I've been lurking on this forum for
I have been reticent, because I'm an English teacher, and learning new languages often implies a period of mix-up for me. I was afraid it'd affect my job, so I've been holding off. I already have a few languages under my belt, and the last one I got stuck on is Japanese (still beginner), but recently I started listening to K-pop, and it got me curious. I can't understand a word of what they say, and the transliterations make no sense from the point of view of any language I know.
In December, afraid of getting bored on holiday, my husband started Arabic on Duolingo. He's been making progress, so I figured I'd try Korean on that. It's been 4 days now, I finished unit 1, and here's my report:
I had tried Duolingo in the past for Japanese, so I knew how it worked. As an absolute beginner, I knew it'd at least get me going. It started off easily enough, just teaching the letters, but halfway through the unit I had to go and look up a YouTube tutorial, because things were too mixed up and I wasn't able to organize my notes. I also noticed one or two mistakes (a symbol or some pronunciation that didn't correspond!), so I needed to clear things up.
Learn Hangul in 20 Minutes 한글 Korean Alphabet How to Read and Write Korean
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT4k7LC91Cw
With this I was able to:
1) Check pronunciation (Duolingo seems to use a mix of AI voices...?!
)2) Get an overview of the whole alphabet
3) Write down a reference chart to study
I'm a big fan of organizing and writing things by hand when I have to study them, so I knew I had to complement sooner or later.
I then moved forward with the unit, but before I was able to finish it, I realized I could use something more mnemonic to remember the different symbols. I had found that for Japanese, and I know it works for me.
At this point YouTube started to suggest related videos, so it offered a short titled "Learn to Read Korean in 15 minutes". Through that I found the wonderful Ryan Estrada, who has created a comic with some handy mnemonics and groupings that helped me even more!
https://ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkore ... index.html
Now it was only a matter of memorizing. I finished Unit 1 of Duolingo, and patted myself on the back.
Yesterday night I started Unit 2, which started to introduce words. I knew I'd have to slow down here, so I only did one circle, and tried the second circle today. I was getting confused, so I wanted to start writing things down to help with studying. I went to the Unit 2 Guidebook. I started to copy the vocabulary I had done up to that point. And then I froze. It read:
이개미
the child's yoyo.
Even with the little I had studied so far, I knew that was wrong.
Now I'm afraid to keep using Duolingo. I'm afraid it's going to teach me wrong stuff. I'm thinking it's full of little mistakes like that, and I don't want to waste my brain learning wrong things!
Next steps: Look for alternatives. I know there's a resource page on the forum, but I haven't looked it up yet. Time to change tactics!
NOTE: One more useful website I found:
https://www.drawkorean.com/
Onwards and upwards! Thanks everyone on the forum for the inspiration!
But will look into the stuff you mentioned! So far, though, I can see some similarities with Japanese, which is helping me out. The writing system is somewhat similar, and the few initial words they introduced actually have some similarity with Japanese! Student, "gakusei" in Japanese, sounds vaguely familiar in Korean. Even newspaper, "shinbun" in Japanese, sounds similar enough in Korean. I just talked to a friend who is an advanced Japanese student, and he says he studied Korean with Japanese textbooks... So I guess they share some things! Still have to verify these things...
