A colourful mix - current: Korean revival and some Portuguese

[druckfehler]

New year, new log, new forum. I decided to migrate to this forum with the beginning of the new year. HTLAL seems almost dead compared to all the activity on this forum. It's great to see a lot of new people as well as old acquaintances who had no longer been posting on HTLAL.

Here's my old log at HTLAL: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30979&PN=73&TPN=1

For this year, I have three languages in mind:

Korean ist the language I've been studying fairly intensively for 6 (already!) years. Last year I passed TOPIK level 5 and almost finished the Super Language Challenge (stats and titles I read/watched can be found here: http://www.languagechallenge.surrealix.com/participant.php?username=druckfehler). I'm sort of fluent, with better passive than active skills. I'm not yet sure what my plans are for this year. I don't even know whether I will pursue any goals. But Korean will definitely remain a part of my life. It may not become much of a study language in 2016, but it will certainly be a language I live with. If I do make any goals, this may include another TOPIK test, grammar study or practicing writing/speaking.

Persian has been an on-and-off study language since 2011. I'm still somewhere in the beginner stage, but slowly improving. I've been studiyng very leisurely with audio sentences. I'm on Assimil lesson 34, Chai and Conversation lesson 26 and Persiandee lesson 10. I would like to reach a conversational level this year or next year (somewhere in B1 territory), but it is still unclear how much of a focus I will make Persian this year. In any case, I want to progress a bit.

Thai is the year's big surprise. I saw an interesting job offering which asks for very good Korean and Thai skills and thought 'why not?'. So I started studying and submitted my application, stating basic knowledge of Thai. Who knows, they might just invite me if they can't find someone else who fulfils the double language criterium. I've decided to at least keep focusing on Thai until I have news about that job. So far, I've familiarised myself with pronunciation and am half-way through tlearning the script. I never really considered Thai before (maybe just a little when I read Bakunin's log on HTLAL) , but it's getting quite interesting now.

[Elenia]

A [wanderlust] inspiring mix! I'll be following your progress with interest

[Bakunin]

Good to see you here, druckfehler I'm looking forward to reading your updates! In case you're not yet aware of it, there's a huge list of free and other Thai resources on WLT, this could be a starting point but make sure to explore the whole website. There's also an active FB group (Farang Can Learn Thai) with activities at all levels, it's worth subscribing to.

[wnint]

Topik 5, nice! Are you close to topik 6?

I followed the link you posted and noticed that you had read I Have the Right to Destroy Myself. I just started reading it. A lot of unknown words in the first pages... Thankfully, it looks like the number of unknown words is decreasing somewhat after the first chapter. I also noticed that you seem to have great taste in movies, giving Castaway on the Moon 10/10.

[Expugnator]

Welcome to the new place, druckfehler! I used to read your log at the old HTLAL. It's always nice to follow someone with a really diverse language mix.

[druckfehler]

@Elenia Thanks for your warm welcome!

@Bakunin It's good to read from you again! Especially since it will be great to get some advice on Thai. I've been looking at WLT for some guidance on how to start studying and it has already proven very helpful! I'll also have a look at the facebook group.I'm totally looking forward to using thairecordings once I know some basics. One thing I'm wondering about is whether there was any aspect of the language you found particularly challenging. For now, it seems like the tones might be the biggest stumbling stone for me. Would you say Thai sentence structure is challenging? I see you're studying Khmer nowadays. That sounds interesting as well! Are there many cognates with Thai? Did you continue to pursue Turkish?

@wnint It's great to see more people studying Korean on this forum! Especially since you're at a high level, it will be interesting for me to follow your log. How did you become interested in Korean? I missed level 6 by 9 points, so you could say I'm close. But then again there was a lot of room for improvement in the writing section (only 42 points in that section, while reading and listening were around 90), so it will probably still take considerable effort to get there. "I Have the Right to Destroy Myself" was the first novel I read in Korean and, to be honest, I only understood the gist of it. Especially the prologue had me scratching my head - so many foreign words and philosophical musings Don't be discouraged if it's difficult, it's not exactly an 'easy' book... Have you read other books in Korean? I absolutely loved Castaway on the moon... Pretty much everything I recently watched with Jung Ryeo-won lately was great. I totally forgot about the blog, to be honest I should start posting again sometime...

@Expugnator Thanks! Same goes to you! I read your Papiamento log which was very interesting, as well as parts about your Georgian and Chinese journey

[Bakunin]

@Bakunin It's good to read from you again! Especially since it will be great to get some advice on Thai. I've been looking at WLT for some guidance on how to start studying and it has already proven very helpful! I'll also have a look at the facebook group.I'm totally looking forward to using thairecordings once I know some basics. One thing I'm wondering about is whether there was any aspect of the language you found particularly challenging. For now, it seems like the tones might be the biggest stumbling stone for me. Would you say Thai sentence structure is challenging? I see you're studying Khmer nowadays. That sounds interesting as well! Are there many cognates with Thai? Did you continue to pursue Turkish?

Thai Recordings is probably too difficult for quite some time as it is pure storytelling (albeit with transcripts); I'd recommend you to start with my new project for which I also have recordings online: SEA Illustrations. You'll have an illustration telling a story or describing a process, a recording in Thai, and either a full transcript or a key phrases sheet (to be replaced by full transcripts over time). That should already be useful at the intermediate level. I have been told, however, that it's too difficult for beginners, so maybe wait a bit or use it @iguanamon style as native speaker material on the side to wet your appetite for real Thai (as real as a picture description gets).

I didn't find the tones or other aspects of the pronunciation challenging, but don't forget that I went through a 22 month silent phase. People report that the tones are very challenging, and I can see that in many foreigners. I find various aspects of grammar more challenging, if I had to pick two, I'd say word order and how to express temporal relationships. But it's a matter of getting enough input, as are most things.

Khmer is great, I love it. Thai has extensively borrowed from Khmer when the Thais came down from the North and encountered the Khmer empire centuries ago. They took over many aspects of Khmer culture, not only vocabulary. There are many cognates, and somehow the syntax is quite similar too even though these two languages belong to two different language families. I believe they call this phenomenon the South East Asian sprachbund.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the time/motivation to continue with Turkish. And now with all these new projects and languages in SEA it looks increasingly unlikely that I'll have the energy for a completely different culture.

Good luck with all your languages, I'm looking forward to more pictures of Iranian dishes if you're still into that

[wnint]

@wnint It's great to see more people studying Korean on this forum! Especially since you're at a high level, it will be interesting for me to follow your log. How did you become interested in Korean? I missed level 6 by 9 points, so you could say I'm close. But then again there was a lot of room for improvement in the writing section (only 42 points in that section, while reading and listening were around 90), so it will probably still take considerable effort to get there. "I Have the Right to Destroy Myself" was the first novel I read in Korean and, to be honest, I only understood the gist of it. Especially the prologue had me scratching my head - so many foreign words and philosophical musings Don't be discouraged if it's difficult, it's not exactly an 'easy' book... Have you read other books in Korean? I absolutely loved Castaway on the moon... Pretty much everything I recently watched with Jung Ryeo-won lately was great. I totally forgot about the blog, to be honest I should start posting again sometime...

I would say that is close. Impressive!

I decided to start learning Korean after discovering Korean cinema. I think the first one was Memories of Murder followed by The Chaser and the Vengeance Triology. Not a bad start in my opinion! At the time I was on the lookout for a new language to learn and as the first steps when learning Korean are pretty smooth I was hooked right away. I looked up Jung Ryeo-won on AsianWiki and it turns out I have only seen her in Castaway on the moon. I will try something else asap!

I bought the book to have something easy (according to a review on amazon ) to read for my commute so that kind of backfired. I'm not giving up just yet though and will try to finish it within a couple of months. Not much, but I believe I have read Sonagi and translated versions of Winnie-the-Pooh and The Giving Tree before.

Anyway, I'll keep a close eye on your log!

[druckfehler]

Korean I had been interested in the Output Challenge last year when it got started, thinking that this was the sort of thing I needed to improve my active Korean skills. I thought about this again today and simply couldn't resist it... Another challenge to rule over all my free time, then Reposting my goals from the challenge thread here:

CHALLENGE: Full Speaking, 1/5 Writing (i.e. 10,000 words)

CURRENT LANGUAGE LEVEL: B2-ish active (C1 passive)

COMMENTS: 50,000 words in writing seems far too much as I mostly want to progress in my weaker languages this year. But I realise that I need to do something for my active Korean skillls and this challenge could help immensely in keeping me on track.

For writing, I would like to work through the intermediate and advanced grammar books 'Korean in Use' and write practice sentences for all grammar points. There will probably also be some random diary entries and the end goal is to write essays in the style needed for the Korean proficiency test TOPIK.

For speaking, I'm thinking about interviewing myself. I need a catalogue of questions I can pose and then answer. I think recording this is a great idea. I like the possibility of listening to this later and correcting the mistakes in writing. This might just be the key to realising where exactly my weak points are.

Persian A few das ago I realised that I had deleted my Persian audio sentence deck when I was cleaning out redundant files from my computer. It turned out I did not have this deck saved to dropbox as I had thought. At first I was upset, because considerable effort went into creating this deck. Some time later I realised that I had repeated most of the sentences in the deck so many times that there was little benefit in repeating them more. It’s actually quite convenient that the deck is gone. When I make up my mind to study some Persian I can no longer resort to repeating old audio sentences, but need to spend time on new material. Whatever I hadn’t learned from the deck would probably not become learned by repeating it ad nauseam anyway. And I have enough materials which can teach me the same things in different contexts.

For now I’ve decided that I will take a break from my old materials as well - that is Assimil and Chai&Conversion are now on hiatus. Instead, I plan working through the German textbook “Sprachkurs Persisch”. On its own, I find this resource’s pace too fast. In 12 lessons (24 dialogues) they introduce over 1000 words and most grammar points. I usually like to ‘overlearn’ - to repeat vocabulary and grammar a lot more in different, easy contexts. But at my current level, “Sprachkurs Persisch” seems ideal - some of it will be repetition, some of it will take care of filling in gaps. It is no longer too challenging, but because of the swift pace, it’s not boring either. I also think that this book and persiandee.com are the best sources on grammar I have used so far. Right now I know many grammar points only by usage. I’m looking forward to reading up on them systematically. I’m sure I will learn many details I’m still unaware of.

[Evita]

Good luck on the output challenge! And Thai Good luck with that too