(no subject)

[oyceter]

Yaaaay! I have a new DVD player and it is region free and! It plays DivX files! Finally! I can watch video files on TV! And! It plays .srt files, which means...

I CAN WATCH COFFEE PRINCE ON MY TV!

Possibly I even tested it by watching the chestnut scene and the couch scene for the third time in a week.

And to make this post not entirely pointless, I present for your edification and amusement (if you speak Korean and want to mock my horrible grasp of the language): Korean I have learned from watching dramas so far (excluding appellations).

(I actually wasn't going to post this, because I felt it only illustrated how dumb I am, and I don't want to mock kdramas as a whole, since I have very limited exposure and am still trying to differentiate kdrama tropes from things informed by Korean culture. But I remember how interesting I found it when anime/manga-newbies posted about their first impressions. So hopefully this will be somewhat interesting, though I am not at all sure it is.)

• I love you - learned from every drama I have seen
  
• I like you - also from every drama I have seen
  
• I'm sorry - also from every drama I have seen, but definitely from Coffee Prince, as there is one scene in which Eun Chan says it about a billion times.
  
• Hello (for answering the phone) - from all the modern dramas, of course. On a side note, I am geekily amused by how much plot takes place on cellphones via calls and text messaging, as opposed to emails. So much so that taking your battery out of your phone so people can't get to you is sort of like deleting your LJ!
  
• "my lord" - from Damo
  
• Library - clearly my brain prioritizes this, even if dramas usually do not
  
• Don't go! - from Coffee Prince, although I think this will come in handy

Sadly, I have not yet learned key phrases like "I am the god of death! I will kill you!" or "absolute destiny apocalypse," two of the first things I learned to say in Japanese.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Man, someday I am going to have to arrange to visit Korea and let the lizard re/acquaint herself with my parents, and you and rachelmanija will have to come with me! Then my mom and/or dad (they're divorced) can be completely amused by the strange things we want to know about Korea and Korean!

[oyceter]

Oooo, yes! I will even try the fried silkworms, just because I am curious.

Oh! I forgot to add to the list -- I can also recognize "Your Majesty" in Korean, though the practical applications of that are fairly small!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have been very amused by how shocked some Americans have been that I ate raw frozen horsemeat in Japan... on purpose... and loved it! And so did Stephanie!

Moral: Maybe the silkworms are delicious.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

My mom describes as tasting "okay." But apparently they sell well enough as a snack food.

Really, though, there are much better street foods. In the winter, roasted chestnuts and fried stuffed sweet pancakes...*wistful*

[oyceter]

Fried stuffed sweet pancakes?! WANT.

Also, mmmmm chestnuts.

[oyceter]

Ooooo. I am trying to imagine raw frozen horsemeat. We really need to do our all-out-tour-Asia trip!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Served in thin slices, frozen so it instantly melts in your mouth, releasing aroma and flavor. The texture and richness is reminiscent of butter, or toro (belly salmon), or really fine yellowtail sashimi.

[oyceter]

Mmmmmm WANT.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

YES!!!

[calixa.livejournal.com]

It's really amazing how much you can pick up just from watching dramas. I made a list a few weeks ago of all the Japanese words I know, and I startled myself: http://calixa.livejournal.com/421940.html#cutid1

It's just good incentive to watch more :)

[oyceter]

Hee! Yes! I had this entire list of what I learned from shoujo vs. what I learned from shounen, and it's sort of funny.

[hysteriachan.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I have not yet learned key phrases like "I am the god of death! I will kill you!" or "absolute destiny apocalypse," two of the first things I learned to say in Japanese.

I'd like to randomly note that one of my Japanese phrasebooks includes "I don't love you, I never loved you, and stop calling me!" (Mostly I find it funny/scary that this is considered essential knowledge.)

One of these days I really am going to have to sit down with one of these shows. ^^

[oyceter]

Awesome!

I think I can understand "I like you. I love you. Don't go! I'm sorry, your majesty!" from this list, ha.

[heavenscalyx.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I have not yet learned key phrases like "I am the god of death! I will kill you!" or "absolute destiny apocalypse," two of the first things I learned to say in Japanese.

HAH. (says the Utena fangirl)

I have so far failed to pick up that mandatory anime line, "I will never forgive you!" Mostly, I think, because I'm usually too busy giggling at the line to listen to it.

[oyceter]

"Yuresenai!"

Well, that's more "I can't forgive you" than "I won't," but you know.

[revdorothyl.livejournal.com]

What brand of DVD player did you get? I MUST put this on my birthday 'wish list' for parents and siblings, since I'm heartily sick of only being able to watch DivX files on my little laptop.

[oyceter]

I got a Philips DVP3140 from Amazon, though it doesn't come with free shipping because it's actually through another store. I think if you just search for "region free" and "divx," you should be able to find more though!

[revdorothyl.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I'll do that (though I've heard only good things about Philips -- I think that's the model MissMurchison has, as well, and she can watch anything on her DVD player).

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

It took me some amount of time (which is not specified because I feel dumb) to realize that ahjussi and the like were not names. In the old VHS anime fansubs, you got helpful cultural notes explaining that sort of thing.

[oyceter]

Hee! I think I only realized because I read vonnie_k's handy post on it before watching.

[keilexandra]

How bad is the overlap among Chinese/Japanese/Korean?

[oyceter]

I'm not quite sure what your question means, so let me know if I'm answering the wrong thing!

I've found that in terms of grammar, there is absolutely nothing in common with Chinese and Japanese, at least not that I could get my head around. On the other hand, knowing Chinese and learning it in Taiwan was a HUGE advantage for me -- partly because I was already used to memorizing large chunks of vocabulary and whatnot from having to memorize poems and whatnot in class, partly because learning and memorizing kanji was something I was used to, and partly because a lot of individual Japanese vocabulary connected back to what I knew of Chinese.

Most of the time, this would be more formal vocabulary, and it was still confusing because Japanese kanji will often have at least two pronunciations -- one is the more Japanese pronunciation, and one is based off the Chinese (respectively, the kun- and on-readings). The Chinese pronunciations tend to be used for more of the two-kanji nouns or verbs, which are often more formal. I also found that after a while, I could guess at the on-readings just from knowing the Chinese pronunciation and from having a sense of the patterns the adaptations took.

Also, it made reading Japanese a lot easier, since I could look at a kanji and guess at its meaning even without knowing the kun-reading.

For Korean, I am not sure... a lot of this is what yhlee has told me. To my ear, I can tell when some Korean vocab words (usually nouns) are derived from Chinese, because they sound both similar to the Chinese pronunciation and to the Japanese on-reading (if I happen to know the Japanese). The language vocabulary also sounds closer to Chinese than Japanese for me, but that is totally an uneducated impression. On the other hand, the cadences of the language and the way the sentences flow sound a lot more like Japanese. Yoon and other sources have said that Korean grammar is very similar to Japanese (I can't remember which influenced which), and I can sort of hear that -- I can tell that there are particles and verb conjugations at the end, and Korean has something that sounds to me like "sumi-da" and "sumi-ka," which reminds me a lot of the Japanese "desu/da" and "desu ka." (Caveat, I can't spell Korean worth anything. Also, I think the sumi- ending is more formal/polite? Though that is a completely unsupported guess on my part.)

I don't know how to explain why it sounds like there are particles, particularly particles as object/subject/whatnot markers, save that the phrasing of sentences sounds a lot like Japanese -- i.e. people usually pause just the teeniest bit after a particle, so it sounds like "subject+particle (pause) object+particle (pause) verb+conjugation."

Ehhh... lemme know if that is completely not what you wanted to know! And again, all this is based off some knowledge of Chinese and Japanese and absolutely zero knowledge of Korean.

[(Anonymous)]

Very interesting! I had heard that there was a lot of vocabulary overlap, so I wondered if the meanings of a particular character/kanji would -change- as it developed into Japanese, and wot.

[oyceter]

Um... sometimes they change and sometimes they don't? Frex, the kanji for "benkyou" (study) is hanzi for "mian qiang" (to force). My friends and I laughed when we learned that. So... sometimes it's the same, sometimes you can see the relationship when you squint sideways, and sometimes the relationship is so far in the past that I have no idea what it is. Though usually it's the former two. (All just for Chinese and Japanese, I wish I knew more for Korean)