It’s a pretty peculiar feeling when a language you’ve basically known your entire life starts to sound weird to your ears. On Wednesday I heard a talk by a professor from the University of Arkansas on US health care and the presidential elections. Obviously I still understand the English language but it felt a bit unfamiliar(?) to my ears, probably because I haven’t watched an American tv show or listened to any American songs in a very looong time. I’ve always had binge watching tendencies I’m ashamed to say, but it’s as if I took all my binge watching energies from shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Orange Is The New Black, and How to Get Away With Murder, and directed them full throttle towards Korean variety shows and dramas, if that makes any sense.
Anyways, the hours I spend listening to Korean, be it through music or tv shows and the like, are starting to pay off little by little. At least I’d like to think so. To be honest, before I started learning Korean I had trouble discerning Korean and Japanese sometimes, even though I had studied Japanese for two years at school. It not that the sound alike so much as I was way too lazy with my Japanese studies and did not spend enough time on listening or any other aspect of language learning for the matter. Though I’m kind of regretting give up on my Japanese studies (as if I ever started) since a few of SuJu’s subgroups have quite a few songs in Japanese and they perform in Japan quite often. But one language at a time is all that I can handle, so I’ll be focusing on Korean first. Pretty sure I mentioned before that I spent a disproportionately little amount of my studying time on learning new vocabulary, which unfortunately is still the case. However, not that it’s an excuse, I feel like getting into Kpop (mostly Super Junior) has improved my vocabulary quite a bit. Because words and phrases get repeated many times in songs, it’s easier to memorize or at least recognize them. Also when grammar points I’ve just learned happen to appear in song names, the grammar point and the song name basically become ingrained in my brain without much if any effort. Youtube lyric videos and kkbox (kind of like a Taiwanese spotify) are particularly useful for this purpose, i.e. hearing the lyrics while reading them, plus translations of course. I mean I’ll be listening to SuJu’s song over and over again anyways, so I might as well learn the lyrics while I’m at it. Which is how I came up with the brilliant idea to organize the lyrics and translations of all of Super Junior’s songs (from their full albums) into one file and then print it out for easy viewing/learning. I could easily get the Korean lyrics and translations from kkbox for some of the newer and more popular songs, however the older and less popular (relatively speaking) ones really tested the limits if my googling abilities, but I digress. Behold the finished product.
Looking forward to understanding and learning the lyrics of these songs I’ve been putting on repeat for quite a while now, but I’ll be starting with the slower songs first eg. ballads because I’m still quite the beginner. Speaking of beginner leveled songs, lyrics-wise, we are currently learning For You by exo’s Chen, Baekhyun and Xiumin in my Korean class right now. The lyrics are relatively easy and it’s a very good song so I recommend it if you’re a beginner like me.
Another thing I’m looking forward to is the long weekend!!! Happy birthday, a few days in advance, Taiwan!
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