Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

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leosmith
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Wed Dec 14, 2016 6:04 am

Sept 23 – Dec 15, Step 1(b): Learn pronunciation at the sentence level by using Pimsleur. Create Pimsleur transcript, learn Pimsleur vocabulary, do scriptorium using Pimsleur, read all Pimsleur material by using lists and anki after the lessons. Finish Michel Thomas beginner course and Korean From Zero Book 1.

Now you know why I named this step “Pimsleur”. I have written at length elsewhere, most recently here, about how Pimsleur fits into my method, why I like it, etc. So here I’ll merely focus on what I did exactly. First, I should explain my problem regarding editions. There are only 2 levels for Korean for a total of 60 lessons. The day I finished level 1 edition 1, the second editions of both levels were released. Since the change was supposed to be very significant, mainly less formal language, I decided to go back and do level 1 edition 2 before finishing up with level 2 edition 2. So I did 90 lessons in all. I found a transcript for level 1 edition 1, but had to make the others. As you can imagine, level 1 edition 2 was similar to edition 1, so that transcript wasn’t hard to create. But Level 2 was brand new, and this was the first time I had to create a Pimsleur transcript 100% from scratch. Although time consuming, I found the process extremely helpful, so I’m going to write my description of this step as if creating the transcript from scratch is supposed to be part of my method. It’s a good idea anyway; Pimsleur transcripts are getting harder and harder to find these days.

First Run. In the morning I would listen to the opening dialog of a new Pimsleur lesson and type it out. I’d stop the recording where necessary for this first run, which is against the normal Pimsleur rules but unavoidable if you’re trying to create a transcript. After finishing the transcript for the opening dialog, I’d try to do the rest of the lesson as normally as possible, only stopping when they introduced new material, which I needed to add to the transcript. After finishing the entire lesson, I would hand write all the new material as a list with Korean on one half of the page and English on the other. Then I would go sit at my dining room table with the list and memorize it.

Second Run. In the evening I’d review the list, and the lists for the previous two days, then do the Pimsleur lesson again. This time no pausing.

Third Run. The next morning, without any review, I’d do the lesson the last time. I always passed, or felt I got at lease 80%, at that point. Typically I’d get better than 80% the night before, but I felt that was artificially high because of the reviewing. So why even do the pass in the evening? Because I’d learned that I’d sometimes fail, or feel bad about how I’d done, on the next morning pass if I didn’t do the one in the evening. Doing the lesson 3 times was the price I needed to pay to be able to keep the one lesson per day rate.

After the last pass the next morning, I’d start a new lesson by doing the first run as described above, and so the cycle repeats. After that, I put all new items from the previous day’s lesson into anki. I’d do my normal reps, English to Korean and Korean to English, without any writing, but when I got to new material, I’d do scriptorium for all English to Korean cards. Although I made some spelling errors, I never failed cards unless my answer or pronunciation was wrong; I didn’t want to spend too much time on my writing. One thing I forgot to mention was I always read out loud at this stage. In fact I will read everything out loud until I reach my goal, so please know that reading = reading out loud in this log.
Last edited by leosmith on Sun Jun 24, 2018 1:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:07 am

Ok, the last two things I needed to finish to complete step 1 were some grammar programs. For Russian, I settled for Michel Thomas at this point, because it was fairly substantial (over 10 hours). But there are only 2 hours released so far for Korean. A nice little introduction, but I felt not enough to prepare me for conversation. So I decided to try to finish my text before finishing Pimsleur. Here are my thoughts:

Michel Thomas. This program gives me more grammar bang for the buck, or bang per the minute, than any other one I’ve used. It’s a pity this in only the beginner course, covering only a small percentage of Korean grammar. But it was well executed. Pure audio, transcript included, very few words so you could easily focus on grammar alone. Far from complete, but I still recommend it.

Korean From Zero! Book 1 (KFZ). I’ve already described this text book a bit in a previous post. I wasn’t originally planning on completing this during my first step, but I kept on looking at the first lesson, and thought “why not?” After the first lesson, I tried another, and then realized that completing the book wouldn’t interfere with Pimsleur if I did it at a slow pace. So I did one lesson every three days, and actually finished one week before I finished Pimsleur.

Although KFZ is called a textbook, it’s pretty much all grammar. I decided to memorize all the vocabulary, read everything, and do as many of the exercises as were needed to make me feel I knew the grammar points. As with Michel Thomas, I’ll return to this again in the future. My experience tells me that going through a grammar and doing every single lesson, translating every sentence from English to Korean, is the best way I can use it. But if I try to do this with so little exposure to the language as I have now, it will be pretty difficult and won’t stick very. It’s best to know all the vocabulary, and have already picked up a great deal of the grammar through exposure before completing such a thorough pass.

Even though the grammar is far from automatic at this point, having seen it once will be a great help in preparing me for my next step, especially the conversations, which is where my real learning occurs. Somewhere deep into my next step I’ll feel the need to polish my grammar a bit, and I’ll work through KFZ again.

As I mentioned earlier, there are 3 books in the series. I might get a wild hair and decide to complete the other two this year too, but that remains to be decided. Whatever happens, I won’t let it interfere with or take precedence over conversation, which is the king of step 2 in my language plan.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:25 am

Yay, I finished Pimsleur tonight! That was the last item left in step 1. I'm excited to finally be ready for step 2, which has the title "conversation". I already booked 8 italki lessons, 5 X 30min and 3 X 60min, starting the day after tomorrow, which will take me to the day before Christmas eve. I hope that after Christmas I'll be able to do 60min/day for about 7 months, but we'll see what happens. I'll describe the step more thoroughly later. I'm finally caught up with my posts now. 3 months down, 9 to go. Will I make it? Don't forget to vote. ;)
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby smallwhite » Thu Dec 15, 2016 5:51 am

leosmith wrote:Will I make it? Don't forget to vote. ;)


It's hard to guess! I have no experience in one-on-one lessons, and so have no idea how far this item can take you:

leosmith wrote:200 hours of conversation lessons on italki (not started)


Plus you have "~B2" Japanese and Mandarin, and I can't tell how big the cognate discount would be. I've studied a bit of both Jap and Kor and I find their grammar similar in concept but different in realisation. The Mandarin vocab discount I know is about 70%, but how hard is the remaining 30%? Hmm...

I'll follow your progress with interest!
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Nandemonai » Fri Dec 16, 2016 4:45 am

leosmith wrote:Although they only have a few dozen free pod casts, which I linked to above, if you join the site for free, they will give you a one time opportunity to get a one month premium membership for $1. With that membership, you can download all their pod casts, videos, etc in a single download. This took about 20min if I recall. I now have hundreds of free pod casts in a folder on my computer, and I unsubscribed after that, hehe.


I did the same this week. I'd been considering getting it months ago but kind of forgot about it, so thank you for reminding me! I'll be mostly using them after I finish Talk To Me In Korean level 9. How are you going to use these? I'm thinking of just playing the dialogues on repeat and look at the PDFs to answer any questions I might have.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Fri Dec 16, 2016 5:53 am

Nandemonai wrote:How are you going to use these?

I load 10 of the full podcasts into my mp3 player and play them in a loop when I go for a walk. As I'm transitioning to reading right now, I load the dialog text & audio into lingQ and read them. LingQ's existing beginning content sucks imo.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Sun Dec 18, 2016 12:54 am

Evita wrote:Check out Click Korean

I took a look at it, because I'm thinking in my free time I might want to improve my grammar, and look up topics that weren't covered in KFZ1. You say KFZ2 & 3 have big problems, and from what I've seen I agree. How thorough would you say Click Korean is? Could someone reach an advanced level in Korean grammar by using it as a single source?
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Nandemonai » Sun Dec 18, 2016 5:21 am

leosmith wrote:I took a look at it, because I'm thinking in my free time I might want to improve my grammar, and look up topics that weren't covered in KFZ1. You say KFZ2 & 3 have big problems, and from what I've seen I agree. How thorough would you say Click Korean is? Could someone reach an advanced level in Korean grammar by using it as a single source?


You might want to consider checking out the できる韓国語 series, you get a lot of "freebies" when you learn it through Japanese. You can look inside through Amazon to see if it looks like a textbook you'd like. A lot of schools use this textbook here, and I know at least one person who reached basic fluency in one year with these (native Japanese speaker though). In the intermediate books they stopped using Japanese as much, they only use it for the grammar explanations/word lists.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:46 am

Dec 16 – June 15?, Step 2: Conversation. Begin to converse with tutors and use anki to review vocabulary/sentences from the sessions, start reading on lingq, continue listening and scriptorium, work through more grammar (time permitting).

Some learners like to make books and word lists the prime source of their vocabulary and phrases. My most important goal is good conversation, so I use it for my prime source, and that’s why I call this step “conversation”. Everything I did in step 1 was to prepare me for conversation. I know from lots of trial and error that this is where I improve and learn the most. In fact, nothing even comes close to this simple little method that I developed. Actually, the method is so simple that I can hardly take credit for it, but I have added my own little touches to it here and there, so I still consider it mine.

I don’t spend years reading and listening before I start to converse. To me, that would be inefficient, frustrating and illogical. Avoiding conversation means that I’d miss out one the benefits of synergy, which is inefficient. I really want to converse, so holding off would be frustrating. I need vocabulary and phrases from real conversation, so it would be illogical to take it from other sources.

I need to do a lot of conversing to get good at it, so the earlier the better. I start conversing a soon as practical, which is different from as soon as possible. I make this distinction because there is a certain polyglot that tries to get everyone to converse from day 1. He tells them to buy a phrasebook, spend an hour or two with it, then go talk to a native speaker. The theory is as you progress, not only will native speakers provide you with all the input and assistance you need, but you’ll go study grammar on an as-needed basis.

But I won’t do that. For reasons I mentioned earlier, it’s unwise to do anything before getting a good foundation in pronunciation, learn the alphabet, and start listening. And on top of that, I think it would be cruel to start conversing with natives before having some basic grammar and a few hundred words under my belt. So I prefer to spend the first 3 months doing that instead of trying to convince everyone that I’m fluent with a few hundred badly pronounced words.

Now let me describe my little 2-step conversation method, as I have so many times before.
1) I converse with a Korean tutor on skype, 100% Korean, for 1 hour. Everything she says that I don’t catch/understand, I have her type in Korean. Everything I want to say but can’t, I ask her what it is in Korean, and have her type it in the Skype window.
2) After the session, I hand write all items down in a list in a paper notebook, and memorize them. Later that day, I review them once. The next morning, I put them in anki. In addition to anki, I continue to review the paper list once a day for 2 more days. When I do anki reviews, I hand write the answers for the new English to Korean cards only; no writing for the other reviews.

As of today, I’ve had 3 conversations. Originally I wanted the first 10 conversations to be 30min, because I don’t want too many new items too soon. But many italki teachers in my time slot don’t offer 30min classes, so I got a mixture. Here are some stats:
1st session, 30 min, 55 new items
2nd session, 60 min, 40 new items
3rd session, 30 min, 24 new items

Fortunately, I deleted my anki deck just before this to give me time to review new material, otherwise I’d be spinning out of control now. Make no mistakes - this simple method is very aggressive. In order to keep my anki reps down to a reasonable number, I’ll probably have to regularly delete cards older than a month. I know some people like to avoid intensive work, so they do things like using anki passively to try to make their learning more efficient. Although that might help them a little bit, I’ve found there is no substitute for having a reasonable component of intensive work in my study program. To me, reasonable is less than 25% of my learning, so I take measures to cut it off at that point.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:54 am

Nandemonai wrote:You might want to consider checking out the できる韓国語 series

Nice resource, but I'm not into laddering. I have gotten a great deal of help from my Japanese and Chinese background though, and it seems to be growing more helpful every day.
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