Method

So the problem of learning Korean can (and should) be thought of as several related, but distinct, skills: speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Each skill can also be broken down into subskills. The DLPT only has listening and reading, so those will be my top priorities. I want to speak well, so I will work on that as well. I won't be assessed on writing in the forseeable future, and I have no interest in writing. So, I'll ignore that.

Listening

Right now, listening is my best skill. If people speaking Korean using words I know, I can understand it very well. The biggest issue is, I don't know a lot of words. Fortunately, growing up hearing Korean, the grammar is very intuitive for me, so I don't have to do much study to listen to Korean.

Subskills:

Vocabulary (audio): The words I (don't) know. If I don't know the words in a sentence, I won't know what they mean. Pretty straightforward, learn more words. Also short phrases and idioms. I specify audio because I need to know what words sound like specifically. If I know a written word, but don't recognize it when spoken, it's useless as far as listening is concerned.

When I can find audio clips for words and phrases, I'll put those in an SRS flashcard system.  I will also use interactions with Korean speakers as opportunities to learn more words. And when I can find videos and audio with a Korean transcript, I will listen to them while following along in order to improve the connection between my written vocabulary and my spoken vocabulary. Eventually, I hope to reach the point where I will be able to recognize a word being spoken after only having seen it, just like in English.

Comprehension: Actually understanding what's being said. Even if I know all the words, I still need to figure out how to piece them together to form coherent thoughts. Because my comprehension is already pretty good, I'll improve comprehension primarily through simple exposure to lots of Korean.

I'll focus on watching lots of movies and videos, that provide visual context to what's being said to improve comprehension of spoken Korean. Also, more specifically, I will find listening exercises through online resources, like answering questions about a piece of audio or transcription, to test my comprehension. I'll supplement this with direct grammar study that I do as part of learning to speak.

Listening Speed: How quickly I can process spoken Korean.  Even if I can comprehend all spoken Korean perfectly, it doesn't do much good if I can't keep up with how fast people talk. If I can comprehend, it's just a matter of practice to reduce the time it takes to comprehend. I'll work on this through lots of listening.

Reading

Probably my second worst skill. I only really learned Hangeul when I was in middle school. I was in Korea one summer and had a tutor who taught me how to read. I still can't read it comfortably since I never practiced, and reading handwriting is a complete struggle.

Subskills:

Vocabulary (visual): The words I (don't) know. Very similar to listening, except learning the squiggles and marks that correspond to meanings instead of mouth noises. Knowing noises doesn't help me if I can't recognize it on a page. Since I learned the Korean I know now entirely through speaking/listening. I often don't recognize spoken words I do know when I see them written down. So I'll need to "relearn" many words I "know" in a written form.

I have a method called "Goldlisting" that I found successful in learning words for Modern Standard Arabic. I'll use Goldlisting to learn words from a frequency list for Korean, probably the most common 500 or so. Hopefully I already know a lot of them. Then I'll move on to Goldlisting words I encounter in written media that I find worthwhile knowing. I'm interested in history, music, and food (mostly food), so I'll probably end up focusing on words for those things.

Comprehension: Putting together the words into coherent sentences. It seems similar to listening but there's some additional challenges for me. Despite what many say about Hangeul being a phonetic script, there's a lot of morphological components to it. What is written isn't exactly what's being said. It's pretty close, but includes non-spoken elements in order to show information about the roots and inflections of a word. Most languages do this, and it's not a big deal. I just need to get used to it. Also,  I read syllable by syllable, and often don't understand where words and affixes begin and end.

Similarly to listening, I will improve comprehension with lots of reading. I'll start with children's books, and move on to world news and articles about topics that interest me (probably about food). I'll also work on comprehension exercises from online resources, similar to listening. I will also do explicit grammar study on specifically the morphology of Korean. This way, when I see text, I can understand whole words and whole affixes at a time, instead of going at it syllable by syllable.

Reading Speed: How quickly I can process written Korean. Simple, just like listening, gotta read a lot.

Letter Recognition: By this I mean recognizing handwritten letters. I can read letters on computer fonts pretty well. But handwriting is a different story. There's a lot of scribbles and squiggles that don't look like real letters to me. But the problem isn't super big. It's mostly just a matter of recognizing variations in a letter, and understanding abbreviated/cursive forms of letters in handwriting.

I'll do this by looking up resources for learners of Korean for reading handwriting, learning stroke orders for letters to recognize them on the page, and searching for handwriting/font comparisons to compare and contrast the two. However, because the DLPT does not include handwritten texts, I won't prioritize this.

Hanja: (Traditional) Chinese characters used in Korean. Korean used to be written entirely in Chinese characters, and Hanja used to be very prevalent as recent as in the 20th Century. Korean students still are required to learn 1800 characters before graduating high school. However, there's lots of differing opinions on how important learning Hanja is for Korean learners. On one hand, it's helpful for learning Sino-Korean vocabulary that makes up much of the language, and allows one to read older texts with more context. On the other hand, it's uncommon in modern Korean. I definitely want to learn at least some Hanja, because I think it's honestly pretty cool. I'll figure out a method once I have a better idea of what is necessary and what my goals should be.

Speaking

Speaking is my second best skill after listening. But I place more priority on reading and listening over speaking. Not only does the DLPT not include speaking, but people consume far more language than they produce, no matter what language it is. Everyday, I see or hear language almost constantly. But I'm not actually speaking or writing for much of it. How much time do you spend in a day actually talking to someone or writing? This isn't saying that I don't talk and write everyday. I do. But when I add up the time I spend in those acts, it's incomparable to how much time I spend listening to someone else talk or reading something someone else wrote. And I guess that that would be true for every other person on the planet.

But, one of my goals is to speak like a Seoulite, and I can't do that without speaking. Plus, it's more fun to talk to people. I bet I'll learn faster too.

Subskills:

Pronunciation: The noises I make with my mouth. I always thought that pronunciation should be as perfect as possible when learning a new language. I dislike the mindset amongst other Arabic learners that accent doesn't really matter as long as you are understood. Sure, others might understand you, but there's always gonna be a separation and inconvenience when you talk with other people. Also, why wouldn't you want to sound as native as possible? This isn't to say that people with accents are necessarily bad, or lazy, or careless. But I think the attitude that accent doesn't matter is. I think it's also a matter of respect to the language you want to learn. It shows that you care enough to not just learn the language but mimic the sounds of the people you want to speak with. 

In Korean, I think my accent is pretty good, but who knows what Koreans think. I'll work on this by checking my pronunciation of sounds with Korean speakers (probably my mom) and mimicking the accent of Seoulites as much as I can when learning spoken vocabulary. I will also use online tools like r/JudgeMyAccent and Rhinospike to get feedback on my accent.

Vocabulary: Straightforward. My passive vocabulary (words I understand) will be much larger than my active vocabulary (words I can produce), and that's normal. I'll need to focus on words I want to be able to use when I talk.

I'll practice common questions and answers and consult Korean speakers on how to say them. Through speaking practice, I'll make note of things I want to know how to say, learn how to say them, and practice them. Also, some of my passive vocabulary I learn through reading and listening will be usable in speaking, so I'll practice incorporating words I learn into my speech.

Expression: Making myself understood. This is producing sentences that make sense, and presenting ideas in a way that makes sense to Koreans. After all, a stream of disjointed words isn't exactly communicating. I'll need to study some grammar, because whenever I talk I realize I don't really know how the language works.

I'll learn a lot through listening and reading practice, but learning grammar can be a great tool for knowing how to construct sentences properly (as long as it's used properly and with understanding of context). I'll make an effort to learn common phrases for common cultural contexts at first. As I progress, I will use tutors and teachers to practice expressing different kinds of ideas through exercises. Throughout this whole process, I'll find language partners to practice speaking, and receive feedback on whether I make sense or not.

Accuracy: Speaking in an idiomatically correct way. I don't want to be making grammar mistakes, so I'll rectify mistakes with grammar practice, and speaking practice. I'll use tutors and partners to point out mistakes I make when I speak, and practice the correct way until it's intuitive. But I also don't want to sound unidiomatic, or say phrases that a Korean would never say. This will simply take a lot of time and feedback from Koreans, and a lot of exposure to Korean.

Fluency: Speaking comfortably at normal pace. This just takes lots of practice.

Writing

Eh.