Thursday, May 19, 2011

Learning an Asian language

I've spent a large part of my life learning foreign languages. I was fascinated by all the various ethnic dialects in the world, and I vowed to learn them all.

Alas, although I have fallen short of that goal, I have been studying the East Asian languages extensively over the past 6 years. By "East Asian languages," I mean Korean, Japanese, and Chinese (Mandarin). I am fluent in Korean and Japanese, albeit my Chinese still needs some work.

As a fellow student of the oriental tongue, I know that these are arguably some of the hardest languages in the world to learn. Indeed, the task is not a simple one. Any lapse in concentration (ie. a 1 month break) would set me back months of study, and I cried often while writing Chinese characters with my half broken hand. But not to fear! Together, we will be able to conquer these pesky languages, and be able to speak in fluent Korean/Japanese/Chinese in the near future.

As my first post, I will lay out the format of this blog-to-be.

Every week, I will have 3 posts on one of the three East Asian languages I have described. Each post will have a short cultural component, an anecdote of some sort (one time, in Seoul...), and a grammar/vocab section.

I will be accepting e-mail freely, and I will try to answer as soon and as often as I can. Thanks again for visiting this lovely little cafe. Sorry, we're out of coffee. But we have plenty of Kanji, Hanja, and Chinese characters! Haha. Get it? They all mean the same thing...

-Choi

2 comments:

  1. Wow learning those three languages is impressive. I spent a couple of years trying to learn Hindi, I got quite good with reading and writing but was terrible at speaking. It was difficult but I can't imagine how hard it must be to learn some of the languages further east!

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  2. ive been told polish is one of the hardest languages to learn =x

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