Learning Life

Mandarin Word of the Day

2011-07-11T13:05:00.000-07:00

Yīngyǔ- 英语

英语 or in pinyin Yīngyǔ, means the English language.

Here is a sentence using the word 英语：

他说英语。Tā shuo yīngyǔ. He speaks English.

Fighting

2011-07-11T12:26:00.000-07:00

Have you ever commented on a video or an article and all of a sudden some "attacks" you and assumes something about you?

I was watching a Korean variety show and this girl said watching porn is bad and that idols shouldn't watch porn and me being me questioned why? Why is watching porn bad?
I was being genuine because I know that in some countries it is a taboo, so I wanted to know her perspective because even where I am from, people don't outright say that they watch porn unlike here in America where it isn't so much as a taboo. Americans are more liberal in that aspect.
I was at a birthday-costume party and one of my friends dressed up as Robin Hood, tights and all, and on top of that, he shaved his legs. *insert fan-girl scream* lol I was shocked, but in a good way.

After my friend in the picture above showed off his "sexy and shapely" legs, another (girl)friend of mine blatantly said that she needed to go home and watch porn now. I don't know about you, but that was pretty straight forward. I'm not even like that. So anyway, it made me think about the comment I replied to on youtube and how the girl responded to my innocent question about how is porn bad:

"where are you from? i bet you're american..but we asians consider watching porn as bad habit...asians are not american, i know american because i once gone there and american consider guys not watching porn are losers, but we asians are not like that,..."

Truth be told, I was pissed because she assumed I was American and a whole start fight started. Her and I started bickering back and forth and insults started flying and another girl got involved. I'm a lover not a fighter, but I'm hot headed and I don't like being called American or Black or anything else because that isn't who I am. I am from Trinidad and Tobago. I was just so pissed that she would assume my nationality. I understand that in some Asian countries porn is like a taboo. Believe me, I know. I would be incredibly ignorant if I didn't learn about Asian customs and their taboos. I don't know all of them, but I'm learning.
I'm not innocent either in this fight because I did call her a bitch for assuming I'm American.
Today the fight continued and it was getting pretty heated and I, in all my pride, was not going to be the first person to apologize. I find that one of the hardest words to say is "I am sorry" After a fight, I am never the first person to say it and a lot of times, I still won't say it, so I have to commend this girl for being the first person to say "Hey! We are fighting over a small and stupid thing. Let's stop and be friends."

K-pop song of the Day

2011-07-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

MBLAQ- Mona Lisa

K-pop song of the Day

2011-07-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

Girl's Day- Hug Me Once More

Oh my gosh! I absolutely love this song, their concept, and how amazing DreamTea presented the MV. They made it "interactive" and my mind was blown away. It really is a creative idea and I am so happy that DreamTea is finally promoting these girls the way they should.

The Hallyu Wave- K-pop

2011-07-05T07:18:00.000-07:00

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Korean Pop Music

Korean pop music. To a foreigner, especially English speaking ones in my personal experience, a lot of these '???' will pop into the mind because who in the world listens to Korean pop music except for Koreans? Well for starters, me. I listen to K-pop and I love it even though half the time I don't even understand what the song is about because let me tell you from my personal experience, just because the melody is upbeat and the singers are dancing all excitedly and sometimes provocatively, it doesn't mean the song itself is cheery or nonsensical. For example Hyunah- Change:

When I first heard this song and saw the video, all I saw was a girl thrusting her hips sing 'Change', until I looked up a video with English subtitles and I realized there was a deeper message. She is basically telling people that they can change and not to listen to people that say they can't. It is a pretty deep message if I do say so myself.

I would also like to point out that there are times in K-pop where the song itself is cheery and the lyrics are 'wtf' and very repetitive like in SNSD 'Gee':

Don't get me wrong I love K-pop and even though it seems like I am bashing right now, I am a complete sucker for these kind of songs ^.^ I guess this kind of leads to the question "Who do you like K-pop?" Some people will say that there are other songs and music genres that are so much better and I agree wholeheartedly there are music genres that blow K-pop out of the water, but I still prefer K-pop.

First off, the songs are addictive. The entertainment companies of these groups know how to sell the songs. I love the repetitive lyrics it is just appealing to me as I anticipate when it will be sung next and I find myself singing along as at times, they are the only lyrics I know from the song. Like in SNSD- 'Gee', can you honestly say that 'Gee Gee Gee Gee Baby Baby' is not catchy?
I would also like to bring to your attention that the artists are dancing. Yeah. How many artists do you know sing and dance through their entire song and I would also like to point out that they do sing and dance live. The next video is courtesy of SHINee- Lucifer:

Not only are the lyrics addictive, but so is the dance routine and you can't help but be impressed at the artists singing and dancing live and they actually sound good. Not all of the artists sound amazing while singing and dancing live because the choreography can be very strenuous and not all of them will have as much experience like my awesome SHINee boys.

Another reason for me lovign K-pop are the outfits believe it or not. The outfits can get very creative and will just shock you, but in a good way. This next group that I will introduce you to are called 2NE1 (21 or To anyone) with their song 'I am the Best'. They have other songs with eye-catching outfits, but I like this one the best.

I have a deep respect for these artists, also known as Idols, because in a sense they are people you can look up to. There are so many of them that trained for years just to debut. What I mean by train is that many, if not all, of these idol singers joined a company and became a trainee where they learned how to sing, dance, act, model, and learn a foreign language all while going to school and getting good grades. Even after years of training there still wasn't any guarantee that they would be able to debut. I really admire them because there are some success stories of idol singers coming from nothing, even running away from home to audition and become a trainee just to achieve their dream of becoming a singer or actor. I don't know many other artists that would go to such lengths to achieve their dream and it really irks me that some artists in America were made a star 'over-night', but to each their own.
Lastly, I must confess that my first attraction to K-pop were the guys. I am a girl after-all and I do have my shallow moments :p.

Learning Mandarin

2011-06-07T09:02:00.000-07:00

Some people say that learning Mandarin is extremely hard. Every time I hear that or read it on the internet I think "No it isn't." and I have an incredulous look on my face.
BUT! I do see where people are coming from. For one thing Mandarin doesn't use the alphabet that we, native English speakers, are familiar with. Instead there are characters and there are over 2,000 of them as if learning characters wasn't daunting enough.
So here is a bullet list of reasons why people found the language hard and my responses

The characters are hard to learn

First off, the characters aren't really that hard to learn. It is your mindset that makes it seem hard. If you go into learning the language thinking that learning the characters will be hard, well guess what? It will be. When I started learning Mandarin I was excited and even when I looked at characters and thought "How in the world can I do this!", I took it all in stride. Beside's characters, the Chinese people have created Pinyin, Chinese pronunciation of Chinese words using the Latin Alphabet. Using the Pinyin and the characters side by side helps. For me when I started my first online course, courtesy of Florida Virtual School, I printed out the vocabulary words from the lesson and then I hand wrote everything once with the Pinyin, the characters, and the English translation. Afterwards, I printed out a paper that had like boxes on them where I can practice writing the characters. Doing that a couple times a week even if 10 minutes in the morning or before I went to bed helped me to memorize the characters. I also made flash cards with the characters on one side and the Pinyin and English translation on the other to help me memorize the meaning of the characters. It takes time to learnt he characters just as it took time for us to learn how to "fluently" speak, read, write, and understand English. We didn't learn everything in one year. It took many, many, many years.

The writing system

Another reason why learning Chinese sounds hard is because it does not follow any set rules in the case of phonetics. With English we can sound out words to learn how to spell them and the majority of the time we get it right. That is not the case with Chinese. Even if the words sound a-like and you would logically think that they would be written a-like, it doesn't work that way. In my experience the only thing that I could think of is that the only time where characters looked similar is when they have some-what the same meaning. The thing is characters are made up of radicals and each radical has a meaning much like words do. Chinese words are made up of many radicals and the meaning of the word can be guessed albeit not to the "T". For instance the word for "good" is 好（hǎo). It is made up of two characters 女(nǚ) and 子(zi). Nǚ means "woman" and Zi means "child". In the minds eye a mother is supposed to be loving and caring towards her child thus far 好 means "good". It becomes frustrating because while learning the meanings of the radicals as way to learn the meaning of characters is good, the frustrating part is learning the meanings of all the radicals, though it certainly does help to know at least a few it does not tell you how to pronounce the word. Also in my experience, looking up a word in a Chinese dictionary is a chore in itself. Fort my birthday a good friend of mine gave me a hand-held dictionary because I've been using an online dictionary and I was so happy I was smiling ear-to-ear... until I tried looking up a word. For a little while my world came crashing down because it was hard. For the majority of the time if I am near my computer I just search up a word on my favorite internet dictionaries. I have not yet mustered up the courage, and yes courage, to consult my Chinese dictionary when I stumble across a word I don't know which is frequently. I only browse through the dictionary for the fun of doing so to pick out a random word to learn.

The tones

Chinese is a tonal language and there are, essentially, 5 tones. Many places will tell you that there are only 4 because the 5th tone just passes by. The first tone is level, mā (mama/妈). The second tone is entering, má (hemp/麻). The third tone is rising, mǎ (horse/吗). The fourth tone is departing, mà (scold/骂). Now the fifth tone is neutral, ma. As you can see all four words are pronounced the same, but are written differently and depending on how you say it, will have a different meaning. This is a frustrating problem with people learning Chinese, getting a hang of the tones and the exceptions to pronouncing the tones depending on where it is placed preceding or after another tone. When I first started taking Mandarin classes last September I was a bit skeptical as to whether or not I would be hindered because I didn't think that I would be able to get the tones right, but practice makes perfect. Luckily I was able to take a course which involved many speaking activities and normally this would be a negative, but my teacher was not the easiest teacher whence it came to grading my orals and looking back I thank her for it. There are just some things that you don't learn in the classroom that my teacher taught me like those exceptions with the third tone. ^.^

These were the main problems that people had with Chinese that made them thick that it was hard. I grouped some topics together so that you would have to read a novel of an answer to find what you were looking for.

About Me!

2011-06-07T06:18:00.000-07:00

First off I would like to say "Thank you!" and "Welcome to Learning Life" ^.^
This blog is intended to be an outlet for me as I am taking the plunge into the world of "adults"... sort of. I guess you can say that I am leaving my childhood behind as I set forth on a new path a.k.a college. I am a high school graduate ready, yet nervous, about going to college especially one so far away from "home". I'll be going to the University of California-Riverside.
I am a bit naive about how the world works because it is not as though I have been sheltered my whole life, it is just that I have been overshadowed my whole life by my nine older siblings. I have always been in there shadow so going to college where no one knows me or my family is a way to re-invent myself the way I want to be seen and be known for what I want to be known for. Where I currently live I am "infamously" known as the "last Campbell", the baby, the sleeper, the twin (even though I am not a twin). I am not really known, or I feel as though I am not known as who I am inside, Whitney.
I am Whitney. I love music and recently my latest obsession is Korean pop music. I love, love, love K-pop. I can't get over how amazing the guys music is.

I got into K-pop last year, 2010, in March and their marketing strategy, whatever it is, works because I've been a huge fan ever since.

I am also interested in foreign languages. If you couldn't guess by my love for K-pop, the said languages include Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese. My intended major in college is Asian Studies- East Asian Languages and Cultures. I currently have one year of Mandarin under my belt ^.^ 大家好！(Hello everyone!) I have also taught myself how to read Korean. I'm not the fastest reader and I still have trouble pronouncing some words here and there, but it's an accomplishment especially without any formal training. For Japanese I am as unexperienced as the next person, but not for long. I actually make it a habit to find websites or programs where I can learn the languages and I do occasionally buy programs as long as there are in my budget.

Aside from my love of K-pop and East Asian Languages, I love reading. I don't have any favorite books in particular, but I am currently reading The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow. I'm almost done with it. I play computer games like Neopets and Evony and facebok games like Cafe World. I have a lot of free time on my hands lol.

I haven't mentioned my personality yet.... I prefer smiling and laughing to frowning. I like to have fun and create a joyful atmosphere, sometimes even at my own expense I don't mind. I'm a dork. I am introverted yet extroverted. According to my friends I make friends easily because I put myself out there and I indulge people, I'll talk to random people on games like Evony. I don't find it strange because I know my limit on what to give out. I am introverted because to the contrary when I am put into a situation where I don't know anyone I am contemplate for a long time before I decide to go and talk them. People are just easily fooled by my facade of confidence ^.^

Well that is all for now, until next time.