Studying three languages a day

I studied three languages today and this totally deserves a celebratory blog post.

I did two lessons of EBS 초급 태국어 [Study notes here, videos on YouTube], read some stuff in Korean and started reading a Japanese novel (!!). It’s been a long, long time since I studied so hard, and come here to blog about it too.

Thai

I’m going to try to work harder for Thai this year, and hopefully to share more resources with everyone in the coming days. For those who know Korean, I do recommend the EBS series. I’m still working through the series, but so far I enjoyed it a lot and perhaps I’ll post about it again! These days, I’m working on grammar, as well as being able to parse Thai sentences without relying on any kind of romanisation. It’s kind of difficult, also because beginner textbooks will always come with the romanisation, and sometimes at the same font size, or even in bold *face palm* and this makes it very challenging not to look at it. I’m getting better at recognising the basic / high frequency words. When I’m studying, I tend to write out the sentences in Thai and annotate on the notebook instead of the textbook. Writing it out really helps me to remember and recognise the words.

Japanese

I have a whole stack of unread Japanese novels at home, thanks to having Kinokuniya stores here in Singapore. I’ve been very bad at reading them, mostly because I’ll start one and a few pages later, I put them aside and weeks/months later, I’ll feel too tired to restart from the beginning because I can’t remember what I read. For now, I’m starting on a brand-new novel and hopefully it’ll stick. More like I have to stick to it. At the peak of my Japanese reading ability, I was reading more Japanese novels than I did Korean, but now I think I’ve read more Korean than Japanese. Time to do more for Japanese!

Korean

I guess I’m always the most consistent when it comes to Korean. But these days I’m reading for the fun of it, and not for a particular purpose and I realise how much I miss that carefree feeling. When it comes to the dilemma of whether to keep something you love as a hobby or turn it into your career or livelihood, I still don’t have an answer after all these years. 🙂 I’ve also been easing back into Korean dramas, which I’m super happy about. I finished watching 여신강림 (True Beauty) and *squeaaaaaals* I’m a sucker for high school / university romance dramas and even if the plot is rather cliche, I’ll still lap it up if there’s good acting and good chemistry among the leads. Please watch it. Highly recommended.

On a random aside, if you ever feel like your fringe is getting into your eyes and interfering with your work, please do not cut it on your own. Just don’t.

Because you’re likely to end up with uneven, overly short bangs.

Don’t ask me.

Just don’t.

I look like this now: