It's my favorite time of the year, and not just because it's pops up more often than the weeds in your garden. I like it becuase I feel more alive when I'm full of hope. I like it because I think more, and think deeper, without having to necessarily do anything deep or thoughtful. It's like stepping out of gray into the after effects of a nights rain. Even the cracked sidewalks are flecked with rainbows.
My enabler today was my mom. She took me to Office Depot and I bought card stock and this cute little flash card holder. And yes, these are related to my Language study. It's actually an idea I had a long time ago, when I was learning Japanese. I'd thought I'd compile my own dictionary out of the flash cards I was alrady making. It didn't workout becuase at tha time the binders were still not index card sized. Some really intlligent market research has apparently taken place since then, and you can buy binders in every size and shape that can be contained in four sides. And rings.
I love me some flash card rings.
My flash cards, naturally, will have to be updated to match the inherent awesomeness of their eventual home. I'm aiming for a little dictionary of cards, with each card featuring a word, it's various forms, and some example sentences. This, of course, will mean I'll have to take my knowledge of Korean verb construction from 0% to at least, say, 15%.
Up to this point I have been using only Talk to Me in Korean, which is great. But listening, even when backed with work books, isn't enough. It's time to outsource for some structure. I'm going to be using wikibooks to add the necessary grain to my others light load. Wikibooks is great because it can 1) be read (and we all know I love reading), 2) it contains actual rules, and 3) it has examples for you to practice on, complete with answer key.
In other news, my Hangul has already improved. I'm still cheating on impulse by reading the romanji first without even thinking about it, but at least when I do force my eyes on the jamo that make up this wonderful puzzle of an alphabet, I can sound them out with a child's accuracy. The hardest part for me so far is the ㅈ,ㅅ,ㅊ group set. Conventionaly these are transliterated as J/S/Ch, but I find this confusing when you get combinations like 죄, or 시, both of which can sound pretty hard to my ears depending on whose saying them, and yet neither use the "Ch" jamo, . 아이고.
One thing I have been doing with Talk to Me in Korean that I really like is listening to their day of the week while writing out the example sentences. This obviously helps my pronunciation and listening skills, which in turn gives me a foundation for spelling, but it also has the side benefit of increasing my vocabulary and giving me hints at verb conjugation that I'm sure will come in handy while reading Wikibooks.
In other news, I've discovered that I'm losing my grasp on Hiragana. *Sigh* As if one language wasn't enough.
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