Yay! Some speaking practice! FINALLY!

Posted by 윤선 at 1:48 AM Tuesday, April 28, 2009


I'm going to try video-ing my weekly recounts from now on. If you know any Korean at all, it's pretty damn obvious that my pronunciation is SHOCKINGLY BAD. T_T Still, I'm glad to have finally done some practice. I just wish I had someone I could practice conversations with in real life.

Speaking of Korean, though, I've started to (slowly) listen to Korean Class 101's Lower Intermediate lessons. I'm continuing with the Beginner series' as usual, but over the past couple of weeks, I've found I've been a bit... bored and not so challenged. And when I get bored, THAT'S BAD. Boredom = me quitting, and I don't want to quit. So in an attempt to have more of a challenge, I'm slowly moving up to Lower Intermediate (even though I don't actually think I'm up to it yet). ...but that's better than simply quitting altogether because of boredom, right?
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3 comments:

Sang-Shil said...

Wow, this is really great! I wish I had the guts to videotape myself like this. And it seems like moving up to the next level is a true sign of progress.

One question: Do you know when Korean speakers say 제 어머니 and when they say 우리 어머니? I've heard that people will sometimes say "our" rather than "my"... but I'm not sure if this is in all situations, or just some of them. For example, I've heard people say "우리 남편" (!) but in the dramas, I've also heard people say "내 여자".

So I'm a little confused... but what else is new? ^^

April 28, 2009 6:45 AM
Javis said...

잘 하셨어요!

April 28, 2009 10:09 PM
Kim Yoonmi (Surname first) said...

To Sangshil: It's always "우리어머니" but that sounds like you are talking about your "mother-in-law" rather than mother which is "엄마" This applies to all family situations.

"내 여자" is "My woman" Which is different since they aren't family. When it's a wife, it becomes "여보" and the "our" wife to other people or "child's name" "father" "mother"

To 윤선....

I picked this tip up from speaking Korean and being in Korea:
1. Don't be afraid to ride the vowels for whatever emotional state you have. The more upset you are, the more you should ride the vowels. This will improve your pronunciation.

Seoulmal tends to rise like a hill, curve, and the stop short of the bottom of the curve. Korean has a lot of carrying of emotional inflection. So whatever you are feeling inside from the hello to the goodbye, you can reflect this in the length and harshness with which you speak Korean.

(My pronunciation is really good, but my vocab and grammar is usually bad. Appa rides on me all the time for typing words wrong... even though his spelling is antiquated a little.)

I also know the speaking pattern for Jeolladomal and Kyeongsangnamdomal.

The important thing in Korean is to kind of get the words to sing and sing whatever you are feeling inside. Korean tends to be very emotive as a language and not follow the mind sense, but the heart sense. (Paragraph structure tends to be like that too). So let those vowels ride because vowel length in Korean doesn't matter. Sometimes I find speaking Korean a bit therapeutic, it's really a great language to bitch in.

So annyeonghaseyo... would sound like. An-nyoooouuunnng-ha-seeh-yoooo. to an English speaker's Ear. It is as you get a lot more formal that the vowels shorten and become more stilted. (But that's like Historical drama time.)

Because I picked up on this, a lot of people thought I was fluent in Korea or had previous training.

Beyond that, *grins* as a Korean adoptee, I also liked Sailor Moon... and also faced a lack of materials on Korea so relied on whatever I could get out of Japan and China. As a result I also studied Japanese and have a fairly good grasp of that as well. (I can recite Sailor Moon's Anime intro from memory. --;;)

May 5, 2009 8:21 AM

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