as of this post there is just a map posted in a thread. By the end of the month I hope to get some rules established in this all text roleplaying game. Maybe one day it'll be a good generation of ad revenue. Until then its all for fun.
Second, I learned to set both of my computers to have quick reference to type in Hangul. It took longer then I wanted to figure out due to some updates not established, but I eventually achieved 성공. I'm going to pretend that is my word of the day. Changing the language is now my new toy, the same way the Speak-to-Command function last year. Think its easy? Try typing with a keyboard like this.
Lastly, the lesson plan scheduled for tomorrow will be a summery of Hangul and then the rest of the week all about distinguishing vowels and consonants. I was wondering before hand if it was going to be worth doing, since I'm already pretty handy with that basic of a subject and that no one really reads this, but a review wouldn't be a waste. I still struggle with a few syllables and If I'm going to do this more formally I might as well start from the basics to keep a solid grasp all the way through.
Its time to get going then. Anyone with questions as time goes along can e-mail to Patrick@dollarninjas.com
The Start of Something Great, or Forgettable
For the past two years the domain 'DollarNinjas' has been used in order to promote comedy through a webcomic. That goal has long since been abandoned and now the site sat idle being left to decay. I'm too attached to the name to let it go, yet just doing nothing while getting 3 hits a day from spam-bots is certainly more wasteful
So what do I do with the site now? Try and keep up the same failed fight of creating a comedy base? That hardly seems fun, so any funny business is just going to be because I enjoy making light of things. Maybe it can be turned into something constructive. Something done at least for my own productivity instead of trying to turn it into a moneymaker. It'd be nice to both have fun while not wasting my time.
The motivation now is going to be using blog as a dedicated once-a-day update to continue something that I've been trying to do for a while now. Learn the Korean language. Yes, that collective sigh is from all the people who know me. Many people already know that I've been trying on and off to do this ever since I visited the country in an awesome ten day trip in 2008. Its been on and off because other things in life, mainly college, have kept me from really putting forward my best effort in learning. But now that I've graduated, and that I'm quite unemployed, I have all the time in the world. Two of my old hobbies, both the website and my want to learn a language, are going to be combined into a public format that might be pretty interesting to watch.
So starts the work of a man trying to speak of a language he has no business speaking. If you want some background on myself, I'm a recent college graduate and a native American english speaker. I have no other expertise in any other language with only two years of high-school german to be counted for any sort of study. It must be said that in that German class I earned a "4" in the fourth quarter final grade. Yes, 4 out of 100. Figuring out Korean is not going to be easy but I want, beyond many things, to do it.. Maybe this whole project is going to fail. If it does, no one will see it happen so its probably alright. If it doesn't, then feel free to follow along as I create lessons (for myself), review some new concepts (for myself), and make mistakes (for myself).
Oh yea. Looks like I'm going to have to figure out how to type in Korean, too. That'll be my next post for sure.