parakkum

In my process of learning Korean, I've been on the lookout for whatever free listening material I can find. Recently, I've been borrowing littlestar's iPod and listening to podcasts from Radio Free Asia -- and they're excellent learning listening.

According to the Radio Free Asia website, RFA "is a private, non-profit corporation broadcasting news and information in 9 languages to listeners in Asia." Wikipedia helpfully notes that RFA was founded by the CIA, and continues as a propaganda arm of the United States in Asia.

Which is pretty much what I expected from any radio station named "Radio Free [Blah]".

I love it as a learning tool because: (1) it's free; (2) it's news, a format I'm quite comfortable listening to; (3) the podcasts are long, from half an hour to an hour and a half, all chock-a-block with talking.

My competence in Korean is not yet to the point where I can tell just how propagandistic the broadcasts are. I'm more at the level of "Oh, hey -- they're talking about Vietnam's entry into the WTO!"

A quick check on iTunes shows RFA podcasts available in Korean, Khmer (Cambodian), Mandarin, Cantonese, Laotian, Uyghur (spoken by the Turkic people of Xinjiang, China -- they've been in the news recently due to Chinese government crackdowns), Vietnamese, and Burmese.

I might doubt their news value, but I heartily recommend them as learning resources.

In his Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder tells us that to best build new languages, we should learn other languages outside our own group:

Looking at some non-Indo-European languages, such as Quechua, Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, or Swahili, can be eye-opening.

...and...

If you don't know another language well, you're pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English. Checking out grammars (or this html file) can help you avoid duplicating English grammar, and give you some neat ideas to try out; but the real difficulty is in the lexicon. If all you know is English, you'll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary.

Korean definitely has some key structural differences from English, and they let you put together some cool sentences. Consider this statement in English (taken from my Korean language text):

"This picture is the one we took last year on Grandmother's birthday."

The Korean sentence works like this:

"This picture the last-year-during-Grandmother's-birthday-taken picture is."

So instead of having to hack everything onto the end of the sentence, we can apply the whole situational description as an adjective.

This brings up a second interesting point -- how the Korean text presents things. From my point of view, Korean adjectives are basically "descriptive verbs." Consider the color black (and apologies for my horrid transliteration here):

"to be black" (the infinitive) - kkamahda
"black dog" (more like an adjective in the English sense) - kkaman ke
"the dog is black" (more like a verb in the English sense) - kenun kkameyo

The textbook makes a sharp distinction between this case ("black dog") and the case above ("the at-Grandmother's-birthday-taken picture"). But from my perspective, they're the same situation -- a way of constructing a descriptive about a noun. The textbook is good overall, so I wonder if they tried different approaches and found that native English speakers become confused by the relative interchangeability of adjective-like and verb-like elements.