Slow-cooked Korean

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AndyMeg
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Thu Mar 02, 2017 11:07 pm

qeadz wrote:Thank you AndyMeg!

I had seen that site before but since I revisited it now when you posted, it just happened to have a breakdown of key things relating to the SAAD (THAAD?) deployment in Korea... which happens to be exactly what I was reading about the day before.


I really like when those kind of things happen: when you read or hear about something and then you casually see it in another place. It is very useful for reinforcing memory.
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Sayonaroo
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun Mar 05, 2017 8:58 pm

I recommend against practicing translating since it doesn't correlate with your goal of speaking to family members in Korean. Practicing translating will help you get better at translating and those skills doesn't necessarily translate into you improving at Korean. There are people who are amazing translators and have no problem understanding x language or translating x language to y langauge but can't speak x language very well. Anyways your goal is to understand Korean faster and faster and more and more automatic And translating has nothing to do with that obviously. if you want to be a translator you also have to make sure your english is sharp so you gotta read a lot in english tooooooooo.

Getting to a point of Speaking well takes a long time... (you gotta talk a lot and suck a lot before you don't anymore) I wrote a blog post about why it makes complete sense that my speaking skills in Japanese isn't amazing after all these years and within that post I link to this foreigner who goes on korean tv who speaks really well but clearly it took him a while (i'm not saying that like it's a bad thing. it's amazing how much he improved) https://choronghi.wordpress.com/2015/04 ... r-english/ (I'm also doing slow-cooked Korean too... The main reason is because that's the only way I want to do it. I started in 2011).

Also I recommend focusing on comprehension than output especially if you can't understand very well. How much do you understand your family? the songs you like? etc etc. If it's not a lot I don't think it's worth it for you to output so much. It just sounds burdensome and not helpful.... compared to doing other stuff like input.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Fri Mar 10, 2017 10:09 pm

@Sayonaroo:

You are very correct that I need to practice speaking if I want to speak. It is unfortunate that I've let it slide - I was in the habit of doing iTalki sessions toward the end of last year (when we were in a much larger office space with private rooms that had laptops available for use). However I still haven't worked out out a plan on how to get the private space and computer to do it on in the new office.

Language learning really is a process of discovery. It's every bit as much about finding *what works* in terms of learning the language as it is about actually learning the language.

When I began this process over a year ago, it was with a great sense of frustration because what I had tried before had not seen me make any progress other than learning a few words here and there. My initial revelation was that I'd just need volumes of input - and to just work through things repeatedly until it began to make sense. Obviuosly I would look things up - including grammar - to the extent to which I could identify it.

That in turn lead to discovering LingQ and Steve Kaufmanns videos on language learning. I bought into a lot of what he says in his videos, however I do need to let experience by my guide. So once I had put in a reasonable amount of hours, I was in a better position to assess the effectiveness of the approach I was taking.

Mid-year I will be doing another mini review of my progress, and hopefully concluding that I have made good corrections to how I am approaching language learning.

I read a bit of your blog and I agree that ones goal *has* to be included in ones study program. Its a huge missing component in mine and I need to figure out a solution in short order to get it back on track.

--- REGULAR UPDATE FOLLOWS ---

When it rains, it pours! Or better yet: When someone on the floor above tries to use the water sprinkler as a point on which to hang items, it breaks and rains water. That water then drenches the entire floor, floor below it, floor below that until the fire department turn up and stop the flow of water. If things move slowly, such as at 4am in the morning, this process can take some time and said water can even reach the lobby - shorting the elevator motors on its way down.

Then the residents of said building have to put up with cleanup crews and various insurers doing the rounds to bicker over how much needs to be fixed, and who is going to pay for what.

It's been that kind of a week.

On the minus side, we're one floor below ground zero - so we had substantial water in the foyer area outside the elevators. BUT on the plus side our apartment was not directly under ground zero and it would seem the path of least resistence saw very little water come our way and it's mostly a minor inconvenience.

Other than that I'm on my way to gaining an additional passport. I sat the Citizenship exam this week too - the preparation for which ate into my Korean reading time.

Throw a slightly overdue project at work into the mix and I'm surprised I managed to get any Korean done at all! Still - gotta fight for language learning. At least *something* has to be done each day to keep the ball rolling.

Despite my intended increase in focus on output these days, I still believe input is primary. So when the going gets tough, the input has to remain. I'm behind on writing in Korean but managed to keep up a reasonable rate of reading (and a bunch of listening) over the last week.

It does seem, at times, a little frustrating that the mountain of words with which I need to become familiar is so huge. But LingQ is very useful for that. While one might easily quibble over its very loose definition of what a 'word' is, the stats are still useful for seeing progress.

As long as my 'known words' keeps going up. As long as I still find words in old articles which had been left as 'familiar' that have since become known to me, I can be sure I am making progress.

My definition for marking things as 'known' in LingQ is very strict. As such its very rare for me to find a word I have previously marked as 'known' that does not have a solid meaning for me.
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby outcast » Sat Mar 11, 2017 3:22 pm

Does LingQ do static statistics or does it also calculate change over time, for example, you can see how much your word number or text comprehension has improved, or not, in a specified time period?
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Mon Mar 13, 2017 5:29 pm

outcast wrote:Does LingQ do static statistics or does it also calculate change over time, for example, you can see how much your word number or text comprehension has improved, or not, in a specified time period?


I am not aware of any way to generate advanced statistics or graphs. LingQ's stats are simply totals for a chosen period. Available periods one can view are: Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Two Weeks, Last Month, Last Two Months, Last 6 Months, Last Year, All Time

So, for me the main indicators in LingQ are:
Words Read/Hours Listened - representing my exposure to the language
Known Words - While the stat itself is next to meaningless in many ways, it kind of represents familiarity with the language. So as long as it keeps going up then its a reminder that I *am* still learning even if it feels like I am on a plateau.

I am the kind of person who likes to have these kinds of statistics. I want to know that things have been working for me, are currently working for me and have the reassurance that they will continue to work for me.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Thu Mar 16, 2017 6:34 pm

회사의 큰 프로쟄트가 곧 끝날 거입니다. 지난 주의 시간이 없지만 한국어 연습을 아직도 했습니다. 이 주에 쓰기가 다시 시작됬습니다.
지금보다 상당히 더 문법을 6 왈 말까지 배워야 합니다. 말하기 연습도 다시 시작해야 해서 언어 교확 그룹을 가입했습니다. 시간이 있으면 한 회의를 다니갈 수 있습니다. 언어 교확과 문법 사이에 한국어 부족을 해결한 것 같습니다.

The big project at work will soon be finished. Although I didn't have much time last week, I still practiced Korean. This week I have resumed writing.

By the end of June I must learn a lot more grammar than I know now. I also need to practice speaking so I've joined a language exchange group. If I have time, I'll attend a meeting. Between language exchange and grammar, I think the deficiencies in my Korean will be fixed.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Thu Mar 16, 2017 8:49 pm

So the previous post yet again demonstrates how far I have to go in Korean. The corrections are in and there were a lot of alterations and fixes! Aside from the simplest of sentences, there is almost nothing in Korean I can write which would go uncorrected.

It can be very demotivating.

I'll first pick out a couple of sentences and show them against their corrected versions. I haven't highlighted every addition or change, but I've highlighted the changes which stand out to me:

Original: 회사의 큰 프로쟄트가 곧 끝날 거입니다.
Corrected: 회사의 큰 프로젝트가 곧 끝납니다.

Original: 지난 주의 시간이 없지만 한국어 연습을 아직도 했습니다.
Corrected: 지난주엔 시간이 많지 않았지만 나는 여전히 한국어를 연습했습니다.

Now, as with almost all corrections, I read the corrected versions and I understand them. Moreso, they sound like the kind of constructions I have been reading and listening to for hundreds of hours now.

In the first example my feeling from the rendering in English of "... will be finished" is that it occurs in the future. Hence my desire to use future tense on the verb. However the Korean, if translated as literally as possible, might better be rendered "soon is finished".

In the second example, being a longer sentence, I had a whole host of mistakes. I cannot explain why I decided to use "지난 주의 시간이" - which would translate as "last week's time". The use of "지난주에" (actually 지난주엔, which I believe is a contracted form of 지난주에는) is very familiar to me and in some kind of irony is what I would have said were I to have written this sentence last year!

Once more I've left out the important "나는" which rightfully needs to appear *somewhere* in my text to at least set the subject as me. I think long ago - prior to this Language Log even - much of my writings included corrections where the unnecessary bits were being deleted. Being a typical beginner, this was often the repeated use of the subject - both within a sentence and within paragraphs.

However I'm now on the other end of that spectrum - leaving out the subject all too often!

One of the corrections I *think* is a more gentle suggestion. I had originally said "시간이 없지만" (had no time) and it was corrected to "시간이 많지 않았지만" (didn't have much time). So heres the hard part of looking over corrections: determining which bits which *need* to be changed because they are *incorrect* and which bits are probably just preferable phrasings.

Without further information, I'm going to pass off the latter as being a preferable phrasing on an already understandable and grammatically correct rendering of what I intended to say.

I have mixed feelings about the corrections I receive these days.

I mean the volume of corrections I receive is still considerable. So one one hand I feel I can't be faulted for concluding that I am still 'not getting it' with regard to learning Korean. However on the other hand I am making different mistakes to what I made 6 months ago.

A mitigating factor may be that I continue to break new ground - I write about new and differing topics using new and different vocabulary. Perhaps if I were to make of point of writing about the same topic, using the same grammar points, sentence structures and vocabulary then I would find my mistakes diminishing.
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AndyMeg
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Fri Mar 17, 2017 1:18 am

One of the corrections I *think* is a more gentle suggestion. I had originally said "시간이 없지만" (had no time) and it was corrected to "시간이 많지 않았지만" (didn't have much time). So heres the hard part of looking over corrections: determining which bits which *need* to be changed because they are *incorrect* and which bits are probably just preferable phrasings.

Without further information, I'm going to pass off the latter as being a preferable phrasing on an already understandable and grammatically correct rendering of what I intended to say.


Could you ask you wife when in doubt? Maybe she could explain to you the subtle differences in meaning. Just one or two sentences at a time (so you don't overwhelm her with lots and lots of questions). Or, if that's not possible, then maybe you could find a language exchange partner and ask her/him those questions. Or directly ask your questions in sites like Italki.

We all learn by making mistakes. If you are making different mistakes, then it is a good thing. You are changing, you are exploring other possibilities. It is part of the learning process.

Try not to think in english and translate. Try to understand how a korean person would think and act. Getting to know the culture often helps to get a better hang of the language and a deeper understanding of it and its implications. Learn about Korea's history and traditions. (Well, this is what I try to do, but of course, it is only a suggestion ;) )

Perhaps if I were to make of point of writing about the same topic, using the same grammar points, sentence structures and vocabulary then I would find my mistakes diminishing.


I think that's a good idea in order to see faster progress. Then you could choose another topic and move on.

Maybe this course could be of help. It is free and short, but very valuable and insightful: Learning How to Learn.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Fri Mar 17, 2017 7:31 pm

Thank you for the link to the Coursera course - I will certainly take a look. While I have my doubts as to whether they'll enlighten me with information I haven't yet seen elsewhere, any fresh perspectives can help me make adjustments to my approach to language learning.

I've already used up the wife resource with questions earlier this week and the "wife's friend" resource with other questions! Haha. I guess more what I was saying is that during language learning there are a tonne of questions. I have a bunch just from that one language correction - not to mention questions which pop into my mind while I am reading every day. If I were to stop and look each thing up, or to stop and ask about each thing it would entail a lot of discussions and additional reading.

I occasionally ask on LingQ, or Reddit, or find answers to similar questions other people have asked on iTalki and across the web. It can be a time consuming thing.

So more the point I was making is that some things I just let slide. I'm the kind of person who really likes to know all the details - which is why my study guides on learning Korean which I bought years ago have become lost yet I'm using my Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar almost daily.

As to the point of repeating the use of grammar points, sentence structures and vocabulary - it's a tough call. While the corrections I receive can be demotivating at times due to the volume of corrections, my main concern is about what this could indicate.

It could indicate that the way I am approaching language learning is suboptimal (for want of a better word) and that its showing I *should* be focused more on getting things right and a lot less on moving on to new things. This way of thinking would also mean I'd be reading a lot less breadth of material than I am now - choosing instead to focus on more limited materials within a given subject area.

However the volume of corrections could just be part of the Korean journey and somewhat unavoidable. If this is the case then working on each area until I'm 'getting it' would be a fools errand in which there is a big opportunity cost in terms of breadth of knowledge.

You've certainly helped give me some food for thought!

Because I am self-studying and I dont really have anyone in the same boat whose struggles I know, I'm always questioning myself. "Am I doing this right?" "How far along *should* I be by now?"

That in itself is probably a fools errand too :) But I cannot help but wonder...
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AndyMeg
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Fri Mar 17, 2017 9:47 pm

I think I prefer a mixed approach. I study very slowly, but steadily, some particulars of the korean language (for now the very, very, basics), but I also give myself plenty of time for interacting extensively with native material. And I also like to use resources that, I think, complement well one another. That gives variety to my language learning journey without feeling overwhelming.

So I think one thing you may do is also some kind of mixed approach. For example, you could choose a topic or grammar point that is specially difficult to you. Then, if you publish 10 sentences for corrections, half of them could be about that particular topic or grammar point and the other 5 could be about anything else.

For me, the best way to learn (grammar, structures, vocabulary, etc.) is to have some intensive study time (about 30% of you total study time) and complement it by extensively interacting with native material (about 70% of your study time). Intensive study gives you comprehension and immediate feedback, which helps to correct your mistakes and realize what are your strong points. Extensive interaction with native material (preferably material that you enjoy or are interested in) gives you the amount of spaced repetition, natural context and emotional associations that you need in order to really assimilate all that knowledge and integrate it within yourself. It helps to make that knwoledge more spontaneous and intuitive, just as it is for native speakers.

Because I am self-studying and I dont really have anyone in the same boat whose struggles I know, I'm always questioning myself. "Am I doing this right?" "How far along *should* I be by now?"


I also ask myself the same questions. That's why I'm continuosly revising my learning strategies and adjusting them. But I also try to trust myself. I know (deep inside) when something is working and when something else is not. I think the question of "How far along should I be by now" depends on your goals with the language and if you have set a specific time for a specific goal. If something is not working right, one can always revise the process and strategies and adjust them. Sometimes we are not using the best strategies for a specific goal, and sometimes we give ourselves too little time for achieving certain goals. If a goal feels too big, then it is a good idea to divide it into chunks that feel small enough for us to take action and feel the progress.
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