Tag Archives: chinese

The Year of the Dragon

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Bruce Lee

李小龙

李小龙

This year is the year of the dragon in China. I was born in 1988, so this is my year, which only happens every 12 years. So why not talk Bruce Lee, the “Little Dragon”? I went to watch a documentary about him a week ago, called I am Bruce Lee. This is a really good documentary, it touches on every part of his life from his childhood up until his tragic death at age 32. There was also lots of celebrities who talked about him at length, including his wife, daughter, Kobe Bryant, UFC President Dana White, etc. It’s all very interesting, and I think more people should watch the film, about a man who sought to defy racial stereotypes and promote Chinese pride over 40 years ago. He brought Chinese martial arts to the west, was the father of mixed martial arts (his ‘style’ is called Jeet Kune Do, the way of the intercepting fist), the first major Asian star in the U.S, married a white woman (still rare today that Asian men marry white women), and a great philosopher who constantly strove to improve his body and mind. All that, and he died young. Perhaps those that God loves die young.

Acoustic Guitar

I’ve recently decided to focus more on acoustic guitar. I’ve played guitar for 8 years now… and up until recently have focused on the electric and shunned the acoustic. I’ve always thought electric guitars could do anything, emulate any instrument like violin, and guzheng, and piano and even acoustic guitar. Although I can make it sound similar, there’s something about acoustic guitar that feels really natural, and I love the portability of it, not needing an amp to play. I can easily bring it to a friend’s house, unlike an electric. So all this is short for ‘I bought a new acoustic guitar’. Yup. A Martin OMJM for $2500.

Martin OMJM

Martin OMJM

What can I say? It’s really really good, and I love playing it. An acoustic guitar only has one factor in the tone besides your playing, and that’s the guitar itself. An electric guitar however, has lots of factors like the guitar, pickups, cables, pedals, amp, strings, etc. An acoustic guitar really only has strings and the guitar itself, hence the pricey investment. Here’s a video of me playing it.

Social Life
Finally,  I found that its still been hard for me to make friends here. Mostly because of my chronic shyness. Why is it so easy for me to talk to someone online but in person I lose all courage and become so shy? Perhaps I am afraid of people reacting to me.. but I want to fix it, how do I fix being a loner? Go out and meet people. Join meetup groups. Attend church services. Volunteer. Go to clubs and events. Take courses. Look for ways to connect with people from the bay area. Find a roommate once my lease is up. Most importantly though, I have to keep practicing talking with people, especially with talking with  a group of people, and sustaining a conversation, which I find difficult. Because I’ve been a loner since I was young, this is something that needs a lot of practice. If I don’t practice, I will be doomed to be forever alone… =( .

Update: Learning Korean

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Update: new, more indepth korean grammar post here.

So a couple posts back, I described how I was beginning to learn Korean, an exciting new language that is both similar yet different from Chinese. So far, I’ve found that although I’ve progressed, I haven’t progressed as quickly as I had when I first started.

The biggest difficulty I have with Korean is that there are just so many particles, so many verb conjugations, and so many ways of saying something using different characters. Its easier when I read Korean, but orally, when someone is speaking Korean fast (like at my church), it becomes very hard to determine what they are saying because first I have to process the context and then what sounds they are using. The double consonants (ㅃ,ㅉ,ㄸ,ㄲ,ㅆ) are very hard to differentiate for me from the single ones. And some words can be completely different if they are using double consonants or single consonants.

And there are alot of particles. The straightforward particles are the topic, subject and object particles. 저는 is the normal way of saying ‘I’ the first time you introduce yourself (‘는’ being the topic particle). But this is a rather formal way of doing it. 나는 is the more plain way of saying it. Of course some Korean words are only used in writing, rather than speech. ‘와/과’ is used more often than ‘하고’ in writing for the word ‘and/with’. And verb conjugations. There are so many irregular verbs, verbs that have silent letters in them, etc. I pretty much just have to memorize which ones are which. The conjugations can be fairly simple like 먹다 -> 먹어요 for the polite form of ‘to eat’ or more irregular like 크다 -> 커요 for ‘to be tall’, with one of the consonants, 으, removed when its conjugated.

And here is a general list of particles I have to remember:
-subject particle: -이/가, to denote subject noun.
-topic particle: -은/는, to denote topic noun.
-plural particle: -들, to emphasize plurality on a noun.
-object particle: -을/를, to denote noun being acted on by a verb.
-case particle: -으로/로 , to denote a noun is being used (by,with), or direction, or selection, or change.
-possession particle: -의, to denote possession between two nouns.
-location particles: -에, which can denote place, time or quantity. -에서, which indicates a dynamic location or source of action.
-conjunction particles: -와/과,-하고, to link two nouns together.
-special particle: -도, which adds the meaning of also/too/even to a noun.
-special particle: -만, which adds the meaning of just/only to a noun.
-special particle: -이나/나, which means something similar/or/as many as/about.
-special particle: -부터,까지 which means from a time/place to another time/place.

Verb particles
-으면/면, which adds the meaning ‘if’ to a verb.
-고, which adds the meaning ‘and’ to a verb.
-거나, which adds meaning ‘or’ to a verb.
-지만, which adds meaning ‘but’ to a verb.
-는, which turns a verb into a present noun modifier. (-ㄴ/은 for past, -ㄹ/을 for future).
-ㄴ/는, which turns an adjective into a present noun modifier.  (-ㄴ/은 for past, -ㄹ/을 for future).

See, that’s a lot of particles. Chinese only has a few (的，得，地，着，被，给，对，向，跟，和，与). In addition, I don’t have opportunity to practice Korean alot. But anyways… here’s hoping I can improve enough to go to Korea next year.

Learning Korean

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태극기

태극기

Edit: I’ve put together a more comprehensive summary of Korean grammar here <-- please visit. :)

Recently I've taken up Korean lessons for fun. So why Korean? I always think of improving myself in various ways, and I think learning a language is definitely a good way to do that; this wouldn't be the first time I've learned a language by myself (Since my parents didn't speak Chinese to me, I studied it myself during my college years). Korean is not one of the most useful languages to learn. In fact, it’s only used by roughly 70 million people, only 48 million of which you will ever be in contact with (the rest is of course, North Koreans, who can’t leave their country). It is also an isolated language, meaning it has no roots to any other language. My main motivation comes from renewed interest in their culture. My old roomate was Korean, a lot of my friends are Korean, a lot of my fellow church goers are Korean, and I am part Korean myself (I identify as Chinese, even though I am only half Han Chinese). Korea’s culture is remarkably similar yet subtlety different than Chinese, and of course, there is the influence of Korean pop and Korean dramas, which are not as big motivators for me as for some others who strive to master this language.

Korean Alphabet

Korean Alphabet

So far, I’ve found Korean characters to be remarkably easy to learn, in comparison to Chinese at least. The Korean alphabet takes one day to learn, and you can pronounce almost all Korean words and figure out how to write the Korean words for different pronunciations after. This is because of the way Korean words are constructed. Each consonant and vowel are similar to how English is constructed in that there are certain rules when to place them before or after, but either way each Korean word is created much the same way as in English.

For example, the word for ‘hello’ in Korean is 안 녕  하 세 요 , pronounced annyeong haseyo. Let’s break it down. 아 is a and ㄴ is n, according to that alphabet chart. So, an is just those two put together, in this case the ㄴ coming below the 아 in the character, making it 안 (an). nyeong, is similarly constructed, using ㄴ (n) + ㅕ(yeo) + ㅇ (ng) =  녕 (nyeong). ha is constructed using ㅎ (h) +ㅏ (a) =  하. se using ㅅ(s) + ㅔ (e) = 세. And yo using 요 (yo). So the hard part is actually just knowing what the characters mean, not how to pronounce them.

Chinese works quite differently. It’s not like each stroke of Chinese is part of the alphabet, because in Chinese, all the characters mean something different. For example, knowing the character 木 (mu4), and 目 (mu4) isn’t going to help you with the pronunciation or meaning of their composite, 相 (xiang1,xiang4). That means learning Chinese requires learning thousands of characters, whereas in Korean, just knowing that alphabet is good enough for knowing how to write and pronounce 한글 . The most difficult part of learning Korean is in fact, everything else. The sentence structure is different (Subject-Object-Verb). There are different levels of honorifics used, so depending on who you are talking to, what you say may be different. And of course, all the exceptions in Korean in pronunciations and grammar construction.

Of course I am going to continue to practice with this, I think the only way to get what each word means is to practice it regularly with other Koreans, so thats probably gonna be one of my goals. To become semi-fluent in Korean! And then I can visit Korea next year without a translator as well as my hometown in northeast China. In any case, I think learning a language is certainly a nice way to be productive and improve your memory and exercise your brain :) .

Yay! I recorded my first song in Korean.. a cover of the famous Wondergirls song, ‘Nobody’, hope I got the words right: