About the Author
Hello, this blog is about my life as a father, Buddhist and Japanophile / Koreaphile. Any useful information I can pass along will hopefully make the Internets a better place. Thanks for reading!
Category Archives: Korean
Sound Shifts in Korean Language
Since I started studying Korean alongside Japanese, I noticed some similarities. However, I’ve also noticed some differences. One of them is sound-shifts. Japanese has comparatively few, while Korean has a lot, and it affects how words are read. This is … Continue reading
Exploring Kim Jong-Il’s death through language
Reader “Jonathan”, an old friend, linguist and blog reader, emailed me this article recently. The article shows how newspaper headlines in Taiwan, Japan and South Korea all announced Kim Jong-Il’s death using different Chinese characters, or Chinese-based words.1 In the … Continue reading
A Tale of Two Numbers
While learning both Japanese and Korean, I have noticed an interesting tendency to have two different number systems: a “native” number system and a Chinese-imported one. In some contexts the native system is used, and in some contexts the Chinese-imported … Continue reading
Posted in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Language, Latin, Vietnamese
16 Comments
A Brief Look at the Jeju Dialect in Korea
Speaking of languages, I found this article on the Yonhap News Agency about the danger of losing the famous Jeju Dialect in Korea. Jeju Island (jejudo 제주도) is a big island at the very southern tip of Korea and somewhat … Continue reading
JLPT: Total Immersion or Else!
In the recent past, I mentioned a blog/website called All Japanese All The Time (AJATT for short) that proposes studying language through a combination of total immersion (even if you don’t live in Japan), and willingness to fail and try … Continue reading
Posted in Japanese, JLPT, Korean, Language
2 Comments
Why Pronunciation Matters in Learning a Foreign Language
I found this video on Youtube a few weeks ago, while trying to fix my own pronunciation of Japanese. My wife has repeatedly told me that if I pronounced Japanese better, I could speak Japanese well. I understand what she’s … Continue reading
Posted in Japanese, Korean, Language, Vietnamese
4 Comments
Happy Hangeul Day!
October 9th is Hangeul Day in Korea, and celebrates the establishment of the Korean writing system called Hangul, or Hangeul in the new Romanization system. So, what’s the big deal behind Hangeul? It’s just an alphabet. To understand the accomplishment, … Continue reading
Japanese and Korean language: a first-pass comparison
Since I started learning Korean through KoreanClass101, I was surprisd almost immediately by how similar Japanese and Korean languages are. It’s something you might read about, but when you are familiar with one language, the other seems surprisingly easy in … Continue reading
Typing Korean (and Japanese) in Linux
A while back, I wrote a post on typing Japanese in FreeBSD, but since I started learning the Korean language too, alongside Japanese, I decided to revisit the subject. The default method these days for inputting Japanese or Korean is … Continue reading
Posted in Bsd, Japanese, Korean, Language, Linux, Technology
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My new hobby: Korean language 한극어
I love studying languages in general. In my life, I’ve studied Mandarin, Vietnamese, Latin, German, Spanish, but my first love was always Japanese language. I don’t know why, but I think it was something about growing up in Seattle, where … Continue reading
Posted in Japanese, Korean, Language
2 Comments
