OwnPanda learns Vietnamese and Korean (now with more TAC 2016)

[OwlPanda]

I guess this is the place for continuing my language log, which almost kind of sort of got off the ground on the old board.

Right place then.

It's also an okay, if not ideal, time to start on a challenge. I mean, January would have been better, but now is better than never, right?

So, awaaaaaaaay we go


2/16/2016

Vietnamese

Here's where I am with this language. I started studying it when I got married a few years ago, but I made relatively little progress for a while. There were reasons for this.

The first several reasons all fall under the heading of, "I didn't really know how to learn languages back then." That's not to say I'm an expert now. I'm still trying to feel my way around all of this, and I'm starting in a bit of a hole, since a lot of the usual advice is much harder to put into practice when you're learning a language without a lot of connection to your native language. By this, I basically mean that I didn't have any early success with native materials, whether those included listening to conversations, watching Vietnamese television or movies, reading, or whatever. I got nowhere. Everything was completely impenetrable.

Many of the major problems that showed up early were things I was able to resolve. I didn't quite get pronunciation, and I was not helped by the fact that a lot of the resources I found lying around gave contradictory advice on that, since most the Northern dialect gets a lot more exposure in language learning materials even though the Southern dialect is, frankly, more important to everyone except for people in Hanoi. Making things worse is the fact that my wife doesn't have a pure Southern dialect, since she's from the wild and crazy central region.

Imagine you were learning English but your only teacher was someone who spoke like James "The Ragin' Cajun" Carville. That's about what that's like.

The second problem was, of course, the tones. Vietnamese has six tones, sort of. In practice, there are five in the Southern dialect and sort of five in the Northern, since the high rising tone isn't always high and rising up North, especially (it seems to me) at the end of a phrase. Regardless of Northern irregularities, in the South, two of the tones have merged. This is kind of lucky, because that means I don't have to deal with the single hardest of the tones.

The third big problem was that I was terrible at acquiring new vocabulary.

All of this changed when I started up with my current favorite language learning tool, Memrise, because stumbled across a course that included Southern pronunciations and that forced me to type the correct diacritic marks for the different vowels and for the tones. That was the turning point.


This happened about a year ago. I've seen my passive vocabulary go from almost nothing to somewhat respectable for a beginner (maybe 1500 words). I can't read on my own yet, but I can slog my way through Harry Potter with liberal use of translation software, and it goes fast enough that I still enjoy it.

I started a new course on Memrise at the end of last year. The course has about 2300 words in it. Right now, I've gone through 535 of them, though a handful of them are words I already knew. Most of them, fortunately, aren't; this isn't course for complete beginners, so I don't have to put up with a lesson on basic animals or colors or numbers or pronouns or anything like that. I know almost as many color words in Vietnamese as I know in English (well, I know a few more words in English, but I couldn't honestly match a lot of them to colors if I really had to).


So, here's where I am now. I'm still putting more focus on vocabulary than anything else, partly because I've always felt that was my biggest weakness and partly because that helps me express myself, if clumsily. I don't have a lot of trouble making myself understood now, even though I'm somewhat limited in the way I say things, and I don't sound at all natural. I figure that some naturalness will come along once I know enough words to read a bit more.

I'm 535 words into my current Memrise course, and I'm adding on average about 10 per day, though I usually wait a couple of days and do 20 at once. One of my goals for this year is to keep a streak going until I can finish that course.

I just did the lesson with 96 adjectives. When I reviewed them last night, I had some trouble at first, but I think that comes from taking on such a huge list of words. Not everything has sunk in just yet. However, I can still get them right when I do a speed review session, since those are multiple choice, and I almost always get multiple choice questions right on Memrise.

That's a weakness of mine, though. I don't think multiple choice is particularly good for me, so I'm making an effort to cover up the answer choices and try to identify the correct answer before looking at it. If I can't do that, I choose something obviously wrong. That way, I can't fool myself into thinking I know something when I can only get it right after reading it, and I can't use the process of elimination.

For listening practice, I'm a bit torn. I'm enjoying "Learn Vietnamese With Annie," especially "365 Vietnamese." However, part of what I enjoy about that is that it's slow. When something goes faster, I get almost nothing out of it, even if I'm only hearing words that I recognize. There's still some delay between hearing a word and figuring out what it means, so the speaker is usually on to the next sentence before I've figured out the one I'm hearing. I'm fighting the urge to translate things into English first before interperting them, which helps, but it doesn't solve the problem.

So, advice givers, what should I do? Should I listen to the slower speed of "365 Vietnamese" until I'm better at it, or should I go for things that have a more natural pace? This might be a good question for the East Asian Languages team, since I know the answer for people learning Indo-European languages already. Obviously it's better to go faster for those. Even if no one else there is learning Vietnamese, someone learning, say, Chinese would probably have helpful advice.

My goal for the next week is to get comfortable with all 96 adjectives and then move on to the lesson about verbs. I should be able to fight my way through that before the end of the weekend, giving me a lot of material to review next week.


Korean

I studied Korean in college, sort of. I took a couple years of classes, but I was in the slow class. That is, I was in the class for people who didn't speak Korean in their homes. It was necessary to separate the two, because otherwise we could have drowned in the material. As things stood, we had to fight to make any progress. After two years of courses, I spent time in Korea, where, sadly, I ended up speaking mostly English.

I don't really have any particular good Korean skills, though my pronunciation isn't terrible. It's not perfect, but it's okay. Anything I know fairly well I can say fairly easily, and I don't find the grammar particularly intimidating. There's a lot of it, but it all makes sense, and I've spoken enough sentences to wrap my head around the SOV word order.

What has always been terrible has been my vocabulary. Oh, and my listening, but that's tied in with my vocabulary.

Now, of course, I have Memrise on my side, so I can pick up vocabulary that way, and I'm doing so.

I started the year with very little recent work in Korean, but I've been doing on of those courses with about 2000 words in it in order to get a bit better. This course seems okay to me because I'm not a complete beginner, so I don't need to learn all of the typical beginner vocabulary. (Maybe it'll show up anyway, but it's not all showing up at the beginning.)

Plus, it's Korean. To me, that's comforting. Familiar.

Vietnamese is like having dinner with my wife's family. I love it, and it's something that's growing on me, but it still feels a little wild and unpredictable. It's still something a bit new, and I feel some pressure when I encounter it. I know it'll get easier with time, and it's my primary focus right now, but it takes more energy to go through my daily routine with it.

Korean is like having dinner with my own family. It's something I can remember from way back, and even though we're not as close as we once were, I'm finding it easy to get back into it, albeit with more distance than when I was younger. There's familiarity there. I never worry about not knowing how to pronounce a Korean word. I can read quickly and easily.

Both, though, are family. Both languages, too. And I am good enough at both to convince people who don't know anything that I'm okay at speaking them (especially Vietnamese, because I can actually have a whole conversation in that one, albeit a very stilted conversation that sticks to vocabularly that I know).


In any case, I'm making some progress on vocabulary now. I'm not trying to make really fast progress, because Korean isn't my priority right now. It's more a labor of love.


The really exciting part, though, isn't the vocabulary. I mean, vocabulary is exciting to me, but I'm finally making an effort to learn Hanja.

For those who don't know, Hanja are traditional Chinese characters adapted for Korean. Since Korean borrows words from Chinese at about the rate English borrows from French (maybe more -- it's something like 60% to 70%), it pays to know the roots. Unfortunately, a lot of the roots have the same sounds, so knowing the characters makes it possible to distinguish them, and that in turn makes it a lot easier to learn new vocabulary. That's aside from the fact that it's basically impossible to read a lot of things without knowing any Hanja.

The task isn't as daunting as learning to read Chinese. An educated Korean adult only needs to know about 1800 Hanja. I can achieve that in two or three years if I try. How is that possible when smart Korean kids take a lot longer than that?

It's possible for two reasons. One is that I'm using SRS to get them into my head faster. The other is that I'm only concerned with reading. I don't care if I ever write a word in Hanja. That just doesn't matter to me. I'm not going to attempt to pass any official Hanja exams. I just want to read, and I want to exploit knowledge of how to read the characters in order to learn new vocabulary faster.

Plus, my next language project is almost certainly going to be another East Asian language, though I'm not sure which one just yet. Chinese characters help with basically all of them. If I can learn Hanja, I'll be ahead of the game whether I move on to Mandarin or Cantonese or Japanese, which are the three leading contenders.


So, I'm up to about 60 Hanja now. I'm not great with the last 30 or so of them, but the first 30 are pretty solid. The ones that look a bit more like what they mean are pretty easy, as are the numbers. The characters for small, medium, and large show up on menus often enough that I doubt I'll have any problems with them. Some of the mnemonic devices I'm using are pretty good for many of the others.

The ones that require looking a bit closer at the details are, predictably, the hardest so far, and I'm probably going to have to change my strategy a bit as I encounter more of them. I'll cross that bridge soon enough, though, as I'll probably add 15 more Hanja over the next couple of days.

I see no reason why I shouldn't be well over 500 Hanja by the end of the year, and if I work hard enough, I should be able to approach 1000.


This is all putting me in a fairly good mood. Sometimes I need that after a particularly rough day reviewing my Vietnamese words.

Vietnamese seems so much harder than Korean, though a lot of that has to be my level of familiarity with both. Even though I know a lot more words of Vietnamese, and I can say a lot more things in Vietnamese, it doesn't quite feel as comfortable. I hope that changes with time.

[OwlPanda]

Excellent, I can now have those little progress bars in my signature! I guess it'll be obvious to everyone just how far I have to go to get through my current load.

Speaking of which, once I do get to that point, it'll be easy to pick where to go next with Korean. There are apparently continuations of the course I'm doing, so I'll just go with those. I like it well enough. With Hanja, I probably won't need to do any else, since my Hanja course has more characters than I need to know.

For Vietnamese, it's a little tougher. Do I go on to another Memrise course, do I use my own course ripped from a dictionary (which has the disadvantage of not really telling me which words are important), or do I just start a new course that has words I encounter in books? By the time I get through with the Memrise course I'm doing, I expect to be able to read a bit better, perhaps with even less assistance from translation programs.

Here's something fun I've been listening to at work:

Tuyết trắng xoá lấp kín đường về
Còn mình tôi đi trên con đường
Chợt nhìn về vương quốc kia
Như bị chia cách bởi màn đêm
Từng đợt gió tuyết xuyên vào con tim giá băng của tôi
Thế giới như đổi thay, bao khó khăn nhọc nhằn
Thận trọng tôi ơi, đừng để ai thấy
Hãy thật xinh tươi hồn nhiên như hôm nao
Đừng kể ai nghe, đừng để ai biết
Giờ đây đã hết

Giờ ra đi, một mình ta
Không còn gì để mà thương đau
Về tương lai, rồi bước đi
Và nơi đây ngăn cách thế gian
Xoá tan đi, muộn phiền đã qua rồi
Gió tuyết hay tràn về
Dù sao cơn lạnh kia đã thân quen ta rồi

That's the first part of the Vietnamese version of "Let It Go" (the song from Frozen). That's as much as I know so far, and I'd rather go for some songs that were originally written in Vietnamese, but this one uses straightforward language that I find a bit easier to parse than most actual Vietnamese songs. Plus, it actually sounds prettier in Vietnamese than in most languages (it's nice in English, too).

For fun, go to YouTube and look up the international versions of the song. You can find performances in many, many languages, often mixed together, and sometimes with footage of the different singers used for different versions.


Had I posted the progress bars yesterday, the Korean course one would be behind where it is now. I added another 30 words last night, though today's review of the new material was of mixed quality. That's fine, though! It'll get to where everything else is in time.

I figured that out with Vietnamese. Since doing the long list of adjectives, I had trouble getting right answers in my reviews for a couple of days, but that's been clearing up. After a couple of days of wrestling with the harder cases, I'm getting the hang of everything, and I'm getting things right even when I cover up the answer choices and force myself to know what answer I want to give before looking.

[OwlPanda]

It's a beautiful day for adding verbs to my vocabulary! They seem a little more difficult than they normally do, though. I keep forgetting that quản lý means "to manage."

Other words gained include a few I already at least sort of knew or could figure out from their components (xem lại, xin phép, xong, nhắn, chuẩn bị, hướng dẫn, and kéo dài). I'm trying to remember nghỉ mát by linking it in my mind with thoáng mat from the previous unit.

There are a few more of the easier words before I get to the ones that have been giving me a lot of trouble. I can't seem to get dọn dẹp or dọn nhà, even though those should be pretty easy. (Nhà is a really basic word that means "house" or "home.") It's a little frustrating, but then, I know I'll get these in a few days if I just start working on them now.

The most important part, I think, is that I review someplace other than on my phone, especially when I encounter sentences.

I'll never, ever figure sentences out from multiple choice questions. Typing them works much better. Right now, without looking back at anything, I can say, "Có công mài sắt có ngày nên kim." I can also say, "Bất cứ nơi nào em đi anh sẽ theo em." The longer words are much easier to get this way, too. Typing it a few times helped me figured out bộ giáo dục và đào tạo.

The multiple choice questions can lull me into a false sense of security when I think I know something I don't really know. I need to be aware of that so I can avoid it.


I'll do some more learning tonight, I think.

[OwlPanda]

It's a beautiful day for adding verbs to my vocabulary! They seem a little more difficult than they normally do, though. I keep forgetting that quản lý means "to manage."

Other words gained include a few I already at least sort of knew or could figure out from their components (xem lại, xin phép, xong, nhắn, chuẩn bị, hướng dẫn, and kéo dài). I'm trying to remember nghỉ mát by linking it in my mind with thoáng mat from the previous unit.

There are a few more of the easier words before I get to the ones that have been giving me a lot of trouble. I can't seem to get dọn dẹp or dọn nhà, even though those should be pretty easy. (Nhà is a really basic word that means "house" or "home.") It's a little frustrating, but then, I know I'll get these in a few days if I just start working on them now.

The most important part, I think, is that I review someplace other than on my phone, especially when I encounter sentences.

I'll never, ever figure sentences out from multiple choice questions. Typing them works much better. Right now, without looking back at anything, I can say, "Có công mài sắt có ngày nên kim." I can also say, "Bất cứ nơi nào em đi anh sẽ theo em." The longer words are much easier to get this way, too. Typing it a few times helped me figured out bộ giáo dục và đào tạo.

The multiple choice questions can lull me into a false sense of security when I think I know something I don't really know. I need to be aware of that so I can avoid it.


I'll do some more learning tonight, I think.

[OwlPanda]

Not much to report today. I'm just posting to motivate myself, or, really, to get in the right frame of mind for wanting to push forward.

I didn't make any great leaps over the weekend, even though I made a little progress on all three Memrise courses. It wasn't as much as I hoped I'd make -- I'm still only about a third of the way through the Vietnamese verb unit, but that's a really long unit, so that's hardly the end of the world. I went through the adjective unit a little too fast, and it took me a while to get those down.


I'm still loving Hanja, although it's getting a little harder as I go. Still, at my current pace, soon I'm going to be able to say, "Hey, I know about 100 Chinese characters!" It's hardly the most impressive thing in the world, but it's something. I've got to stay positive.


Edit: You know, I just discovered something that some others might know already but that I find to be sort of interesting.

If you're feeling discouraged with the language you're studying and feel as though your progress has been slow, there's a way to make yourself feel a bit better.

Pick a language you don't know as well and then find an introductory lesson on that language somewhere. It's sort of refreshing for your brain, because you don't feel any pressure encountering something you don't expect yourself to know at all. It's like taking a short vacation (nghỉ mát). Listen to the beginner conversations. Then remind yourself that you already know how to say all of those things in your target language, and you can do so without really thinking too hard.

In other words, when you start to feel like you're still a complete beginner, go back and remind yourself what actually being a complete beginner feels like.

So, I put on an intro video for a different language (it doesn't matter which one) and heard the teacher saying, "Over the next ten lessons, we're going to learn how to introduce ourselves, talk about our families, et cetera." I though, "Hey, I can already do that in Vietnamese! Pretty close to effortlessly, too."

And that felt good. That was the sort of boost I needed.

It's kind of nice, I think, to have a primary and a secondary language that I'm studying, even though I really want to be fluent in both. My Korean is definition not at the same level as my Vietnamese, even though I started Korean much earlier, because my studying is so much more effective now than it was before. Thus, just about any level-appropriate lesson I might encounter in Korean is something that I can say in Vietnamese pretty easily.

A lot of the time, some learning frustration I feel comes from wanting to be able to say something a bit more subtle or more sophisticated than the usual repeatable phrases beginner books tend to have in them. It feels really good not to be hemmed in like that.

You know, another nice thing about beginner materials is that they solve the problem of wondering what I want to talk about. If someone put me in front of a camera and said, "Say something in Vietnamese!" I'd embarrass myself. I wouldn't know what to say offhand. If I needed to say something in English, I could probably improve, provided I didn't need to say anything interesting, because my English don't have a lot of limits to it. My Vietnamese does, even though it's my best non-native language at the moment. (I'm trying not to call it a foreign language, because it's widely spoken in the U.S., in my family in particular!)

How do these beginner books help? Well, I can look at them and see a framework for a simple conversation, and I can riff on that. Maybe I don't want to repeat everything in the conversation word for word. Maybe I don't want to talk about what time Lan is going to class and what Nam ate for lunch. I can use that framework to come up with something else, though. With a topic in mind, and with that topic related to vocabulary I learned in the past, I can expand on the quotidian adventures of our generic L2 dialogue characters and practice talking merely near a script, not following a script.

I'm sure there are lots of other good ways to find speaking inspiration, and I should probably try to dig a few up. I'll have my routine conversational walk tonight, and it might be good to have something fresh to talk about. Here, by fresh, I mean "using some vocabulary I haven't practiced before."

Hey, that one simple beginner video in a language I have no intention of studying sure did help a lot!

[OwlPanda]

As much as the last update was optimistic, this one feels quite the opposite.

I spent quite a bit of time studying vocabulary over the last few days, but I retained surprisingly little of it. I just reviewed some words that I was supposed to have learned this morning, but even with some fairly good mnemonic devices for them, I could only recall a couple of words. That's frustrating. What's worse, I missed a bunch of older words that came up for review, so now I'm wondering if I really learned those.

Most of these difficult words are Vietnamese. I didn't advance much in my Korean courses, only adding 15 to each. That puts me on a reasonable pace for the Hanja course, and I'm finding that I start to get those after a few days. The Korean vocabulary course is pretty easy still, though it'll get harder as I get further along, I'm sure.

It just worries me quite a bit that the only thing I'm doing even halfway well, learning new vocabulary words, feels a bit shaky at the moment. Conversation practice has been exhausting lately, and I haven't had much time to read anything.

I'm still looking for appropriate listening material to put on while I work, but I haven't found anything I can even remotely understand without reading along, and I obviously can't do that while I'm working on other things. It's frustrating that the alleged "beginner" audio lessons from VietnamesePod101 are almost impossible to follow.

I don't think I'm ever going to get this, honestly.

[OwlPanda]

It hasn't gotten any better.

I find that I'm not retaining any of my new vocabulary, and I'm starting to forget stuff that I was able to remember before. I'm not sure what's wrong, but it's as if I'm getting dumber as I go, and more studying isn't helping. I'll even get the same word wrong multiple times during one review session. It's never been this hard before.

Part of that is that I'm not letting myself count an answer as correct unless I can come up with it without looking at any answer choices or, when I'm using the telephone version of Memrise, the Vietnamese or Korean keyboard that pops up. I'm typing all of my answers using my phone's keyboard.

That doesn't explain everything, though, as I can't remember anything from my latest Hanja lesson, either. It's not just that I'm not making progress; I feel as though I'm losing ground. I'm studying every day, too, so it's not as though I'm just losing ground because I'm slacking off.

It's probably going to be time to revise my goals for the year if this keeps up.

At least I'm doing okay with new Korean vocabulary, though I'm not adding much of that, and I'm still having trouble with the harder words. I can't even remember the easier Vietnamese words, and that's troubling.

[Hanuman]

It's an issue I'm all too familiar with!

Don't be too disheartened with the vocabulary not sticking, maybe you can mix it up a bit to help with retention.

Are you learning the vocab in isolation or in context? Sample sentences/lines of dialogue should help to anchor the meanings better and aid in your mnemonics.

Maybe adding an audio or visual component to your memrise reviews will help create another link to the vocab.

Instead of just linking the vocab with a single strand, create a spiders web around the word and your brain will do the rest.

Being a SE Asian language I know that the resources available don't always allow for an ideal version this.

[Elenia]

It might sound counter intuitive, but maybe you need some time away. Give your brain some space to sort through things and let them settle. If you're stressed, tired or overworked in any way, or if your finding that your brain seems to have reached some sort of maximum capacity, it's better to just relax for a while. Trying to push through when it feels as though you're regressing will just make things worse, probably.

Time away doesn't necessarily have to mean no time studying the language. Like Hanuman says, try mixing it up a little. Do something that is pure fun, even if you don't think it will help that much. Maybe listen to some music, and try to learn a song or two, or watched some subtitled TV show that seems interesting. It doesn't have to be native content, either: dubbed content and translated things tend to be much easier to understand. Maybe even kick back with a really easy audio course. Whatever you do, make sure it's fun and low-effort. (emk has a lot to say about doing the fun, easy stuff). It will definitely be harder to find something that fits the bill for two languages that are so far from English, but it could be worth it. You may find yourself continuing with them when you feel ready to go back to your old routine, or saving the resources you find now for another difficult period. One particular thing about using such things at the beginning is that if you go back to them later on they show you how much you've progressed.

Finally, you asked in your first post what kind of listening is better: slow learner content or native media. I don't know if you found your answer elsewhere - there is definitely a thread on the subject floating around the site - but I believe a lot of learners here would say use both, if you can. This way, you get the best of both. The learner content will teach you new things as it should, the native content will help you get used to catching those new things in the wild. It will also help cement the words in your brain better. Knowing that a word is useful outside of your course, not to mention the rush you feel at actually being able to understand it, strengthens the connections you make to that word. Not all native content has to be hard. If you can get audio with accompanying text, that works (audiobooks are great because they tend to be clearly enunciated. Documentaries are good a little later on, because they have clearer speech than most TV). 'Easy' also doesn't mean for children. Sadly, I can't give you any recommendations, but maybe someone else will be able to.

Good luck. Just be patient with yourself, and you will get through this tough period, and hopefully come out of it with a new set of techniques to apply to your everyday learning.

[OwlPanda]

Thank you for the replies!

Yeah, maybe it's a good time to spend a little more time listening to "Learn Vietnamese with Annie" and "Vietnamese 365" than lots of drills. It's probably bad to let stress get in the way. If that becomes an issue, then I'll just have to put on some dubbed episodes of Detective Conan.

When I get new words from here on, I should make sure I'm using my computer rather than my phone to introduce them, too. I'm starting to think that using my phone just makes it that much harder for me to learn how to spell things.

One other thing I need to do is to delete words that are really similar. When "quan tâm" and "quan tâm tới" are both on the list, I have a 50% of missing whichever one comes first in the review. That's sort of annoying.


Then there's always https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjCCbmyp5vo for fun.

Warning: If you suffer from overexposure to the film Frozen, do not click on that link.


To answer a question, my vocabulary is mostly isolated words right now, because that's what's in the course I have. I try to bring the new words out and use them in conversation, and that might be the key to some of the tougher ones. Some of the words that were bugging me most were ones I made a point of practicing. I told me wife it was time to "hưởng thụ" (relax), and she said she wanted to eat first, so I told her to "thưởng thức" (savor, enjoy) the food.

And that did the trick. I stopped missing both of those words. I'm going to try talking my way through the more recent sections of the word list when I get the chance.



Now you guys have me in the mood to put on some karaoke for the rest of the evening. I've heard stories of people who said they learned Korean entirely from K-Pop.