TL;DR — Talk. Learn. Discover. Repeat. #19
Hey yall, I hope you’ve been well!
I’ve been enjoying being in my favorite city in South Korea: Gwangju, walking down memory lane in places I went to 13 years ago when I was here for the first time.
I originally came here to take the TOPIK exam though and let me tell you… I’m glad it’s over. These last few weeks have been torture and I reached a complete peak burnout on the day I took the exam.
The lack of sleep and pressure I had set for myself didn’t help but the exam itself and its incomprehensible rules such as giving you a 30-minute break during which you can’t even go to the convenience store to eat something despite the exam being from 1 pm got on my nerves, which made me lose my concentration during the reading comprehension. I’m planning on writing a full description of what my test experience was like so more on that at a later date.
From now on, I’m turning my focus back on Japanese. I’ve been missing Japanese so I’m switching most of my daily tools to Japanese (games, music, videos, and diary).
I am planning on focusing on one specific area but I’m still unsure of which one. We’ll see when I get back home in Seoul.
Anyway, let’s dive right in!
🗣️Talk languages
As mentioned above, I’ve just burned out on Korean. Well, on actively studying Korean at least. This doesn’t mean I regret studying hard for the TOPIK for the past 2 months. I’ve felt my level improve drastically. All this thanks to a little tool people do their best to avoid nowadays:
Textbooks.
I absolutely love studying with textbooks now but it wasn’t always the case. I use to hate them when I was in school. The reason is clear today: the school system teaches us to dislike them.
We learn to follow textbooks as they are organized when that’s may not be what we need.
When I first opened the textbook to study the writing section of the TOPIK, I saw it started with Questions 51 and 52 but the one I really wanted to study as quickly as possible was Q53 so I skipped there. After this, I skipped straight to Q54 grammar patterns (at the end of the book) before going back to see what that question actually was like. I also ended up skipping entirely the Q52 tips because I had already seen them before.
This made the textbook more fun to approach and a lot less like a chore. I didn’t have to go through the boring parts and focused on what I needed.
So why not grab one of the textbooks you dropped before and see if starting from a different point makes it more fun?
I also wrote a long time ago1 about more ways to learn with textbooks here.
✍️Learn from my experiences
The moment I finished the TOPIK exam, I decided to focus on Japanese again and was faced with a surprising realization: I couldn’t understand basic skills in the game Honkai Impact: Star Rail in Japanese even though my lesser-advanced level of Korean never caused me any trouble.
And that made me realize I was making a typical mistake all advanced language learners have done: not focusing on one topic to improve.
That’s what I discussed as well as what to do instead in The Silent Killer of Advanced Language Learning Progress.
🌎Discover new cultures
Last month, we talked about positive mythological creatures. This month, we’re turning to negative ones and covering the same areas in the world, starting again with North East Asia.
Korea’s most famous one is the Gumiho. It’s so famous there are still webtoons, dramas, and movies around their tale to this day.
The Gumiho is a shape-shifting nine-tailed fox with great intelligence and magic powers. It is often depicted as a seductive and sneaky creature preying on humans but some versions offer a more nuanced portrait.
It is said the Gumiho gains its nine tails after living for a thousand years and some stories suggest that if one can resist eating human hearts for a thousand days, it can become fully human.
Quite a different story from the Kitsune we saw last month, right?
Talking about Japan, the concept of yōkai (妖怪) is a well-known one, appearing in countless stories and mangas. While they are often depicted as negative entities, some of these spirits can actually be benevolent towards humans.
The Shōkera (精螻蛄), however, is one of the countless negative ones. This large and dark three-toed demon lurks from rooftops hunting negative behavior. Little is known about the Shōkera because admitting having seen one meant admitting one’s wickedness.
Another yōkai lurking is the Jorōgumo (絡新婦 or, more accurately, 女郎蜘蛛2). This yōkai is a large spider capable of shape-shifting into a beautiful woman luring men to devour them.
If you want to find out more about Japanese yōkais, I highly recommend the website Yokai.com. It’s filled with all kinds of yōkai, both positive and negative ones.3 Let me know if you find other ones worth mentioning!
I could go on but let’s call it a day. Next week, we’ll turn to South East Asia.
🗺️Repeat with me
Maisin (Maisan) - A curious Oceanic language
Want to know what originally made me choose to write about this language? I couldn’t not hear it as “Raisin” in my head. Yup. That stupid of a reason. And yet, I’m happy to have looked into it because it reminded me of something else: Creole languages.
Indeed, while this is not a Creole language at all, its structure felt familiar to me. I still can’t put my finger on it but I reckon this might be because I’ve seen other languages with similar features appear around the world. Anyway.
The Maisin language is an Oceanic language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the country with the most languages in the world (Estimations range from 820 to almost 850). Maisin is an SOV language spoken by about 2,600 people.
One of the key features of Maisin grammar is its system of topic and focus markers. These markers play a crucial role in the structure of sentences and the conveyance of information. There are three enclitics marking topic that can be attached to noun phrases in Maisin:
/=ka/, the 'default' topic marker,
ai=ka tamati ratti. → He’s an old man. (he=ka man old)
/=a/, the irrealis topic marker,
ari asan=a sera=e? → What’s his name (he name=a who=[possession])
/=ro/, the emphatic topic marker.
ei=ro ei-fi ti-ra=anan. → They’ll go all by themselves. (They=ro themselves 3rd PL-go=[Future])
One peculiar aspect I saw in Maisin was its use of two versions for one single verb to indicate “to go”: rai (for movement towards speaker, ie. “to come”) and ra (for movement away from speaker). This also exists for every verb of motion such as to go down (uku to come down, and uki to go down), or “to go in/out” (rauku to come in/out, and rau to go in/out).
I find it quite interesting to see such similarities in opposite words!
Unfortunately, this language suffers from a lack of resources available to learn the language online. My research only allowed me to find this Maisin: A Grammatical Description of an Oceanic Language.
Still, here are a few sentences I found in it and elsewhere:
Au asan=ka Mathias. → My name is Mathias.
i-ma-matu=me → He was sleeping. (He-[continuous aspect]-sleep-[Past])
e=ka man=kefe ku-rai? → Where did you come from (2sg=ka which=[Ablatif] 2nd person-come)
i-toddi=ai i-mati? → Did she get married or is she dead? (3sg-marry=or 3sg-dead)
Thanks for reading!
Mathias,
An average polyglot
Wow, 4 years ago already! 🤯
The first version actually translates to “entangling bride” while the second, original one, means “whore spider.”
Researching this, I discovered the Iwana bōzu, a large river fish in Buddhist priest robes approaching fishermen to tell them to go home. How can you not smile at that?