Foreign Languages

I felt inspired to learn Korean after attending Sungha's concert last week, and I regret to say my enthusiasm only lasted me long enough to get through the Korean alphabet. I thought it'd be easy because I was familiar with Chinese and Japanese sounds- East-Asian languages sound pretty similar, right? Well apparently not because I swear everything sounds the same to me in Korean.

You know how when you learn a new language you can usually romanize a word until you're familiar with matching the right character with the right phonetic value? Like in Japanese it's called romaji and in Chinese it's called pinyin. Well idk wtf it's called in Korean but it really doesn't work. Firstly there's no real English equivalent for some sounds- like, you can't imitate that sound with English letters, and secondly whatever attempts people before me have made, makes no sense to me.

For example the first Korean consonant is written as "Gah", but when I listen to a recording it CLEARLY sounds like "kah". And I don't know about you but a g sound and a k sound are not the same thing to me. Then the girl in the video is all "it's a soft g sound"- like, that sounds like a k and k is not a soft sound. We obv weren't on the same track anyway and I'm just like "oh God this language is so hard".

Why do I want to learn Korean anyway? Well firstly it's just COOL to know another language, because all of a sudden I've opened the doorway to a new culture and a sort of mini new world. Then everything after that is obv for the K-Pop bands and how I plan on finding some post-plastic-surgery hottie to marry in Korea. Probs need to learn Korean for that, yeah?

But yeah I'm stunted in my path because it's hard and I lack motivation. I think it's easier for me to learn Japanese because I listen to so much Japanese music and I must say the alphabet is like a million times easier, though it makes much less sense than Korean and its conjugated sounds. Japanese is just... easier for me to pronounce? That's about it.

I'm still daydreaming about the day where I become quadrilingual.