Rachel and Yoon visit, part 2!

[oyceter]

Vacation weekends: never long enough. I am especially sad yhlee and rachelmanija don't visit more often!

Friday was used bookstore wandering, which turned up both Seimaden (reincarnation, hell, and terrible art) and the mansion of Penetralia, as well as a showing of Capital Scandal (this not in the bookstore). The latter means there is now an audience of, count 'em, THREE for Japanese-occupied Korea noir. Now if only people would write it!

On Saturday, we went to farmers' market #1, which I snobbily do not think is as nice as my farmers' market, even though it did provide dou hua! After that was jjajangmyeon with rilina and then... KARAOKE!

Apparently both Rilina and I can sing until you pry the mikes away from our cold, dead hands, but we managed not to scare Rachel and Yoon off their first and second karaoke experiences, respectively. In fact, I count it as a great success that Yoon did not run off screaming after our voices met her perfect pitch! Also, Rachel went from "Weeellll... maybe... I'll sing a few things with people..." to rapping Eminem to "Ooo, it's too bad we didn't get to Les Mis. Next time!"

We also watched Red Cliff 2, which has Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro being immensely slashy at each other, Zhuge Liang borrowing arrows and the wind, big boats on fire, maps, more fire, little boats on fire, fish oil bombs, and:

YOON: Are there repeating crossbows in this?
ME: I have no idea? Had they already been invented then?
RILINA: Doesn't Zhuge Liang invent them?
TV: Wow, Zhuge Liang! These repeating crossbows are great!
YOON: \o/!!!!!!!!

Sunday was my farmers' market, silat and weaponry geekery with yeloson, and then siccing Gundam Wing on badgerbag!

In between, there were also mentions of flesh-eating fish, wasp-like human torsos, what may be the most histrionic funeral scene ever, Cherubus the Manager being scarier than Angelus the serial killer, Spike/Angel slash portrayed with toilet paper, the problems of when dead raccoons don't decompose fast enough, and the ultimate MY HED IS PASTEDE ON OFF YAY scene, which really needs its own entry to fully explain.

And now I am sad to have to go back to an empty house =(.

Comments

[yhlee]

My personal theory on this is that Japanese has fewer phonemes (I need to double-check the vowel situation, since I do know vowel length is phonemic in both languages but I'm not sure about the compound vowels in Korean). Korean has a three-way stop distinction where Japanese has a two-way distinction (like English, voiced and unvoiced), plus because of all the damn vowels in Korean the modern romanization resorts to digraphs, so you have to memorize letter combinations that represent a single sound. Japanese's vowel system, on the other hand, is a thing of simplicity and beauty; even the diphthongs are all pretty straightforward. I kind of want to elope with it.

(Someday I should actually knuckle down and learn Japanese instead of just reading about its grammar and stuff.)

[oyceter]

Heh, I feel the difficulty in reading romanized Korean vs. romanized Japanese is less that Korean is harder per se, but more that it doesn't fit the Roman alphabet as easily as Japanese? Ditto with romanized Mandarin, which also confuses me while reading.

Ooooo, what is so lovely about the Japanese vowel system? I mean, I personally think it was very easy to learn and pronounce, even romanized, but have zero idea of how it functions systemically.