phew

korean is so much easier to learn than japanese.

with japanese, i still find myself struggling to read. because you see, knowing hiragana and katakana alone does not guarantee comprehension in the language. because u need to recognize the chinese characters a.k.a kanji. although the joy that accompanies every succesful recognition of the kanji is euphoric, the amount of effort spent in trying to remember each strokes and shape is plain tortorous.

although i should say my prior knowledge of japanese helps me a lot in understanding korean grammar structure. the grammatical structures are pretty similar, except that they have more use of pronouns. so yeah it was pretty hard understanding japanese grammar at first, but now it pays off pretty well in terms of transferring the information to learning korean. vocabulary wise, as korean shares some things in common with japanese, the words are pretty similar too. well some of them at least.

after being able to read and write korean characters, my vocabulary has improved tremendously. this is due to the ability to read the characters straight away without having to draw the kanji from microsoft word IME pad and search it online to get its meaning. leaning japanese is a painstaking process. it is true that its easier in terms of pronunciation compared to korean, but that was only in the initial stage. now that i get used to it, japanese is becoming harder and harder for me.

but...that doesn't mean i am going to give up learning japanese. i mean, woah it was so hard learning it at first. and i still like the joy of recognizing kanjis. and reading those picture books with the 6 years old at the library is pretty fun too. they even pointed it out when i read it wrongly ;p

p/s: speaking of which, last week a german girl came to me and started going 'sprichst du deustch?' which means do u speak german and i was like, so flabbergasted i couldnt say anything smarter than 'erm...ja...hahaha...sprichst du auch deutsch?' (means erm...yes...do you speak german too?). too many languages man. pick one and focus!