Korean Title: 소년, 소년을 만나다 (Sonyeon, Sonyeon eul Man Na Da)

The Blatherings: This short film will be making its official debut into the theatrical world on November 20, 2008. Actually, this was introduced here way back in April with an interview from one of the stars in the film: Kim Hye Sung. Then last month, at the Pusan International Film Festival, the film made its “official” appearance there.

The film’s title explains the plot pretty obviously. Kim Hye Sung and Lee Hyung Jin play as two high school students who fall in love with each other. It’s considered “based on a true story”, and the film pretty much lacks one thing: dialogue. The director chose to film it in that manner because he wanted the actor’s facial expression and body language to tell the story. Whether or not this works, if it works, then kudos to the actors and the film makers for taking this angle. Actually, kudos to them for doing something like this. Korea needs to stop being so ultra-conservative!
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Tags: film, glbt, hangukuh, kim hye sung, lee hyung jin, pusan international film festival, romance, south korea

When David wrote this entry up couple weeks ago, I decided that it’s a really good thing I am not a linguist. Really, I would make a horrible linguist because it took me eighteen years of my life to realise this uber-late revelation about myself and other people. Or at least most of the people I ran into fit this category. And no, I am not talking about drug addicts, although with the amount of meds I had to intake in the last year alone makes me feel like one.

Ahem. The point is that when I was at a karaoke / no rae bang when I was about eighteen, I was singing Final Fantasy X’s “Suteki Da Ne” in Japanese, and I noticed that I was able to sing at a higher pitch than most English songs. In fact, that was when I realised that I can sing higher in Korean and Japanese than in English. Even when I talk normally in Korean and Japanese, my voice pitch is higher. That’s when I started to pay attention to my other bilingual or multilingual speaking acquaintances and friends.

I noticed that a lot of people who speaks Japanese/English, Korean/English, and Tagalog/English all speak in a higher tone with the Asian language and in lower tones with English. Now with some people, there might be no differences or it could even be the opposite, but from my experiences, that’s what I came to the conclusion as. I am aware that this finding has to do with the differences in the language’s wavelength and all those other linguist terms I am not familiar with, but it still kind of fascinates me. Now, whenever I know someone is bilingual or multilingual, I listen and compare different pitches in the languages as my personal experiment!

Now here are two video examples . . . which some of you may have seen. I was trying to look for better videos, but in the end, this won over because they are so cracktastic, especially with the the second one.
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Tags: bilingual, english, final fantasy x, hangukuh, japan, karaoke, language, multilingual, nihongo, no rae bang, south korea, tagalog

One thing I love about being bilingual is that I can pick up these weird views on the Korean language and its romanisations systems. Apparently the recent Pusan International Film Festival not only brought films to the people, but it also brought up the discrepancies in the romanisation system. The “p” in “Pusan” apparently confused the foreigners because many of them are used to “Busan”. It strikes me funny that a single letter can cause that much confusion amongst the foreigners.

Then again, I don’t blame them for being confused. I am not confused by the romanisations, but I am stuck in the middle of the two systems: McCune-Reischauer and the Revised Romanisation. I’m the prime example of someone who grew up with the MR system in place, but then in my teens, they decided to get rid of the MR system and replace it with the RR one.
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Tags: bilingual, hangeul, hangukuh, language, mccune-reischauer, pusan international film festival, revised romanisation, south korea

While it may be presumptuous to say that I am 100% bilingual, it is safe to say that I am bilingual, only not 100%. Unlike a lot of my peers who had mixed families, where one of the parents was Korean, I was lucky enough to have a mother who spoke her native language to me 95% of the time. Of course, I’m sure living in Korea gave me an advantage over my peers who lived in the states for the most part, but I’m thinking about the ones who have lived here most of the time instead.

It’s funny. At work, my Korean ahjumma co-workers keep praising me at how I’m so lucky to speak English and Korean well. Even the other day, when I went to do my hair, I was a translator for my friend, and the stylist told me that he’s jealous that I am fortunate to speak both languages. Even my mother, gets praises from her peers, saying that she’s lucky to have a daughter who speaks Korean and English instead of just the latter. I admit, being bilingual really is a useful skill, but I will admit that my Korean’s pretty weak. Sure, I can speak, read, and write Hangeul, but my speaking skills are at the level of an eight-year old, and my reading and writing skills are of those belonging to a seven-year old.
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Tags: ahjumma, bilingual, discrimination, hangeul, hangukuh, language, south korea, united states