#on the demotivated artist tangent

[strooples]

IDK if I already apologized but I’m super super sorry guys since my motivation to draw/make arts is very sporadic. Most of the time I’m basically running on 10% energy, drained from work + other life stuff ;~;.

I’ll eventually make more fanarts! I have no clue how consistent the fanart inspirations will be though bc I get intensely interested in some things at a time, then suddenly lose the interest, and maybe 3 months or 3 years later I’d suddenly gain it again??? Sometimes, it’s also not that I fade out of interest but that I lose things to talk about, or how I often fall a bit behind (if the franchise is continuing, or if most people are ahead in the show/story/game). ((Heyo, at least the good news is that I’ve been interested long enough that some people know me as the girl obsessed with lego ninjas and Kai Hiwatari lolol))

But to get back on topic: I really want to make more drawings, since I made this blog to interact with others (art seems to be the best way to engage with people for me?? esp since my abilities to make funny memes/jokes are sorta limited/bad).

Then again, IDK how to break into already-established circles who enjoy similar interests. I like the Bakuten Shoot fandom, but I’m too nervous to approach anyone even if you guys seem all so cool :(. Or I like Ninjago, but it’s a super super big fandom and a handful of people with interesting theories seem to pop up again and again, so it seems hard to be a newbie to the online spaces bc you may end up talking to no one. And there’s other stuff I barely engage with, but I think the fandoms seem chill + hilarious to be around (currently coming to mind is Ace Attorney, Hades, and JoJo fandoms). But I don’t exactly know where to begin to draw stuff or to talk about the stories.

So IG that is my dilemma…

I’ve never been the greatest with interacting with people IRL, and it sort of pours into online where perhaps physical impressions aren’t an issue (you don’t have to think about stuff like body language and tone of voice). But ofc things like banter, casual conversation, the right amount + style of mutual exchanges, and not overthinking things still seem difficult to me.

But yeah, hopefully I’ll have some motivation and ideas the next time a bit of free time clears up?? And I hope to have more interactions over stuff we all enjoy!! Maybe it gets easier over time, online at least?

[koreanstudentiseul]

My Language Learning Experience (2006-2019)

Hello~ as requested, here is my language journey/experience post. So fair warning this is a very long post. Way longer than I meant it to be, but I did warn this when you guys asked for it so I’m sorry in advance.

For this, I’m going chronologically, but I’ll mark it clearly if you wanna just read specific bits, I don’t blame anyone who wants to skip sections it is a lot of text. With that said, let’s begin~

1st: Spanish.

My first experience learning language was in Primary school, at aged 10 (due to a late birthday) when we were surprised by a sparkly new class that wasn’t offered in the school before. Spanish. I don’t remember much from this point being nearly 14 years ago but I remember finding the class difficult because the teacher wasn’t very approachable and seemed to play favourites. At least in the context of only helping certain pupils rather than all the pupils. I picked up a few things, like 1-10 and some animal names but that was about it.

I continued Spanish in High school as it was a mandatory subject in the first 2 years, I learned more from these classes mostly I think because they were more used to teaching the subject but I can’t say that with any certainty. I have mixed memories from this time as we were forced to endless exercises that didn’t explain anything, yes/no style corrections which don’t help anyone, and my teacher told me off for knowing the answer (I still remember this clearly, she asked what the word for fish was, I said pez. Then she asked what the plural was, I said peces and she scolded me for knowing that. To this day, I don’t know why) so that was traumatising for me and meant I didn’t speak up in class again for well over a year.

At this point I’m 4 years-ish into Spanish and I think I’m doing okay, I can do the homework and the exercises with minimal issue (not always correct, but was done in a reasonable time) and we get to picking our subjects for our exams. At which point, my teacher who was talking to everyone about their choices as most did (this was to explain the exam courses and what to expect so you know what you’re choosing, which I think was a nice thing but they stopped doing this sadly) and when it was my turn, it was “implied” that if I picked the subject I wouldn’t be allowed to take the class. I was told that I wasn’t smart enough to pass so I couldn’t take either language course and that I’d to pick another department.

This knocked any confidence I had with languages, I thought I’d been doing okay, at parents night I always had good comments so I don’t know what prompted this delightful comment. And with it being their word against mine I couldn’t prove it was said, but I knew the school would have sided with them anyway. This is also the reason I have Spanish as a want to learn rather than can speak because aside from my fish trauma, I can count to 99 and do basic insa chitchat and that’s all I retained. Oh and the words for library and sharpener, because my favourite place is a library and un sacapuntas is just something that’s always amused me for reasons unknown.

2nd: Korean

So, fun fact, I’m surprised that Korean’s here because I actually had been counting it as 3rd until I actually thought about it for this. My derpiness aside, Korean comes in at the beginning of my 5th year so would be late 2011 (Our school year starts mid-August) when my friend introduced me to K-Pop and oh boy my mp3 player has never looked the same since. It was a serious exam year, so no great progress was possible, especially with trying to get into college. I didn’t find TTMIK till much later than this but for this point in time, I found the lyrics on live performances really intriguing. I mean it’s nothing I was used to seeing on our equivalent shows, they never had the lyrics up for songs, in fact I don’t remember them telling you the artist half the time was towards the end of their broadcasting time. That tangent aside, the words just looked really beautiful and by September that year I was enamoured by the sound of the language, so I started looking up things about Korean in between the onslaught of homework and assessments. Also according to old social media I was subconsciously singing it from the December onwards, so good to know that that was always a thing I did. It took me until March to be able to read enough to write and even then it crude as anything. There’s very little trace of anything from that time but I struggle to read what there is.

Sadly this is where things end here for now, exams and getting into college and having space to breathe after years of being up till 2am trying to get all my work done and not having weekends cause I had to study too kind of pushed it to the back burner. What can I say, it was the first actually free summer I’d had in 5 years and I wanted it to be a detox before college started just in case it was the same set up of no sleep. And then I bumped into the aforementioned Spanish teacher again over the summer who made a comment to the effect of “Bet you’re glad you didn’t take Spanish, otherwise you’d have a nasty fail on your results.” Which for one annoyed me because it implied I had any say in the matter, but also removed any confidence I had regained since our last encounter.

3rd: Japanese

Now this is going to be really underwhelming, you’ve been warned. So I picked up Japanese in exam season 2012 (’cause I clearly didn’t have enough going on) and if I recall correctly used Japanesepod101 for it. I just followed their podcasts so I never learned to read just speaking/listening really. I suppose the 3 alphabets scared me off some, still kinda does scare me but I have a plan of action now so it’s a long term goal rather than wishful/fearful thinking. Still not sure what prompted this though, maybe an anime revival, or just finally caving since I’d wanted to for years.

Anyway, I got through the most basic level on JP101, and a little into the next one when as previous stated getting into college/return of the Spanish teacher caused a little bit of a crisis and I fell away from languages. I also have retained basically no Japanese, and this bothers me so I look forward to getting back to where I was.

2nd (again): Korean

Oh hi, Korean’s back again. Okay this time it’s gonna be a little longer, this goes up until the day I’m posting this. So I picked Korean back up in 2013. At this point I found TTMIK (through yahoo answers would you believe, they hadn’t come up in my search for learning Korean back then). I did level 1 and then I think only got to lesson 4 of level 2 before college hit like a tonne of bricks. And then we have another gap.

We come back in yet again in 2017. I never stopped listening to K-pop, sorta dipped in and out of dramas in that time very lazily, but didn’t really learn anything between 2013-2017. I had to reteach myself to read because it was really hazy and only half remembered, no surprise though it had been more than 5 years since I’d really touched on it at that point.

So once I could comfortably read again, I was confident to go ahead and redo level 1. I did all 25 lessons in 2 weeks. Level 2 however, that caused more trouble. Admittedly I was really ill at this point, I actually had to stop working because of it so level 2 was a lot slower than I wanted or even expected. I knew it was basically new ground in level 2 but even so it was difficult to see the time between lessons, and how much work it was to understand lessons progressively increasing.

I had hoped to get it done in 6 weeks, but it took about a year. Even now some things I still struggle with and get muddled, though it’s getting better with time which is reassuring. At this point my motivation was crippled. I wasn’t progressing, I was barely looking at Korean and I honestly thought about quitting. It also wasn’t helping that the studygram that had once been an ally turned foe showing me all the work everyone else was doing while I was doing nothing at all.

I have now since learned that it doesn’t have to be something demotivating. If someone wants to study 13 hours a day, fantastic! But that’s not for me. Some days are easier than others, I am still in recovery and that’s okay. Some days I can do 4 hours no trouble, others 5 minutes seems impossible. But I should have days off, I shouldn’t make myself ill worrying about studying. I should have time for games, and painting, and wandering round the woods with my camera, and general self care things.

In saying this, I’m guilty of saying this then ignoring it. Especially since I started using italki, where I’d have to learn 100 words, write a presentation and answer 30 questions in a week. I should push myself to try and do the homework, but at the same time, I have other things to do too and I shouldn’t torture myself with cramming homework and nothing else cause it takes so long to try and do the stuff that’s physically handed in let alone anything else.

Don’t get me wrong I love my tutor, she’s the only person who has me laughing at my mistakes, has me trying to use the language because I was terrified of doing that before. Well, I still somewhat am, but it’s getting better. Sometimes the workload is a little crazy, funny how I wanted homework now I just want to throw it all away and just do what I feel I need with the language between lessons. Not sure if it’s a phase or the initial excitement’s wore off and it’s not like wading quicksand.

So, before I start rambling I’m going to have a tl;dr summery here in regards to Korean this year.

The good from this year is hands down the studygram/studyblr community. Before I was annoying people talking about or posting about studying Korean, and these communities offered me a safe welcoming place to be where I could discuss what I was learning, and even get help when needed. I will always be eternally grateful to those who answer my questions in relation to anything, be it being unable to read handwriting, or grammar, or vocab confusion or something as simple as recommendations.

Slightly less good, no fault of Korean admittedly, probably is the difficulty in understanding and retaining information. Most of it is down to being ill. The rest, just generally me being confused because the way our schools teach English, so I don’t really know the different word classes and the rules for each. I can’t look at a word and be like, that’s an adverb, or even if I’m told ‘oh this is and adjective’ I really don’t know what to do with that information. I can do noun, and verb that’s about it. Not for lack of trying though, I have since tried to teach myself, and I have a cheat sheet but I can’t use that in a conversation so hardly a great use. It also means forming sentences is quite tricky, since if one type of word must follow another to be grammatically correct, or even make sense I have no clue about it.

Even further from good, and not something I like to dwell on too long, I feel like I’m cheating with Korean 95% of the time. With Spanish, I never had to double check anything, I could form sentences, and say what I wanted with what I knew and it was fine, but with Korean, it’s like the exactly opposite. I don’t trust myself to write anything without quadruple checking it. I wish I could just write sentences and just look up words/grammar as I need them but no every word of every sentence and even then it’s still flooded with mistakes which doesn’t help me try and wean bad habits.

So yeah I think that about wraps up Korean, but it doesn’t sound particularly good in this explanation. Hopefully next year it’s better.

4th: Turkish

Langjam number 1 (for me), and I had Turkish. Delightful experience, granted I was very ill. I had the flu that weekend because of course it had to hit that weekend, I’m not allowed to have plans apparently. But it was fun, I learned how much of a time sink grammatical concepts are. I feel like all I did was learn grammar that weekend, and I don’t remember any of it, but I still have the sentence I made at the end of the weekend:

“Merhaba, adım Rosie. Hastayım bu yüzden fazla çalışmadım. Ama, Türkçe çalışmaktan mutluyum.”

Not going to lie, all I remember clearly is Merhaba, but that’s better than nothing. I would love to go back and do it properly, or at least without the flu. One of my best friends, a very sweet bean is from Turkey and I’d love to be able to try and speak to them in Turkish a little since they speak English every day for me and yeah I’d love to be able to chat to them a little (though I still can’t type it on my laptop properly so that should perhaps be task one on returning to it).

I don’t know when I’ll go back to Turkish, but I kept all my resources and my notebook so it should be good when I do. Perhaps when I get to an intermediate level in Korean Turkish can resurface, though don’t hold me to that I may just wanna do it randomly. 

That’s it for now! Bet you’re glad you don’t have to read anymore of my boring language past ;) If I missed anything, or didn’t entirely answer the question you asked, just let me know and I’ll try and get back to you as soon as possible.  Thank you for reading, have some cookies and happy learning~ ♡