So my project has "officially" started as of May 7th. How's it looking so far?
Well a lot of my plan has changed since my plan outlined originally. As I actually do things in Korean and learn Korean, I find out what's working, what's not, and what I'm actually motivated to do on a daily basis. Everyday I'm doing the following:
- 1 lesson on Pimsleur Korean 1
- 15+ new words in Memrise Korean courses,
- Reading and analyzing a post on Humans of Seoul,
- Doing two lessons on HowtoStudyKorean (HTSK from now on) and creating Anki flashcards from new content,
- Reviewing Anki cards (usually about 60-80 cued for each day).
I found myself losing interest in watching 마음의 소리. It was too hard to understand to just watch it for fun without effort, and too long to study in depth. Also I keep thinking about how contrived every situation and plot in that show is. I'll probably come back to watching dramas or movies when my listening improves and it's more fun to watch long-form media in Korean.
For now, I'm looking at Talk to Me in Korean's Iyagi series, which has 5-10 min segments of two people talking in Korean about various topics. They're real natural sounding conversations, just with limited vocabulary. It's actually pretty good for my level. I can understand about 80-90% of it as is, and they're short enough to study without me getting too tired.
HTSK has been a great resource. They have plenty of spoken sentences as examples for grammar explanations. I read grammar explanations, but don't worry about studying them too in depth. Partially because it usually turns out that I already know the grammar rules intuitively, and also because I'm much more concerned with understanding Korean rather than speaking or writing it. Having example sentences for me to review has been very helpful, and their examples make up most of my flashcards. The one complaint I have is that their audio examples are unnaturally slow, and don't provide good practice for listening to full speed Korean.
I've been creating a couple new kinds of Anki cards. In addition to words in context, sentence comprehension, pronunciation, and listening comprehension, I've added production cards, where I have to come up with the right Korean word(s) for the prompt.
1) Informal to Formal
Q: 우리
A: 저희
Pretty straightforward. It shows me an informal word or particle, and I come up with the polite/formal equivalent. Having the correct level of speech is VERY important in Korean and growing up I didn't learn much formal language.
2) English/symbol to Korean
Q: 40 (Native Korean)
A: 마흔
This is for words that I think are important/basic enough that I should be able to produce quickly in addition to just understanding them. I never learned Native Korean numbers above 29 as a kid because I never needed them, so I'm filling in that gap in knowledge here. I'm avoiding words with multiple translations, especially out of context.
3) Korean contractions and grammar
Q: 저+가
A: 제가
For common contractions and changes that words go through in certain grammatical contexts. Kind of like drilling conjugations or something.
I considered making cards to practice correct conjugations of Korean verbs. But when actually looking into what the rules were to conjugate verbs, they were complex enough that I dropped it and decided to just rely on what "sounds right". So far, it's working. When I start speaking more I'll probably go back and learn what all the proper conjugations are, but right now my intuition is enough.
Memrise is nice in that it shows how long my streak is. Each day I learn 15 new words through the app, it adds a day to my streak. Having that counter is a pretty good motivator to do it everyday. It's nice because I can pull out my phone in dead time during my day, like waiting in line or sitting on the subway, and review some words. It's only good for vocabulary, and does everything through English-Korean and Korean-English translation, so it's not ideal. It's not how I'd make my own flashcards. It also has pretty much random words, like golf, lake, sandals, to be comfortable, etc. But I figured it's a decent way to use the otherwise unproductive time in my day to do something that helps my Korean. It certainly can't hurt, and I'm sure I'll encounter those random words sometime.
Pimsleur is useful for providing words and phrases for everyday situations, like ordering food and telling time. It's VERY basic, sometimes painfully so. Each 30 min lesson only introduces a handful of new words or a new concept. But it does so very organically and smoothly. They tend to teach you stock phrases like stuff you'd find in a phrasebook, but also teach you how the phrases work so you can change them. You barely feel like you're learning anything, but 10 or so lessons in you realize you actually picked up a fair bit of Korean through the program. It's like the urban myth about a frog being slowly boiled alive, but you're learning a new language. I like taking walks while listening to a Pimsleur lesson, so it's a good excuse to walk around and explore new areas in Boston.
I also picked up some children's books from the Boston Public Library. They have a decent collection of Korean books, but most of them are too advanced for me. Fortunately they have a few kids books which are actually good for my level. Now I can say I've read entire (children's) books!
I'm planning on posting a quick update every Saturday, my "off day" (as if I had a job or classes). I've decided for now this blog is to provide a record for myself, so I'll focus on evaluating what resources are and aren't working for me and how each resource is contributing to my progress.
Well a lot of my plan has changed since my plan outlined originally. As I actually do things in Korean and learn Korean, I find out what's working, what's not, and what I'm actually motivated to do on a daily basis. Everyday I'm doing the following:
- 1 lesson on Pimsleur Korean 1
- 15+ new words in Memrise Korean courses,
- Reading and analyzing a post on Humans of Seoul,
- Doing two lessons on HowtoStudyKorean (HTSK from now on) and creating Anki flashcards from new content,
- Reviewing Anki cards (usually about 60-80 cued for each day).
I found myself losing interest in watching 마음의 소리. It was too hard to understand to just watch it for fun without effort, and too long to study in depth. Also I keep thinking about how contrived every situation and plot in that show is. I'll probably come back to watching dramas or movies when my listening improves and it's more fun to watch long-form media in Korean.
For now, I'm looking at Talk to Me in Korean's Iyagi series, which has 5-10 min segments of two people talking in Korean about various topics. They're real natural sounding conversations, just with limited vocabulary. It's actually pretty good for my level. I can understand about 80-90% of it as is, and they're short enough to study without me getting too tired.
HTSK has been a great resource. They have plenty of spoken sentences as examples for grammar explanations. I read grammar explanations, but don't worry about studying them too in depth. Partially because it usually turns out that I already know the grammar rules intuitively, and also because I'm much more concerned with understanding Korean rather than speaking or writing it. Having example sentences for me to review has been very helpful, and their examples make up most of my flashcards. The one complaint I have is that their audio examples are unnaturally slow, and don't provide good practice for listening to full speed Korean.
I've been creating a couple new kinds of Anki cards. In addition to words in context, sentence comprehension, pronunciation, and listening comprehension, I've added production cards, where I have to come up with the right Korean word(s) for the prompt.
1) Informal to Formal
Q: 우리
A: 저희
Pretty straightforward. It shows me an informal word or particle, and I come up with the polite/formal equivalent. Having the correct level of speech is VERY important in Korean and growing up I didn't learn much formal language.
2) English/symbol to Korean
Q: 40 (Native Korean)
A: 마흔
This is for words that I think are important/basic enough that I should be able to produce quickly in addition to just understanding them. I never learned Native Korean numbers above 29 as a kid because I never needed them, so I'm filling in that gap in knowledge here. I'm avoiding words with multiple translations, especially out of context.
3) Korean contractions and grammar
Q: 저+가
A: 제가
For common contractions and changes that words go through in certain grammatical contexts. Kind of like drilling conjugations or something.
I considered making cards to practice correct conjugations of Korean verbs. But when actually looking into what the rules were to conjugate verbs, they were complex enough that I dropped it and decided to just rely on what "sounds right". So far, it's working. When I start speaking more I'll probably go back and learn what all the proper conjugations are, but right now my intuition is enough.
Memrise is nice in that it shows how long my streak is. Each day I learn 15 new words through the app, it adds a day to my streak. Having that counter is a pretty good motivator to do it everyday. It's nice because I can pull out my phone in dead time during my day, like waiting in line or sitting on the subway, and review some words. It's only good for vocabulary, and does everything through English-Korean and Korean-English translation, so it's not ideal. It's not how I'd make my own flashcards. It also has pretty much random words, like golf, lake, sandals, to be comfortable, etc. But I figured it's a decent way to use the otherwise unproductive time in my day to do something that helps my Korean. It certainly can't hurt, and I'm sure I'll encounter those random words sometime.
Pimsleur is useful for providing words and phrases for everyday situations, like ordering food and telling time. It's VERY basic, sometimes painfully so. Each 30 min lesson only introduces a handful of new words or a new concept. But it does so very organically and smoothly. They tend to teach you stock phrases like stuff you'd find in a phrasebook, but also teach you how the phrases work so you can change them. You barely feel like you're learning anything, but 10 or so lessons in you realize you actually picked up a fair bit of Korean through the program. It's like the urban myth about a frog being slowly boiled alive, but you're learning a new language. I like taking walks while listening to a Pimsleur lesson, so it's a good excuse to walk around and explore new areas in Boston.
I also picked up some children's books from the Boston Public Library. They have a decent collection of Korean books, but most of them are too advanced for me. Fortunately they have a few kids books which are actually good for my level. Now I can say I've read entire (children's) books!
I'm planning on posting a quick update every Saturday, my "off day" (as if I had a job or classes). I've decided for now this blog is to provide a record for myself, so I'll focus on evaluating what resources are and aren't working for me and how each resource is contributing to my progress.
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