I've been fiddling around with all of the widgets on my dashboard (oh Mac, so cutesy and untechnical-sounding...) and I've now set up an English Korean translator right on my desktop. I'm really doubting the competence of this little widget, though. The translation goes in either direction--if you have text in the Korean box, you can go to English and vice versa. A fun game: type in an English word, translate into Korean and then back to English then back to Korean etc. For instance, starting from the word "few" you get spit back:
some
what kind of
what kind of type it peels
It this it peels the shedding of blood of what kind of type to peel
Will peel to peel and shedding of blood of what kind of type it peels the emission of it blood of this

Shedding of blood? Emission of blood?!? I'm seriously not going to use this widget to write any important documents, esp. those in which I hope not to come off as a blood-thirsty psycho--which is most.

Speaking of important documents, I wrote a speech today for class. The topic is "Your Trip." Actually, due to some pronouncation confusion I almost wrote a speech about "My Dream" in which two of my fellow ETAs came in first and second in the Tour de France. I would've sworn the teacher said "Dreemp" but I guess it was "Treep." Not hard to do given that the whole d/t differentiation thing doesn't exist in Korea. Anyway, the whole speech is in Korean, but I thought I'd share it, just so everyone can see how eloquent I've been sounding lately.

FRANCE
I am Janaki O'Brien [actually, in Korean, Oh-buh-lah-een]. My hobbies include watching movies and reading books, but I most like to travel [kind of a lie]. From 1998 to 2002 I studied the French language therefore I wanted to go to France. On July 7, 2002 I took a plane to Paris [total lie]. I went alone. I brought clothes and a toothbrush and money. I brought few things. I wanted to stay in a nice hotel but I stayed in a cheap hotel. [So far this trip is sounding like a real winner, me alone in my cheap hotel room with only my toothbrush]. The food was delicious so I ate often. I ate cheese and bread and grapes. At lunch I ate next to the Seine. Every day I took pictures and took walks. I went to art museums and so my mood was good. On July 14th I went to Chartres. [Try spelling out the word "Chartres" in a language that does not allow two consonants next to each other. I mean, in Korean the word "Sprite" is actually five syllables: "suh-puh-rah-ee-tuh." For Chartres I came up with "Chuh-ah-ruh-tuh-ruh"---not so smooth.] It was very beautiful [implied pronoun...this sentence is actually a single word long]. I like France so I was happy.

This speech took me three hours to write.