Korean Immersion Odyssey

[olusatrum]

Hi all, I just discovered this forum and thought a log looked like a good idea. I'm coming back to studying from some time off and I'm trying to get back into the swing of things

I'm not really studying traditional materials beyond just occasionally referencing them. Rather, my goal is to maximize native input. I'm hoping this will also help me rely less on the tedious SRS vocab grind as well. I think my biggest roadblock right now is that I tend to get a little frustrated with how much effort it takes to seek out and parse Korean content, so I put it aside and just passively enjoy stuff with translations instead.

I'm doing a few things to combat that frustration. I made some subs2srs decks of dramas I've seen, so that I can go sentence by sentence, as much or as little as I want per session. Each line has its audio too, so it helps me with my listening. I'm quickly becoming addicted to making these decks, they are so fun to study! I'm also working through the books 보통의 존재 by 이석원 and Blonote by Tablo, since they're full of shorter works I can't get mired in. I like looking things up on 나무위키 (even if some of the opinions are questionable), and I'm trying to read more news articles and blogs.

The goal of all this input is to enjoy Korean content and work my way up to more complex stuff, but also to gain confidence so I can feel less anxious when working on output. Whenever I chat with Korean people, they reply so quickly and naturally that I get anxious about how slow and uptight I sound. I live near a large city that has language exchange meetups and general Korean events, but I get too nervous about my speaking ability to go. I'm hoping that a larger "bank" of native, natural speech patterns will help me build the confidence to meet people and make connections. Blogging in Korean is one of my vague future goals, since it would let me practice output at a slower pace, but I don't know what I'd write about, what platform I'd use, if anyone would read, etc.

[olusatrum]

Thought I'd share how I make and study my subs2srs decks, since I really think they were such a game-changer to my study routines.

Subs2srs is a program that slices up a video or audio file based on subtitle files and turns them into Anki cards with the target language subtitle line, audio, and a screengrab of the video on one side, and the native language subtitle line on the other. There's an example of what it looks like in the previous link. It has an option to make a video clip instead of an audio clip and screengrab, but the latter is more storage space friendly and perfectly adequate for the job. I've seen people change the card format to not show the target language text on the front, and I've seen people use it to slice up longer audio files for repetitive listening and not import into Anki at all.

You technically only need one subtitle file, but I want both Korean and English text, so I use dramas on Viki that have Learn Mode. I download the subtitle files using savesubs.com. One thing that's a little frustrating is that, since I get my subtitles and video files from different sources, sometimes I have to adjust the timing of the subtitles at different points so they match up with the video. I use Subtitle Edit for this. If you just need one time shift to sync the start time, subs2srs can do that in-house. But I had to shift some stuff in the middle of the video, so I had to edit the files. Luckily, it's easy to adjust the timing on whole chunks of lines in Subtitle Edit. That's the only thing I had to do in a separate program - otherwise, I was very happy with subs2srs's options to tweak timing and exclude useless lines.

Once I had everything in Anki, I had to figure out how to study the dang thing. Anki is not really the ideal platform I guess, since I don't actually want to review or memorize the sentences, just work through parsing them once and move on. So I made an options set for my subs2srs decks and set the max reviews at 0. To make sure my cards don't go into "Learning" and show up again, I hit "Easy" every time.

The advantage of having the cards in Anki, though, is that you can use other Anki add-ons with them. For example, morphman reads your vocab deck and reorders your sentence cards by how many words in them you already know. I haven't personally used this, but it looked cool so I thought I'd call it out. It's also handy to have just a huge bank of sentences with translations that you can search any time you need an example sentence for a vocab word or a grammar point.

I'm already the type to re-watch stuff I like, so this is an awesome way for me to study and stay engaged. It's easy to pick up where I left off, I don't have to waste time pausing and rewinding to catch stuff, and being able to easily hop in and out lets me use it for small breaks throughout my workday. I know plenty of people use it with VLive and Youtube as well. Actually, even if you're having trouble obtaining video, the video file is not actually a required input. The only field required is 1 subtitle file, so even without video or audio you can still get a huge bank of anki sentence cards with just a few clicks.

[rdearman]

Love Subs2srs but you might want to consider using SubStudy program instead written by our own EMK from the forum. I have done a video series on using substudy to create Subs2SRS. BTW, substudy will do MUCH more than just create anki decks. It will create a soundtrack for you from the audio, and also generate a html5 system you can look at on your web-browser and jump back and forth in the subs/stream.

Substudy: https://github.com/emk/subtitles-rs

[olusatrum]

Love Subs2srs but you might want to consider using SubStudy program instead written by our own EMK from the forum. I have done a video series on using substudy to create Subs2SRS. BTW, substudy will do MUCH more than just create anki decks. It will create a soundtrack for you from the audio, and also generate a html5 system you can look at on your web-browser and jump back and forth in the subs/stream.

Thank you, that html5 web browser thing looks interesting, I might try that. For now I'm pretty happy with Subs2srs and how easy it is to automatically clean up the output and get rid of lines shorter than x characters or x milliseconds, or that contain anything from a list of words or characters, etc.

To the surprise of no one, Korean Immersion Odyssey hit an immediate roadblock: my dismal vocab bank. I have rock solid instant recall of 1500 or so words, and vague hazy recognition of most other common words. Makes sense - in my break from studying I still consumed Korean entertainment, so I got constant reinforcement of the words I already knew, with no effort to properly learn new ones. I'm always thinking "oh, I recognize that word" but I don't have strong recall of the meaning or an ability to use it in a sentence.

So I added a few fields to my local copy of Korean Vocab by Evita. I've been working through that deck for maybe 2 months now, suspending words I already know. The deck currently only has the Korean word, English word, and Hanja, which I'm discovering is not enough info for me to commit a word to memory. So I added the fields: Korean definition, English definition, Hanja meaning, and "extra" for when I need to remind myself that 전채 has nothing to do with 전제, which is not 주제. This is all stuff I find myself looking up in the course of learning words, anyway.

My plan is to update these fields when I come across each word in my reviews. I'm having trouble thinking of a way save labor on this, but maybe that's ok because the manual work might help force me to solidly learn a word from the beginning. I may skip words I'm already doing well on, but I definitely want it for new and re-learning words. Also, and this may not end up working out for me, but I put the Korean definition on the front of the card. If I need it to jog my memory, I'll have to work to parse through the whole meaning.

I made some progress on finding and reading some blogs yesterday, but one frustrating roadblock is my lack of Naver search skills. On the English internet, I can usually tell at a glance if a piece is some corporate marketing shill piece, or someone with nothing interesting to say pushing "content" for "exposure." I know the general lay of the land, and which websites I might want to check for which types of content. I feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark on the Korean internet. Probably I'll get better at this in time, but for now I had decent luck browsing the 사진 topic on Naver blogs, where I found a lot of gorgeous nature and travel photography with plenty of text about the photos. Here's a nice example

[Cenwalh]

To the surprise of no one, Korean Immersion Odyssey hit an immediate roadblock: my dismal vocab bank. I have rock solid instant recall of 1500 or so words, and vague hazy recognition of most other common words. Makes sense - in my break from studying I still consumed Korean entertainment, so I got constant reinforcement of the words I already knew, with no effort to properly learn new ones. I'm always thinking "oh, I recognize that word" but I don't have strong recall of the meaning or an ability to use it in a sentence.

"To the surprise of no one, I hit a roadblock" could replace "We talk languages" as the site's tagline

[qeadz]

So I added a few fields to my local copy of Korean Vocab by Evita. I've been working through that deck for maybe 2 months now, suspending words I already know. The deck currently only has the Korean word, English word, and Hanja, which I'm discovering is not enough info for me to commit a word to memory.

I hit a similar problem - and I was using Evita's Vocab deck too. Nothing wrong with the deck - I think it is simply made more difficult since it is someone else's creation. In an ideal world we'd all make our own decks based on the material we cover but, since that is a time consuming endeavour, we can piggy-back on work graciously put in by someone else (thanks Evita!).

What I ended up doing was to wait until words become suspended & buried (due to me being unable to recall them), then I'd add additional detail to the problem words. Some of the detail was about the etymology - how it relates to Chinese roots (which I dont actually study at all). But other times I just make up something to help me remember the word (this is for pure Korean words which don't seem to have roots I can identify).

This way I don't end up putting any extra effort into the majority of words which I am actually recalling just fine.

But that is just the lazy way - I could probably get more out of vocab study if I put more study into it (not just reviewing more words, but doing more indepth reviews including learning the Chinese roots).

[olusatrum]

What I ended up doing was to wait until words become suspended & buried (due to me being unable to recall them), then I'd add additional detail to the problem words. Some of the detail was about the etymology - how it relates to Chinese roots (which I dont actually study at all). But other times I just make up something to help me remember the word (this is for pure Korean words which don't seem to have roots I can identify).

This way I don't end up putting any extra effort into the majority of words which I am actually recalling just fine.

Yeah, I really should make my own deck, but somehow I've never been able to stick with one. I've abandoned every deck I've ever made myself. Mostly laziness, but also I end up with this weird anxiety that I'm not picking the right words to study, and I need someone else to tell me the good words. If I add a word to my own deck and then I don't see it in the wild for a while I think "See, I shouldn't have studied that word. I wasted my time." A misguided thought, of course, but it's little stuff like that that eats at my routine. Using someone else's deck feels like I'm following a tried and true course, that I should stick with even if I don't see immediate results.

I'm skipping the effort for words I already feel okay on, but I definitely need the help on 하다 verbs and abstract nouns, and there are plenty of those. I wanted to add the extra info up front because I'm finding that the simple translation has me ending up with some wrong ideas about words. Like for example I came across 무렵 the other day, which just said "time," but is actually a bound noun meaning an approximate time period, and thus more of a grammar principle than a simple 1-1 translation of "time." Bound nouns really throw me sometimes, I had a heck of time trying to figure out what 채 meant in a specific context the other day. Turns out it was this one. Even some concrete nouns I need extra help on, like I just looked up if 단추 means buttons on clothes or buttons on machines (both!).

Actually, now that I think of it, maybe it would be helpful to include a tag for stuff like that so I can study stuff like bound nouns and counters and 하다 verbs on their own in custom study sessions

[Christi]

I made some progress on finding and reading some blogs yesterday, but one frustrating roadblock is my lack of Naver search skills. On the English internet, I can usually tell at a glance if a piece is some corporate marketing shill piece, or someone with nothing interesting to say pushing "content" for "exposure." I know the general lay of the land, and which websites I might want to check for which types of content. I feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark on the Korean internet. Probably I'll get better at this in time, but for now I had decent luck browsing the 사진 topic on Naver blogs, where I found a lot of gorgeous nature and travel photography with plenty of text about the photos. Here's a nice example

I have the same problem. Korean internet is confusing. Have encountered a lot of sites that used very old-fashioned interfaces or used things like flashwave or other stuff that doesn't work too well anymore.
I tried joining a few online fan cafés a while ago.. it was so difficult to figure out or to find any nice looking ones. So I've given up on that idea

Do you mind sharing which blogs you've found? I liked the one you shared before

[chris3spice]

You might want to check out PotPlayer as well. It can do multiple subtitle files and loop them and such as well. It's made by Kakao.

[olusatrum]

I have the same problem. Korean internet is confusing. Have encountered a lot of sites that used very old-fashioned interfaces or used things like flashwave or other stuff that doesn't work too well anymore.
I tried joining a few online fan cafés a while ago.. it was so difficult to figure out or to find any nice looking ones. So I've given up on that idea

Do you mind sharing which blogs you've found? I liked the one you shared before

Yes! What is up with the geocities vibe??? I read this interesting article on the differences between American and Japanese web design, and I think Korean web design is similar. I'm not huge on fandoms but I did look at some cafes for other topics I'm interested in. I was pretty much immediately confused by the leveling up system, though.

So I literally went to blog.naver.com, hit 주제별 보기, and browsed what felt interesting to me. I think the 사진 section worked out because either the thumbnail photo is interesting or it's not. If it's an interesting picture, it's probably at least minimally interesting to read a little about it. Here's some photo and video of a lovely starry night sky at 태안 beach, and here's some beautiful shots of lotus flowers with a discussion of different types of cameras and photography. I have not read a lot yet, but the other nice thing about looking for photo stories is that even if I get totally discouraged on the text, there's some nice pictures to look at.