Day 11- Similarities and Switching

The day started out pretty similar to those before it. History moved slower but was broken up by a presentation done by two other students. I think the main stragegy of our teacher is to find one little problem with a presentation and pick it apart for fifteen minutes after our presentations (which last for about 30 minutes). The issue is that the teacher tells us to basically highlight the chapter but only emphasize "the important stuff." Which we aren't quite sure what that is. The teacher was a bit annoyed when the presenters glossed over various kings of that period as they weren't that important but kinda snapped when they did not go into detail on how the lives of civilian women had changed from the previous era. It was just weird.

So, just when you think you have something pegged, it switches itself midway though. Speaking of, I was feeling good about Korean language class until today. We recieved a Korea workbook, which was fine. The jarring bit though was when we were informed of ending consonants (which was nothing new). Most Korean sylables go CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant). But now there can be two ending consanants (which happens occasionally and isn't too bad in and of itself) but sometimes only one is pronounced (!!!) and sometimes, if there is no consonant sound, one of the bottom two consonents transfers over to the other vowel and sometimes certain vowels on the bottom change the pronounciation of the following consonants, but only it it is certain letter combinations and it's all been switched up and deviated...ARRRGH!

Ahem. I'm better now. It just was frustrating learning all of the pronouncion rules or rather, the exceptions and tweaks to the pronounciation rules. Any language has them, I suppose, but I guess I hadn't expected them to pop up so quickly. I persevere nevertheless.

And I also am quite happy, as today was day two of the experiment and got to read some more nonsense sylables. The interesting bit was that some of the words for the experiment that Jisung (the woman running the experiment) chose to be annunciated were made up like the name Tenise (rhymnes with Denise) and Balal (bah-lawl). The latter, moreso than the former, took some getting used to but I did a lot better at going through the words this time. I'm sure the researchers weren't pulling their hair out like last time (haha...just kidding, they were nice and didn't seem that frustrated by my mistakes). Here's a picture of the recording studio:

I sat in front of the microphone and spoke into it, while the students conducting the experiment sat on the other side of the glass over here:

Now who are the fearless researchers, you may ask? Here they are:
From left to right: Hyunwoong Park, Jisung Kim and Cynthia Lee. I did Cynthia's experiment last week and today was Jisung's. They are all three graduate students going for their masters degree. This particular experiment has been in the works since the winter of this past year. I feel honored, to say the least and I'd feel irate if one of my test subjects kept screwing up phrases. However, the three of them were really kind and understanding when I'd screw up (especially that first session, oh my goodness). Jisung and Cynthia told me to find them on Facebook, but I was unable to find them. I will see at least Hyunwoong and Jisung on Wednesday for the third and final experiment (as of now) so hopefully I'll figure out how to find Cynthia and Jisung online then (Hyunwoong doesn't has Facebook at the moment, but I'd add him as soon as he did). Hopefully I'll be able to run into them after the experiments in some way, shape or form.

I didn't do too much other than that. I read a little for homework and took a nap around 8 or so. Problem is that now I'm tired and just want to sleep more. Turns out I'm done with my work so why not, right? Sorry, nothing too interesting today. Maybe tomorrow?

-Reven