Reality Check

I doubt anyone's going to come across and read this. But if you manage to, I'll give a short introduction.
I'm a high school student. I'm in a rigorous academic program, so time is quite spare. Not to mention I play two instruments - cello and viola. But this kinds of things will -NOT- be what you will read about if you play on reading this.
My true area of interest is foreign languages. It began with French, which I started learning in elementary school (but it was mostly learning the colors... for four years). I moved and did not have French for my fifth grade year. Middle school, I took French every year. My French teacher was extremely hard - and we were supposedly on a high school French 3 level by the time we finished. However, high school saw the downfall of my French. The teacher was horrible, my French actually de-proved instead of improving. So I sought to satisfy my yearning for Foreign languages in a different way.
And thus, I began trekking on learning Asian languages. I'll admit, it began with Japanese because I was interested in Anime. However, my Japanese didn't take off until a year ago, around the same time I applied for a summer program in Japan. About the same time I became more serious about Japanese, a friend of mine told me about her Chinese school*, and that it had a class for English speakers. I joined in four weeks late - but I spent the entire next week learning the lessons I had missed.
I developed an interest in Asian dramas around this time as well. (And left the Japanese anime that had brought me into the world of east Asia behind me, mostly. I still enjoy a few manga - but I'm no hardcore addict - and it must be in Japanese.)
However these two langauges are still not the focus of the blog - maybe.
I started this blog because I commited... the horrible act of trying to pick up another language.
Some people juggle several langauges all at once. But most of the blogs I've read advise NOT to do this. The AJATT is a fairly popular method, and a lot of langauge-learning blogs out there are going with the idea of native input. However, the main point of native input is to surround yourself with the langauge.
And if you decide to pick up more than one language, you're already halving what little time you have to spend with a specific language.
That being said, my primary langauge is Japanese. My room has signs all over it in Japanese (mostly with sayings like 頑張って to remind me to study, or telling me that English is not allowed in my room), I use firefox in Japanese, iTunes in Japanese, most of the time half or more of my tabs are in Japanese, I rip the audio from my favorite drama episodes and listen to it while doing chemistry homework, etc. I think you get the point.
Chinese has been put to the way side. Much to the disappointment of my Chinese teacher. I feel pretty much like a failure in Chinese class. But there's only four of us, and I'm the youngest and the only one still in school. One person took Chinese at univeristy for four years. Another lived in China for several years. And one is an older second generation Chinese-American. And then there's me. It's only my second year - but I probably only know about two month's worth of Chinese.
Asian dramas do not just have Chinese and Japanese. There's still Korean. I've looked at Korean and my first thought was "There's no 漢字/汉字, I'm not interested." That was true, until I started watching more Korean dramas and movies. I love the dramatic movies that make you cry - and Korean movies are well-known for doing just this.
And then I was doing an assignment for my economics class, and since I had used Japanese newspaper last time, I decided to use a Korean newspaper. However, the side displays with Hangul looked very interesting.
And then, I watched April Snow, a Korean drama. And realized, that a particular person whom I may have a particular interest in.... is Korean and, as far as I know, speaks Korean.
It all came down to one thing - it wouldn't hurt to learn... a litlte Korean.
So I downloaded a few episodes of Let's Speak Korean. And I'm going to watch one a day. Learn the phrases. And avoid romanization at all costs - I've heard that Korean isn't very easy to romanize, and I would rather not depend on it. Let's Speak Korean is great for this - because there is no romanization what so ever.

So today, I watched lesson 1.
I learned how to say "Hello": 안냉하세요. I know a little bit about the Korean script since I've read about it a bit before decided that "I was going to wait until I was a lot better with Japanese and Chinese before touching Korean (that plan failed). So I understand how it works. And I hope that by looking at the script I can make sound connections.
I also learned that you introduce yourself by the phrase "~입니다." I don't yet know if that is more of a "My name is..." or if it's just a "I'm ...".

And that concludes my post. It's 10 PM, and I need to go finish reading the stranger and practicing for my French oral tomorrow. (I'm in my last year of French, and it couldn't have come sooner.)


*I don't even know how many people know what Chinese school is. Whenever I mention it, people seem to assume that Chinese school is a normal-day school taught in Chinese. It's not! It's like Saturday school where - usaully - second generation Chinese-Americans go to learn to read and write Chinese.