In a post written by Syz in June, the topic of language discounts was discussed. By all means, if you haven’t read it, go take a look at the post and the 30+ comments it brought about. I want to review this idea for a moment, but this time on non-Sinitic languages. Specifically, I want to look at Korean.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m giving myself a crash course in Korean. I’ll be in Seoul in a couple months and as nice as my friends there are, I don’t want to have to rely on them for conversations on topics like hotels, taxis, restaurants. In fact as added incentive, my friend has given me a list of things I must master by the time I get there. This includes the above few tourism-related areas, but then also I’m expected to learn at least one pop song for karaoke (Kr: 노래방 noraebang, lit. “song room”). I’ve only just begun, and I’m doing what I can to make sure my pronunciation is passable from the start. But I can’t help thinking I’m about to hit a stage in my vocabulary acquisition where it just explodes into awesome. It has a lot to do with discussions had over at Annals of Wu on what I call the “sound matrix” theory.

Continue…