notes on my english

2025-09-14

random life update: i found another jan Awa in the wild!

so number of jan Awa/Ava's involved in my life: 5

• me
• two random kids from some american news
• ava's space
• the dressed mole rat

also apparently you can add other people's website buttons without getting permission i guess? idk

today i found this website and decided i'm allowed to be weird with my language!¹ so here's some things about how i'll use english on this blog. i want to stay true to my style of using language (ok what's wrong with me usually i say idiolect) while keeping this decently readable to monolinguals.

so here's how i use english, other languages will be talked about later and this will be updated as i procrastinate my work. oh wait there's a word for this and it's 'style guide'

loaning/calquing from korean or toki pona²

mainly, i'll be using korean words a lot. for loaning korean, there's three main ways:

• hangul
• revised romanization
• whatever you call using the qwerty keyboard to type korean but instead of using hangul i use latin letters like this: dlrjs gksrnrdjek³

sometimes when romanizing, i will break the rules, like hakwon (학원, supposed to be hagwon). usually it's when the 받침⁴ is voiced, because most of the time it's voiceless and i will go 'oh cool 받침=voiceless' and don't really bother to write a voiced batchim. also writing ㅐ as ae instead of e for example 수행 -> suheng (supposed to be suhaeng)⁵⁶

if you don't speak korean and you encounter something that looks like korean, you can look it up and chances are the dictionary will have it.⁷

but here's a list of words i frequently use in korean. as you'll see most of them are related to school.

• hakwon/학원: (i am going to butcher this) like an after school school but like not by the school... i mean like ohh yeah private academy! that's the word!!! also if you're in middle school or higher it's like a cram school chances are. except for my english hakwon which i love because they haven't fallen into the trap of being a cram school (also called ipshi hakwon 입시 학원 by me)
• naeshin/내신: i actually only vaguely know what this means. in-school tests that count for your grades. but usually when i talk about naeshin period or complain about naeshin it's usually gonna be the midterm and finals aka the jipil.
• jipil/지필: short for 지필평가. i don't know what this is in english but stuff like midterm and finals and suneung and all that stuff? the tests that aren't performance based assessments? (duckduckgo and google have failed me⁸) ok i asked chatgpt and it says 'written test'. wow i could use that of a literal translation? cool.
• suheng/수행: see this⁵
• suneung/수능: college entrance test in korea
• 특목고: i hate how ㅡ is romanized so i will write this in korean only or translate word by word to 'special purpose high school' or 'special high school' or 'fancy schmancy high school' (ok that isn't a word by word translation) and it is a fancy schmancy high school.
• jabnote: in korean, it's 잡노트, short for 잡생각노트 (random thought note) but in english i have decided it's a combination of jabber and note. cuz why not it fits perfectly.
• choding: human in elementary school. i use joongding, goding, and deding much less. they each mean the same thing but for middle school, high school, and college.
• flea-hit: to cram. actually the korean word is 벼락치기 and yes 치기 means to hit but 벼락 means lightning, not flea which is 벼룩 but i messed up and it's used once in my blog.
• 수박 겉핥기/halting subaks: literally 'to lick the surface of watermelons' or to only try things on a surface level. and yes i do pronounce 핥 as [halt]

and toki pona. there are three words i frequently loan from toki pona.

• la: the context marker. there's a lot of things this could be used for but mainly 1. topic marker (think of korean 는 but used only in the start of sentences. for example i use pens and pencils, but sharps la i never use) 2. if-then thing (for example my brother hits me la i hit him back)
• kijetesantakalu: raccoons. big brain people like to say the word Protocynoid or smth. i also use them for raccoon dogs in east asia, known as 너구리 in korea and tanuki (probably? also too lazy to get the font) in japan (i think they're actually different species) also check out kijeila's post on kijetesantakalu
• ok actually you know what? i forgot what word i was gonna say.

punctuation

capitalization la, i mostly use lowercase. sometimes it's all lowercase, sometimes proper nouns are capitalized, sometimes, actually most of the time it's mixed. like i will not capitalize proper nouns that i use a lot (usually names of me/my friend group or countries/languages) like korea, english, ava, esperanto etc. the only exception is the US which is pretty confusing because us (the first person plural pronoun) is a common word. like what does 'us citizens mean'? are we the citizens or are they citizens of the united states?

i use full stops, commas, question marks, and exclamation marks the way you'd expect. i do use the oxford comma, i sometimes use the full stop and question mark to indicate tone, like why not. i just like to do that? i like to use 'these quotation marks and use "these for quotation marks inside quotation marks"' but sometimes i use "these" to specify something was said (or vocalized i guess?) and 'these' to specify something was a thought.

emoticons

why not? i don't use a lot of emojis but i do use things like :D :> :/ a lot because it's one of the things i can do easily on my tablet. when i'm using my phone or any galaxy device i like to use thorns for mouths. unfortunately i'm writing on my tablet and therefore i am too lazy to get a thorn.

#english #kokosila