Permenantly now at wordpress for this blog!

I'm no longer going to be using blogger for my blog as I feel more comfy with my wordpress version. The link is here - http://mynihongoandhangul.wordpress.com/
I just feel I can be more creative with my blog on wordpress, I just feel at home with it. So obviously this won't get updated at all anymore and it's the most unlikely thing in the world that I'll be checking it again so please go to my wordpress blog ^^ it has exactly the same posts as this one and more because I'm using it permanently now! :) Sayonara from here and konnichiwa for when you get to the other side! MWAH!

Hey my pretties!

I was talking to my friend in China yesterday night and he told me about his music. He's a 27 year old singer (although as an Asian he looks so much younger) and he's been writing music since he was 17. His songs vary in genre from country/indie to rock and they're amazing! Singing in Chinese obviously, the first song he sent me is called 'I Grieve You By My Voice' which sounds sad but the song is actually very relaxing. Something you want to listen to in the car :)

http://www.yinyuetai.com/video/282812 (this site is in Chinese, you may need to refresh the page and press play and wait a couple of times before it plays, usually it's fine though. Any trouble, just comment!)

This is the song I'm on about. He's sent me more mp3 versions of his songs and also a site that allows you to download his album too! I shall link all in the next post! Please support him, he's a fantastic guy with fantastic music! If you like this song spread the word, he can't get access to any foreign sites which he could upload his songs and videos. I'd love for him to do well internationally. Be awesome guys!

Yesterdays YESSTYLE.CO.UK offer

Helluuuu everyone, since I don’t have anything planned to write about today regarding language or culture I think I’m just going to blog about last night’s endeavours.  Basically me and my sister always look at YESASIA.CO.UK (.com If you’re in the US) which sells media like music and films and also little accessories and collectibles and also YESSTYLE.CO.UK which sells clothes and accessories.

Now YESSTYLE had an offer on where most items were 10% off AND everything had FREE SHIPPING. Oh mi gawd. My sister and I decided to wait (stupidly) till the last day of the offer, which was yesterday, to try and take advantage of this offer and buy whatever we wanted despite having countless emails about this offer. Long story short, I ended up scouring the Korean Fashion section for hours until 10:30pm on my laptop and, when I thought I’d figured out what I wanted, realized I didn’t have any money in my account, only in cash. My sister then told me we could just ask our dad to use his card and then give him the money back, which ended up being fine, but then my dad told me he didn’t want me paying for it on my laptop because apparently it doesn’t have enough security. IT DOES. But that’s beside the point.

I ended up using the PC downstairs to pay for my stuff which was a fag and a half because I had to log into everything again and then I had to find my items which I ended up changing! By now it’s around 11:00pm which is when my sister decides to tell me I’ve only got about 50 minutes left to decide which items I want to we can pay for them. I’m going nuts here, we’re both starting to go past the exhausted stage into hyper and so after trailing around the T-shirt dresses (which my sister hates) and enduring my sibling’s constant insults about how I’m not picking the right clothes for my figure, I was set on two items.

At this point it’s getting a bit crazy and my sister is doing Gok Wan impressions in an attempt to try and get me to buy something more flattering, although she did like the grey hangy, loosey top I bought. I’m just more of a comfy person!! (I do love fashion though.) We did eventually buy them…and then sat around in her room till 12:00pm laughing at ourselves.

Oh what is my life.

Here’s the items I bought!

aaaaaand I can’t find the other item so if it’s been removed, looks like I got there just in time! Once it comes in the post though I’ll put up a picture of it! Both items are T-shirt dresses under the tab Korean Fashion, Dresses, T-Shirt dresses.

-Since I haven’t planned any posts yet (although don’t get me wrong I’ll still be posting!) please, if you have any questions about ANYTHING or requests for a post, comment in the ask me section! I’ll either reply directly or write an article on it. Ta!

I've always been curious about eating live seafood like octopus and squid, how do you eat it? What does it taste like? Is it freaky? So I asked my friends from Korea and Japan about eating live seafood and they told me quite a bit actually. Some replies were online so I have had to edit the text a little and some I received in person. All of them have tried live seafood at least once in their life, this is what they told me!

I talked to my friend Yui from Japan about seafood and she asked me if I'd eaten octopus (cooked) before. I said I hadn't and that it looked a bit scary and she said it's good but it "only looks bad!" She said there's also たこのおどりぐい (Tako no odori gui) which means literally 'octopus that's dancing food' and that there are few people who challenge themselves to eat it. I asked her to elaborate on eating live seafood a bit more and she explained to me (in Japanese).

"There are mainly living octopus and squid/cuttlefish, shrimp/prawn/lobster etc and the these things you eat are called odorigui, dancing food! Say, octopus, you eat it's leg in thin broiled seaweed in case it starts shaking. When I eat the moving octopus it sticks to my mouth."

Another Japanese friend of mine, who will go by the name Rice, explained that he had eaten live seafood but couldn't remember in detail as he was very young. He did explain that "we call that odorigui. Odori means dance and gui means food so food dances in your mouth when you are eating it!"

I asked my friend from Korea, Jungwon, what she thought of eating live seafood and she said:

 "OH YEAH! It is delicious when we eat that with 초장(Chojang)."

Chojang is a special sweet and spicy red-chilli pepper sauce.

"I didnt like it when I was young, but maybe I am being old...hahaha.  It just feels somewhat good when we are chewing that. And I use many sauce so I can feel just sauce!! But finally, it is delicious *.*"

Finally, my other friend from Korea, J.W, elaborated nicely after I asked him if he's eaten live seafood before.
"Yes I've eaten a live piece of small octopus. I'm not that into it though." How does it taste? "Well it doesn't taste bad because you have it with some sesame oil that has some salt in it so it tastes aromatic. You have it on a plate, yes it's hard to chew but they are served to be cut into small pieces so that you can eat them smoothly."

Here I got a little confuzzled because he said it's cut into small pieces and so I assumed after it's been cut up it would be dead. Apparently not.

"Ahhhh it's still alive but you know what? It means fresh, and when you chew in your mouth its almost gone. You don't have to worry about it at all lol just very small pieces you'd swallow."
Are there lots of places to eat live seafood in Korea?

"Yeah there are some but not everywhere on the street lol eating live octopus is somewhat common here but it doesn't mean we love it. On the other hand there are also some koreans who cant handle it."

Nice.

So I guess summarised, in Japan it's slightly less common to eat moving seafood than it is in Korea, but that does not mean it's rare, good GOD no. Both countries have different styles of serving and eating and I suppose Korea is more on the hot and spicy side of the sauce than the cool seaweed in Japan. But who knows! It's not like I've interviewed the whole population, in fact I probably could have done with a few more opinions, so this is not a generalized summary it's just based on my friends experiences. If I hear of any more from other friends I will add it to this post and share it in an update. :) Later guys!

(You can find tons of videos of people eating live seafood on youtube so check it out!)

What sushi is...

The times I’ve dragged my friends to YO!sushi and heard the same excuses. ‘I don’t wanna go because I hate sushi!’ ‘NO, I can’t eat raw fish it’s…ewargh.’

Just no.

Tons and tons and tons of people won’t go to Japanese restaurants because they’re scared of eating sushi or they say they don’t like it. The fact is about 90% of these people don’t actually know what sushi is. Not really.

What do you think sushi is? Raw fish? Like salmon wrapped in seaweed with a bit of rice? Sushi is often misunderstood as just raw fish but it’s actually rice with vinegar. The su- part means vinegar.

Now that’s cleared up, how about some facts about sushi?

Sushi is very popular in Japan and thus the sushi making business is extremely competitive with many restaurants personalizing their own secret methods of making the vinegared rice which they’ll share with no-one.

A lot of businesses make their sushi more attractive by shaping it into animals or characters from manga series’ and some even do personal sushi shapings.

It can actually take up to 10 years to qualify as a professional sushi chef.

Today’s sushi actually began as a type of fast food in the 19th century!

The classic sushi is an oval of rice which has been formed in the hand and is topped with things SUCH AS raw fish, cooked seafood, eggs, other vegetables.

Now you know a bit more about sushi get dowwwn to a Japanese restaurant and EAT.THEIR.FOOD.
The worst thing I’ve ever heard one of my friends assume is that the only thing Japanese restaurants serve is sushi of which she hadn’t actually tried! Japanese food consists of more than just sushi! There are plenty of meat dishes and vegetables and gorgeous desserts (sweet and savoury)! Don’t be put off by raw fish, you don’t need to go anywhere near it if you don’t want to so get dowwwwwwn there!

I may do a post on my experiences at YO!sushi at some point! ;D It’s 10pm now so night guys! Oyasuminasai!

Update!

Hey guys, just wanted to let you know I am on two sites (with the exact same blog). The other site is Wordpress and I'll link it HERRREEEEE: http://mynihongoandhangul.wordpress.com/

If you're asking why I'm using two for the exact same blog, well, I just want to see which one is the best for me so I'll be using them both for maybe about 2 weeks or so just to see which one is better for my blog. At the moment BlogSpot is very very easy to use and I love it but then again wordpress allows me to personalize my blog a lot more. We'll see! If you wanna check out my wordpress blog just follow the link I've given you but if not then just chill here! Taaa luv!


Homepage  of my wordpress blog

Edit: ended up changing the background colour to a nice mint because this green wouldn't allow the writing to show up very well!

Korean pronunciation - American vs English?

Okay, as I'm currently focusing on my Korean at the moment, I thought I'd help some people out by bringing to light the problem with learning pronunciation online. Of course learning how to pronounce certain sounds is going to be easier if you have someone to practice with in person but for a lot of us learning is done through books and online sources. If you've found a site that includes audio files so you can hear the pronunciation then you may as well skip this post, but I'm just going to assume that anyone reading it either;
1.) Cannot open the audio files
2.) Doesn't have a site that includes said files/is learning from a book or printed sheets
3.) Is deaf

So the issue I have with some online learning resources regarding pronunciation is the difference between American sounds and English sounds. In fact BRITISH sounds. There are Scottish, Irish and Welsh people as well y'know! And god there's even the Australian accent and New Zealand all that jazz but to keep it simple I'm going to just use Standard American vs Standard English.

Firstly I'm going to give you an example. Say the word 'saw'  in an American accent and then in an English accent (if you can). The '-aw' is pronounced differently.

(The best e.g. I can give it is English - 'soh' and American 'sah').

Some online sites use the word 'saw' to represent how the letter ㅓ (Romanization: 'eo') should be pronounced, eo = aw.
A further example; the word '저' (Romanization: 'Jeo' meaning 'I'). An American person would probably say it correctly whereas if we used the standard English pronunciation of saw it wouldn't be right (unless you're from Yorkshire in which case a lot of people may say it correctly). 저 would be pronounced 'jaw' or 'juh'. Which one you ask? Well it's somewhere in the middle. Don't worry guys I'm going to vid this up soon!

This is something I've come across and there isn't really an easy way to fix it apart from actually stating on your site that you're going to be going by American pronunciation/English pronunciation. Most sites will go by American pronunciation either because they are American or because they feel like most people will assume American pronunciation anyway. I haven't come across one site yet that states which pronunciation they're using probably because it's only minor details that differ between English and American. It is however best to go by American pronunciation just because we all assume that's the way it is anyway, but I'd like to see it stated on sites more that way people actually know for sure they're saying it correctly. This isn't solely Korean pronunciation either but the letter ㅓ is one which you MUST know in Korean but this pronunciation thing can be applied to any language, Japanese etc.

So that's just something I'd like to get out there! The difference between American and English accents when looking up pronunciations in books or online without being able to hear an example. Please be careful about how you're pronouncing something and as a general rule just go by American pronunciation. I'll example this shiz on vid soon so over and out guys!