Hey everyone! :)
Song of the day: Bad Girl, Good Girl by Miss A
It's always exciting when I get letters or packages in the mail ~ anything other than bank statements or political adverts. So, you can imagine my excitement when this arrived:
Oh me, oh my, a huge box. What could be in it?
Lots of Silver Spoon sugar? O_o
Nope...turns out it was a box full of Korean textbooks!
Thirteen in total! This is probably one of the best deals that I have ever found on Ebay, since the books came in total to be £1.70. I had to arrange for a courier (£6.96) to get them delivered which was a little troublesome but in the end, I paid less than £10 for this! ^_^
Now, if you've read one of my older entries, you'll see that when I made my
New Year resolutions, one of them was to work on my foreign language skills. So why Korean? Improving my Chinese would make more sense! Well, whilst I'd been going out with SJ, I'd started to learn a bit of Korean so decided to keep on going and actually commit to it this time (after saying this about Italian and Portuguese >_<). I figured that Korean would be easier than Chinese since the language has a phonetic alphabet...and so far, that has definitely been the case! Also, wanting to understand the dramas and songs has been excellent motivation for me! :)
If any of you guys are thinking of learning, then I recommend the following resources:
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Talk to me in Korean
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Korean Flashcards
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Luke Park's Grammar Guide
It's never easy to learn a new language, but these fun resources ease the gradient and definitely make it much more exciting, especially the TTMIK podcast lessons. I really like how the teachers there always joke around and how the lessons refer back to each other so it feels like there is a story being told too ~ thanks to 6theorians for linking me to that site!
As for my Mandarin skill level, that isn't so clear cut ~ whilst I'm able to understand and maintain (with effort!) an everyday conversation or barter with a street vendor, there are also a lot of holes in my knowledge, grammar and vocab. At best, you could say that I'm lower intermediate. I think that I'm at the stage now where the only way that I'll be able to improve would be to study it intensively as a full time occupation, or to throw myself into China for a year...neither of which look very realistic at the moment! It is a shame, but I know I'm not the only one who struggles with their "native" language...if you are like this too, then let's form a support group! ^_^
All my love,
Yishi xxx
