First Steps

Welcome! This is my blog about my project to learn Korean. More background is in the "About" page.

Tomorrow at 6PM is the end of my academic semester so I'll have a lot more time to do literally whatever I want with my life, including learning Korean. May 1st is my "official start date" for this project, but I'm using this remaining time in April to get started on Korean and build some habits.

Since I wrote the Method and Resources page I've changed some of the resources and methods I'll be using. After all, no plan survives first contact. I'm settling into a daily schedule (more a list of habits really rather than a set schedule) that hopefully hits all the skills I want to focus on. Right now, especially since my project hasn't "officially" started, my goal is to simply build habits. This means prioritizing low-effort, fun, low-commitment activities that are ideally portable.

Here's what I'm doing everyday:

- Memrise with a daily goal of 5 words a day. I'm working on a course with the 100 most useful adjectives. I'm not a big flashcard guy so I set a small daily goal. But I find myself actually having more fun than I thought using Memrise, and I'll probably up that goal to 15 a day. It's nice for moments like waiting in line, sitting on the T, or waiting for a commercial to end. I'm avoiding courses to teach grammar or the language in general, because I'd rather create my own flashcards to deal with anything but straight up vocabulary. Fortunately people have made courses with vocabulary lists from common learning materials like TTMIK (Talk to Me in Korean) or TOPIK (some test that certifies that you know Korean).

- Watching "The Sound of the Heart 마음의 소리". This is a Netflix TV show about an aspiring cartoonist Jo Seok 조석 and his weird family. I'm not a big drama guy but I've found this show pretty funny so far. On the first day I watch the full half hour episode without subtitles to view it as a native speaker would. The second day, I rewatch the first half (about 15 min) with Korean subtitles in order to pick up on things I missed and start mining the dialogue for sentences and vocabulary. The third day, I do the same with the second half. The next day I start again with the next episode. I'm avoiding English subtitles for as long as I can and trying to learn as much as possible using Korean only.

- One lesson of Pimsleur Korean 1. My issue with Korean is that there's huge gaps in my knowledge, so I'm starting from scratch with Pimsleur. I have an Audible account and was delightfully surprised to find out that I had saved up enough credits to purchase Pimsleur Korean 1. So I'm working through a lesson a day (as prescribed by Dr. Pimsleur himself). Most of it is review but I'm still learning new things, like that 실레합니다 means excuse me (polite/formal). Another language-specific issue is that I often learned the casual or polite way to say things, but never learned the formal/written way to say them because I never had to, since I never worked or went to school in a Korean environment or wrote anything. Pimsleur starts off with teaching the more polite/formal ways to say things, which is more useful if you're a language learner who doesn't necessarily know Koreans or have a Korean family yet.

- Listening to Korean music in the background. While I've been working on my last finals and essays for this semester, I've switched my usual jazz and fusion with Korean hip-hop. When listening to foreign languages, I like underground hip-hop for a number of reasons. First, it's not pop. I just generally don't like pop in general, and I especially don't like K-Pop. Hip-hop, especially the underground stuff produced by randos on the internet, usually has a sound I like more. Also hip-hop has way more language in the same time frame, which is useful to adjusting to the sounds of the language. They spend more actual time saying Korean words, contain more content, and usually repeat themselves less. Also, rap is sort of the pinnacle of spoken language, in the sense that it's more advanced than normal speech. If you can understand rap, you probably can understand everything else. I mean I'm a college-educated native speaker of American English and most of this Andre 3000 verse goes right over my head. Right now it's just in the background so I'm not actually paying attention to anything. But it can't hurt to hear more Korean, and in the future I plan on taking actual songs and dissecting them.

Here's some things I'm working on but not daily:

- Making Anki flashcards. Anki is an SRS (Spaced-Repetition System) flashcard app. I've used it in the past with limited success. First, I haven't made a habit of it in the past, and stopped using the cards. Second, I was pulling decks from online sources instead of making them myself and tailoring them to the skills I need to build. Right now I'm making several kinds of flashcards.

1) Pronunciation. Korean has some special rules for pronouncing words that aren't immediately obvious.

Front: 옛날에
Back: [Recording of word]

A beginner might see that and pronounce it as "yet-nal-eh". But in this case, the ㅅ becomes a ㄴ and the ㄹ becomes elided into the next block. So the word should be pronounced "yen-na-re" or "앤나레". Since I've been practically illiterate in Korean, I have to learn all the spelling quirks of 한글 like a child first learning to read.

2) Listening. This is to practice connecting sounds with written words I know, and also to just practice listening in general.

Front: [Example sentence recording]
Back: 선생님은 학생들과 박물관에 갔다
The teacher went to the museum with the students

The 한글 is to connect the sound of the language with the written form. The translation is because I want to focus on the use of 과 as "with [someone]" and the word for museum, 박물관.

3) Vocabulary.

Front: 재 혹시 어디 좀 아픈애야?

혹시 일자리가 있습니까?

Back: by any chance/happen to/in any case

The bolded word shows me what word I'm reviewing. The sentences provide context and sometimes I have pictures to provide more context. This helps avoid the issue of words with multiple meanings, because the context I choose will only contain one particular meaning. In this particular card, the first line is from 마음의 소리 and the picture is from the scene that the line is from. The second line is from Naver Dictionary as an example of the use of 혹시.

4) Reading comprehension.

Front: "너 내가 귀여워보이면 시력이 안좋은거야."

Back: "If you think I'm cute your eyesight must be bad."

These cards are to test whether or not I can understand a written sentence, practicing grammar and vocabulary. This example comes from the "Humans of Seoul" Facebook page. The sentence is a quote from the girl in the photo, who was describing the time a boy messaged her on KakaoTalk saying that she looked cute in her profile photo. Generally speaking, I try to find sentences that only have one thing I don't know, whether that's a grammar particle or a new vocabulary word. This way each card is teaching me something new but isn't overwhelming me with multiple new things. Having the whole sentences also helps me connect words I only know aurally with their written forms.

Some great sources of sentences I've been using so far are 마음의 소리, Naver Dictionary, Humans of Seoul, and Howtostudykorean.com's lessons.

- Practicing Handwriting. I made myself a little handwriting practice sheet in order to make my handwriting a little more natural and less blocky/childish. I used a handwriting font and Excel to make it.

The full thing is a "pangram" of sorts - a sentence that contains every Korean letter. It isn't exactly analogous to an English pangram because English letters look the same no matter what context they are found, while Korean consonants look slightly different depending on if they're a beginning or ending consonant.

- Grammar Lessons on Howtostudykorean.com. I'm, similar to Pimsleur, starting from square one and working my way through the grammar lessons. It's blowing my mind learning how words I've used since I was a baby actually work. I plan to make this a daily activity.

Once I finish school, I plan on making an actual daily schedule, something like this:

- Wake up, eat breakfast

- Walk to cafe while listening to a Pimsleur lesson

- Work on one/two lessons on HTSK.com

- Watch an episode of 마음의 소리 and create flashcards

- Eat lunch

- Listen to an Iyagi dialogue and study in detail

- Work out

- Eat second lunch

- Read a Humans of Seoul page and create flashcards

- Walk home and re-listen to the Iyagi dialogue

I'll figure out the details. I start a full-time job in July so I want to cram as much Korean as I can into my life during May and June. Once July starts it might look something like this

- Ride T to work, listen to old Iyagi dialogue

- Work, do Memrise/Anki cards in free moments

- Eat lunch, watch 마음의 소리

- Work, do Memrise/Anki cards in free moments

- I'll figure out the rest later

I'm sure this will change drastically anyway.

So that's basically how my project is starting. I'm planning on updating this blog once a week, maybe more if I'm so inclined. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be writing about. It might be just updates on my progress or methods. It might have interesting cultural or vocabulary notes. We'll see.