First, a little update. Yesterday I had a really bad class with my best teacher. It was due to the terrible internet (again, the teacher was in China). So we struggled through the lesson, but spent about half of the time switching systems (skype/kakaotalk/zoom) and asking each other whether we could hear. Incidentally, a former Chinese teacher of mine turned me onto
zoom. It usually works very well with partners in China, even with video, but not yesterday for some reason. So you get good sound, good video, and there appears to be video recording options. It’s free, but shuts down after 40min if you’re not a paying member.
Anyway, after that dismal performance, I realized I actually did quiet well considering, and I experienced an hour or two of amazing clarity where my attitude was great and my memory was as sharp as a needle. In the afternoon I switched to Russian for it’s weekly maintenance and I was amazed at how well both the conversation and TV comprehension went. But when I switched back to Korean a bit later to watch my TV shows, I didn’t understand anything. Probably the closest to zero since I began watching. Sometimes I have problems when I switch from conversing in one language to another, but never anything near to this extent. I didn’t know what to do; my brain clearly wasn’t functioning properly, and I actually had blurred vision in one eye. So I just watched the show and concentrated hard on the words I “knew” but couldn’t remember. By the end of that first show, it seemed I was thinking normally again, and the second show went about as I would normally expect.
Everyone, myself included, experiences ups and downs in their performances. But what I described goes above and beyond that. While I appreciate the highs, I don’t want to experience lows like that again. I figure this has to be fallout from the general anesthesia; it’s been 6 days - hope it ends soon.
This morning I had my best Korean conversation ever. Definitely A2. This is the third time in my 17 lessons so far that I felt I was at A2 instead of A1. They’ve been pretty spread out. I predict that in another 10 hours or so they’ll be pretty common, and if I believe I’ll make B1 at 80 hours, then I need to predict I’ll make A2 at 40 hours.
Speaking of hours, the real reason I wanted to write this post was to admit that I’m doing a lot more study than step 1. I estimated 5hrs/day for step 1. I estimate 8hrs/day for step 2. Here is a typical breakdown (time shown for Korean studies only):
6am-7am conversation
7am-8am looking up, writing out lists and memorizing words and phrases from the conversation
8am-9am flashcards
9am-10:30am reading
3-4pm grammar
4-5pm TV show 1
6-6:30pm list review
7-8pm TV show 2
This means that while I spent about 450 hours on step 1, I will spend an additional 2150 hours to close out the year, for a total of around 2600 hours. I’ve only completed 570 hours so far, or about 22%, so I’m still at a very early stage in this spurt. Much more to come!