Phantom Of The BumpSide

[robroy]

Good day Phantom Rob and FoPAR Rob,

Well all of us Robs have stuff in common then!

Phantom Rob, I am truly impressed by both the fact that we share a mower, and that you happened to find my mower pic! Your rate of FORDification assimilation is truly impressive; I've never seen a new member become FORDified as quickly and thoroughly!

FoPAR Rob, you've certainly got me on having lived in Phantom Rob's home town--well done! And you can always pick up Chinese later if you want to push this triad of Robs to the next level. Don't let what folks say about Chinese being tough deter you. Us two Robs having done it proves that any Rob can do it.

Phantom Rob, I sure like your War Horse photo! I think that's awesome that you let your kids (and neighborhood kids) work the spray cans for you--way to outsource! My truck #50 would undoubtedly look better with a fresh spray can job, yet its currently drab and rusty appearance increases both its Stealth Technology and its advanced Anti-Theft System.

Robroy

[PhantomoftheBumpside]

Chinese can be really tough when you work your way into it backwards from Korean....

Korea uses Chinese as a way to clarify or describe when there are multiple possibilities. I was actually thinking about a Korean buddy of mine from a long time ago when I shot that pic of War Horse in front of the Sumner Station.

His name is Kwon, Oh Yuk. Kwon being his family name and Oh Yuk being his given name which was given to him through his family's naming formula. (Kinda like we name our kids after us, aunts and uncles, only with with set rules).

He used to get upset when I would tell him that Oh Yuk meant "Station number 5" and he would snap back "No! Not 'station number 5'! Five Pages of History! The hanmun different!" It was fun to yank his chain a little.

Of course it would be even tougher to back into Chinese from Japanese. They have simplified and modified the Chinese characters that they use quite a lot compared to the Koreans.

So yeah, I can read and write some Chinese and even speak a little, but when I do that I am having to go from English to Korean to Chinese in my head, and while reading/writing I am pretty much going from English to Korean.

Thanks for the welcome FoPAR and Sargentrs.

Sumner is not my home town. I am from KY. But I got to know the dirt in Georgia and Korea very well, and now I am residing in WA.

[69FLATBED]

to the site Phantom!

[robroy]

Good afternoon Rob,

That's interesting about Korean, Japanese and Chinese. I've only been peripherally aware of how Korean relates to Chinese. Japanese I'm exposed to every day since I've worked under contract for Hitachi since summer 2010, but I don't speak any. I've focused on Mandarin Chinese with traditional characters since 1996. I realized back then that I was going to have to choose a single language and stick to it to make much progress, because I don't have enough spare IQ floating around for more than that.

But since you lived in Korea for a while you no doubt know Korean in a very practical way. That's great. I've never visited China, and all these years have been learning in college, on my own at home, and from a tutor I've hired. So my Chinese is really stiff and proper from all that "book learning," and it's not practical--I sound too formal and old fashioned to Chinese people, and I lack a lot of modern popular vocabulary that I'd naturally pick up if I lived there. And people use modern slang so often, that I get lost very easily, even in simple conversations. There's something to be said for both paths to language learning I guess, but I tend to favor the way you did it--to learn in the native environment. That's how we all learned our first languages and it sure worked well for that. If only airplane tickets weren't thousands of dollars!

I liked your story about your Korean friend's name a lot. It's funny when foreign names happen mean something weird in English. My buddy worked with a guy a few years ago named Bong. He even scanned the guy's business card and sent it to me to prove it.

Robroy

[PhantomoftheBumpside]

Thanks for the welcome FlatbedTroy. I have a CR Passport (Keys), lived in Davie and Coral Gables for a while while I worked on contract for a large computer company in Boca (no names). Met BB King, Lucille and Jimmy Buffet at the same benefit concert once, have wandered aimlessly around in the glades, Hollywood/Miami, and the Ft. Walton area, and got a 3d degree sun burn on my back and legs from passing out on the beach in PC.

Fun state!

[PhantomoftheBumpside]

It's been a long time since I was in Korea and started my own personal explorations of the language... one of the first things I did when I got there was buy a Korean to English (yeah Korean word in Hangul, definition in English is hard to look stuff up when you don't know Korean) dictionary and make a chart of the structure of the words. The structure is basically consonant-vowel or consonant-vowel-consonant and my chart was basically a 45 degree angle / with the beginning consonants along the angle, vowels and diphthongs (grouped in a chart to show combinations) in the middle, and the consonants again on the bottom line, each paired with their Romanized pronunciation (and the way pronunciation changes depending on position).

This is one of the other fun things I got to do in Korea...

The ROK 9th Infantry Division is also known as the White Horse Division, they made us all honorary White Horses when we graduated their Ranger School. This should explain the name for my '68 F250 Camper Special.

Hard to believe it's been 25 years....