Slow-cooked Korean

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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue Apr 04, 2017 6:13 pm

Something I have been thinking about as of late is the proverbial upside-down pyramid of language learning. The further 'up' the pyramid I go, the more I have to cover.

Initially I believed that just by reading and listening I would learn the most frequent parts of vocabulary and there is no *need* for special flashcarding or focused review of vocabulary. I believe this to be true now that I have gone through 160k+ words of reading. I feel I have picked up a lot of vocabulary including lots of random words from various topics which I still recall. I think it worked out well.

HOWEVER I always wondered whether this effect (learning words through reading rather than intentional review) would begin to slow down. I'm hitting a lot of infrequent words because I have moved on from the beginner/upper beginner material. The grammar and language use in the texts I am working through now are much more adult in nature.

So I am finding now that I am encountering a lot of new words, but the repeats are more infrequent. I am clearly still learning words, but I wonder whether the rate at which I am learning words is therefore decreasing. Since I have no way to track vocabulary really, I can only go based on how I feel about progress as of late.

With that in mind I did a little thinking last week about how I might fix this potential problem. Some options sprang to mind:

1) Start doing some targeted word memorization via flashcards, Iversens Method, Goldlisting (does this even work??) or such
2) Decrease the amount of new material I read, and increase the number of times I re-read material
3) Some method whereby I try to use words I've read in my writing (diary entries, grammar practice, etc)

They're not mutually exclusive, but after some thought I opted for option 3 only. I am a strong believer in reinforcement through different activities.

I'm not super keen on doing changes to my language learning routine frequently. My preference is to try something - for a decent number of hours - then have some kind of review to see whether the activity is having the effect it was hoped to have.

In this case I am making an exception and from last week I injected this modification into my language learning strategy:

While reading texts I'll choose words which I do not know but sound like useful words to know and tag them in LingQ.
During the week while doing my writing practice I'll peruse the list and try use some of those words.
At the end of each week I'll find the 5 - 10 I know least well and keep them. For the rest I'll remove the tag.

It's just a means of encountering those words a few times than I otherwise would. Someone mentioned that for the Goldlist method, part of the argument for its effectiveness was that in choosing which words one knew best it reinforced the ones being discarded. Perhaps I'll have some kind of effect like that.
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby rdearman » Thu Apr 06, 2017 3:59 pm

I tried Goldlisting for awhile but it wasn't really for me. However I do use Anki a lot and I personally recommend that you continue to do extensive reading, but you could add a deck of infrequent words into your study mix. For example (warning made up numbers ahead!), if you were to get a frequency word list for your TL and select the words in the "middle frequency range", let's say 5000-10000 and use flashcards for them. You'll still get all the most common words via reading, and the next level of words in your infrequent range deck. Finally for more obscure specialist words in an area your interested in, or employed you might want to create another flashcard deck for words which are generally obscure, but likely to be useful to you personally.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Fri Apr 07, 2017 8:11 pm

rdearman wrote:... You'll still get all the most common words via reading, and the next level of words in your infrequent range deck. Finally for more obscure specialist words in an area your interested in, or employed you might want to create another flashcard deck for words which are generally obscure, but likely to be useful to you personally.


I've been kind of avoiding explicit vocab review, but it may end up that it really is the most effective way of tackling the issue. Certainly it appears I am moving in that direction. At any rate I'd probably give Anki a whirl - in the past I've used Memrise, but I'm not sure that the variety of activities they've built into it are really helping that much. In my limited experience the words I remembered for the longest time were those for which I had made interesting memes to remember them by.

I had a couple of ideas while considering spending time on focused vocabulary review and I wonder what your take (or anyones take actually!) on it would be:

1) Use of color to help me remember words. Perhaps one color for passive verbs, another for active and a third for adjectives (which Korean treats often similarly to verbs).
2) Pair nouns and verbs together - just choose the most common action. eg: Kick + ball, Report + crime, Spend + time

At least #2 strikes me as a very reasonable thing to do.
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Fri Apr 07, 2017 8:13 pm

Also in addition to the reply to @rdearman's post, heres an update in broken Korean!

어제 저는 시간이 다가오고 있는 것을 깨달았습니다! 3 개왈 후에 한국어의 능력 검토를 하겠습니다. 그래서 HowToStudyKorean 레슨을 보면Unit 3 까지25 게 넘어서 앞에서 일주일에 레슨 2 게 이상 공부하면 됩니다.
저는 지금까지 제가 공부하는 법에 몇몇 변화들을 했기 때문에 더 정확한 검토를 할 수 있습니다.
아직도 듣기와 언어의 이용이 남아 있는 가장 큰 문제입니다.

Yesterday I realized that time is running out! In 3 months time I intend on doing a review of my Korean language abilities. So taking into account that there are 25 HowToStudyKorean lessons remaining until Unit 3, going forward I should do more than 2 lessons each week.
Up to this point I’ve done few changes to the way I’m studying, so its possible to do a more accurate review.
Still listening and language usage remain my biggest problems.
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby AndyMeg » Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:14 pm

qeadz wrote:I had a couple of ideas while considering spending time on focused vocabulary review and I wonder what your take (or anyones take actually!) on it would be:

1) Use of color to help me remember words. Perhaps one color for passive verbs, another for active and a third for adjectives (which Korean treats often similarly to verbs).
2) Pair nouns and verbs together - just choose the most common action. eg: Kick + ball, Report + crime, Spend + time

At least #2 strikes me as a very reasonable thing to do.


I don't know about the use of colors, but I think #2 is a great idea.

Another thing you could do is to spend more time with native material focused on a specific topic of your interest so that you can adquire the most frequent vocabulary used in relation to that topic. And after a while you could move on to another topic. (that's more or less what I plan to do with k-dramas. For now I'm focusing on present-day dramas, but after a while I would like to focus on more specific themes/genres. For example: medical, fantasy or suspense).
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:46 pm

AndyMeg wrote:I don't know about the use of colors, but I think #2 is a great idea.

Another thing you could do is to spend more time with native material focused on a specific topic of your interest so that you can adquire the most frequent vocabulary used in relation to that topic. And after a while you could move on to another topic. (that's more or less what I plan to do with k-dramas. For now I'm focusing on present-day dramas, but after a while I would like to focus on more specific themes/genres. For example: medical, fantasy or suspense).


Yeah I don't know about the color either. It just came to mind as something visual which the brain might have a memory for. Another idea I had was to have a list of corrected sentences which I could review periodically - perhaps using color to draw my attention to the corrections.

eg:

일단 물을 끓어야 되며 빻은 커피 가루를 물속에 넣습니다.

My mistake in this one was assuming that the ㅎ disappears when the verb changes form. I incorrectly rendered 빻다 as 빤.

I could choose all the mistakes I have made to be part of a review this way or perhaps choose just key ones I feel are the worst offenders. At any rate this would use color somewhat differently to what I proposed for vocabulary review.

As always there are a million different activities one could do - each trying to deal with some or other deficiency. The trick is finding the most bang-for-buck. I only do 6 - 7 hours per week. Its really not much at all, so I want to be sure I am making reasonable use of the time I do spend on language learning.

However whatever comes of all this, I know that the reading and listening must be kept up at good levels. I do believe they are the backbone for everything else.
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby Ezy Ryder » Tue Apr 11, 2017 9:45 pm

qeadz wrote:1) Use of color to help me remember words. Perhaps one color for passive verbs, another for active and a third for adjectives (which Korean treats often similarly to verbs).

Many Mandarin dictionaries colour-code syllables' romanisations according to their tone. I find it can really help to remember the tones of some of the less common words I don't hear al that often. If I can't remember what a syllable should sound like, I'll sometimes remember I always see it romanised in a particular colour, and pronounce it based on that.

TL;DR If there's something you can neither "deduce", nor easily remember (yet); colour-coding may be worth trying out. Otherwise, unless you enjoy it, probably not worth the effort.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue Apr 11, 2017 10:05 pm

Ezy Ryder wrote:Many Mandarin dictionaries colour-code syllables' romanisations according to their tone. I find it can really help to remember the tones of some of the less common words I don't hear al that often.


Interesting - thank you for adding this. I did a quick google search to see how they did it and - not knowing anything really of Chinese - it seems a very sensible extension.

More-so that the color coding is helping for you. Were I to do some kind of vocabulary revision, it could very well help me similarly (even though I'm not trying to remember tones - the principle is the same I believe).
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue May 02, 2017 5:41 pm

It's been a while! I'm still here, although busy these days so I have reduced my activity to only browsing a few interesting threads here (with a brief foray into beginner's Mandarin for a friend who is starting to learn it).

But I figure it's time for an update just to keep things ticking along :)

Just to continue the recent theme of vocabulary and retention, I had an interesting realization recently. There is generally an order in how I forget a word in Korean. Of course after this realization I was able to fit an explanation to it, but thats always the case - we humans are very good at arguing and debating.

Anyhow, here goes:

1) 에 or 애

I've found that for the most familiar words, the first thing I will become confused about is whether the word is spelled with ㅔ or ㅐ. My hypothesis is that there is usually no difference in pronunciation between these in the Seoul dialect and this is what I am learning. Hence it is one area in which there isn't a connection between pronunciation and spelling.

2) 어, 아, 오

The next most likely to go are these vowel sounds. Now in English, at least with my South African accent, 오 and 아 come fairly naturally. However it is 어 which adds to the confusion. Over time I'll confuse the other two with 어. Now it's not that I can't *hear* the difference - now I hear it well enough (IMHO) when listening to Korean, but I just forget how to actually pronounce the word!

3) ㅉ and ㅈ

I could almost list this entry as number 2, but I think maybe this applies to fewer words so it doesn't happen as frequently. I do actually struggle with this when hearing spoken Korean. Don't ask me off-hand because I don't remember, but there are words in which the ㅈ tends to have a bit more of an edge to it when I hear it (and when I say it). Those are the ones where I find myself feeling it should be a ㅉ.

Luckily ㅉ seems to be considerably less common... so when in doubt, I write a ㅈ and frequency seems to be on my side :)

4) ㅃ and ㅂ

I find I can tell these apart much easier than 3 when listening. Hence they tend to factor in fairly low on the forgetfulness scale. Similarly to 3, words with ㅃ aren't as common (at least for the vocab I know) so one can always make the safer guess.

I feel I am able to pronounce the difference between these much better than 3.

5) ㄷ, ㄸ, ㅌ

Surprisingly this seems to mostly not be an issue for me. There is only one word which I have repeatedly messed this up with, and it is 식당 (restaurant). I went through a mini-phase of repeatedly wanting to write 식탕 (and did in a number of cases because I was so comfortable with what I wrote that I didn't check the spelling of it).

I think this was more of a specific case and now that I have beaten myself up over it, I expect it will be correct from now on because it has kind of stuck in my mind.

-----

That is not exhaustive. I'll make other spelling errors from time to time (often omitting an ㅅ which isn't pronounced), but in general I find that my spelling errors are largely correlated to how long it has been since I used a particular word. The only exception is the first entry (애, 에) which happens very regularly.

My working theory for all of this is that the order of the aforementioned 'forgetfulness scale' mimics how readily I am able to both tell the phonemes apart and how accurately I am able to differentiate them in my own speech.

This in itself might seem an obvious kind of conclusion, but I was thinking about English. It breaks rules left, right and center and sometimes there is no real match between how I might pronounce the word with my accent and how it is written (taking into account the 'general' pronunciation rules the language has).

Yet my spelling in English is not terrible. Over the years since University it has deteriorated, but it feels like my memory of how words are written is disconnected from how I might pronounce them.

But in Korean it appears the two are very connected: I forget how to pronounce a word, then I've forgotten how to write it.
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qeadz
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Re: Slow-cooked Korean

Postby qeadz » Tue May 02, 2017 7:02 pm

In addition to the previous post, I'll just add one more thing for today!

My wife was watching Korean news and while most of the dialog is way over my head - I catch random words or phrases here or there, but to even say I understand the general topic would be a gross overstatement - I did read something. Well. Almost.

A news headline, which translated to English, would be something like:

The foundations/basis/fundamentals for the SAAD deployment agreement are being ...<unknown>...

I asked my wife for what the final word was. I *should* have been able to make a guess because the word used was 재확인 (reconfirm) which contains 확인 (confirm/verify); a word I already know.

Anyway. It always makes me feel good when I can read a news headline or get the topic from such content because at least it indicates some small bits here and there, however scattered, are starting to make some sense.
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