Evita's Korean and Other Languages

[Evita]

You could say that I took a break from studying textbooks in Korean. A bit more than a month, I think. I hadn't planned to do it but I guess I just burned out and needed to do something else for a while. I still enjoyed watching Korean TV though.

So what's the status now? I've finished chapter 2 of Ewha 3 and almost finished chapter 9 of Sejong 5. My Anki decks have the following numbers:

Vocabulary: 5412 (45 new)
Grammar sentences: 2199 (403 new)
Other sentences: 1658 (1168 new)

I started studying the last deck in May, I think, so on average I've seen 2-3 new cards per day from this deck. I would like this number to be higher but it just doesn't work, I've tried it. I get overwhelmed with reviews and then I have to stop adding new cards completely for a while. It's the same with my other decks, I have to balance all of them.

I also went and downloaded (from the Sejong site) both the English and Korean versions for levels 2-6 of the 재외동포를 위한 한국어 textbook, and also the mp3 files for the Korean versions. Just in case they disappear somehow from the website. I know having three different textbooks to follow is too much but I just can't resist a series that has 12 books and teaches more than 250 grammar points in total, and is free and has audio on top of that. I think it goes higher up than the Sejong series, which only has 8 books. It's also different in that it's made for kids so the vocabulary is easier (well, if you don't count some very children-specific vocabulary like what the different rides on a playground are called. I must admit I skipped some of them). I'm reading through book 2-1 now just for some reading practice. My reading speed has improved a lot over the years but I still can't read the Korean text on variety shows without pausing so it's still not good. Of course, it doesn't help that I'm watching shows where the English text is right beside the Korean so my eyes jump automatically to it.

I got a little bored of Running Man so I'm mostly watching The Return of Superman these days. It's one of my main sources of new vocabulary. But - they started with 4 families and now they've added two more so the show has grown longer to approx. 1h45min. That's a lot of time for one episode. Now that I think about it, though, I don't mind it. More stuff for me to watch! Plus, it would be more boring to watch the same 4 families forever.

[AndyMeg]

I also went and downloaded (from the Sejong site) both the English and Korean versions for levels 2-6 of the 재외동포를 위한 한국어 textbook, and also the mp3 files for the Korean versions. Just in case they disappear somehow from the website. I know having three different textbooks to follow is too much but I just can't resist a series that has 12 books and teaches more than 250 grammar points in total, and is free and has audio on top of that.

I totally understand. I love that series of books!

Just out of curiosity, how do you work with all your textbooks? (so far I've seen many different ways people use to work even with the same textbook)

[Evita]

Just out of curiosity, how do you work with all your textbooks? (so far I've seen many different ways people use to work even with the same textbook)

My work with textbooks consists basically of two parts - first, go through the lesson, read the texts, do some exercises and enter assorted sentences into Anki (almost always with audio). Second - study with Anki. There can be many months in between these steps so I always mark the lesson as done when I've completed the first step.

Sometimes the reading is not straightforward. I've noticed that the texts in Sejong tend to include grammar that hasn't been officially introduced yet, and I've found one or two texts in level 5 to be just too difficult (or boring) to work through. I'll come back to them in a year or two. Besides, the reading texts in Sejong don't include audio so there's much less motivation for me to work through them. Ewha 3 also has one reading text per chapter but that one has audio so I do work through it even if the sentences are sometimes too long to be added to Anki. With Ewha, though, I usually skip the poem or the folk tale at the end of the chapter because they always contain some rarely used vocabulary. I plan to come back to them as well sometime in the future.

[AndyMeg]

Just out of curiosity, how do you work with all your textbooks? (so far I've seen many different ways people use to work even with the same textbook)

My work with textbooks consists basically of two parts - first, go through the lesson, read the texts, do some exercises and enter assorted sentences into Anki (almost always with audio). Second - study with Anki. There can be many months in between these steps so I always mark the lesson as done when I've completed the first step.

Sometimes the reading is not straightforward. I've noticed that the texts in Sejong tend to include grammar that hasn't been officially introduced yet, and I've found one or two texts in level 5 to be just too difficult (or boring) to work through. I'll come back to them in a year or two. Besides, the reading texts in Sejong don't include audio so there's much less motivation for me to work through them. Ewha 3 also has one reading text per chapter but that one has audio so I do work through it even if the sentences are sometimes too long to be added to Anki. With Ewha, though, I usually skip the poem or the folk tale at the end of the chapter because they always contain some rarely used vocabulary. I plan to come back to them as well sometime in the future.

Thanks a lot for the explanation!

[Evita]

I haven't posted in a while because I haven't done almost anything with my Korean. Instead I've been reading about money - how to save, invest the savings and become financially independent. There's lots of advice on the internet but it's mostly geared towards the US audience where the available financial products (and taxes!) are quite different from Latvia. During my search for the best investments, I found out about P2P lending and was very excited by that. I didn't even know that so many lending platforms were created in Riga. How convenient! I was not sure how safe these platforms were, though, so I scoured the internet for more info and came upon this blog. Turns out that Germans are the most active (and plentiful) investors in these platforms.

I don't know why I never researched investments before. I should have started doing this 10 years ago. I would love the freedom of having income and not having to work, but I didn't think it would ever be possible for me. Now I've calculated that it should be doable in about 20 years. Maybe in 15-17 years if I save more or earn more. And as to that, I'll be (re)learning Java and Javascript this year to become a programmer instead of a tester so I will have less time for Korean. Probably.

I recently caught myself toying with the idea of abandoning the sentence decks. I love studying them but updating them while keeping thousands of other users in mind is not easy. It holds back my own studying. I'm not at the point yet of abandoning the decks, I'll try to keep adding to them. But the end may be closer than I thought

[Evita]

It's been a couple of months (or more) since I last watched Running Man, but I'm still watching the Return of Superman, the show about kids. I'm on episode 56 at the moment. I do want to watch a drama sometimes but usually when I try one it doesn't grab me and I abandon it quickly. Well, last autumn I checked out KBS's weekend drama "My Golden Life" and it did grab me. The problem was that the drama had barely begun and I didn't want to wait for 50 episodes so I decided to wait until I could marathon it.

Well, I recently remembered about it and decided it was time to watch it finally. I did it in less than two weeks. It's always a funny feeling when you "live" in a drama for a week or two and then it ends. Sometimes I would rewatch my favorite scenes or whatever, but this time I didn't because I was not satisfied with the ending. I have not checked Dramabeans to see what other people thought about it but it just left an unfinished feeling in me. Does anyone maybe know a fan fiction site in Korean? I tried to find one with Google but was not successful

In any case, my mind was full of Korean after the marathon so I got back to my textbooks and my Anki decks. I updated my signature, I'm up to 5470 words now. (Haven't studied hanja in a long while though.) I continued with the Sejong for Kids 12-book series and finished 2-1. Now I'm halfway through 2-2.

I rarely go to the TTMIK site anymore but sometimes I do check out what kind of new videos they have. I recently discovered their intermediate lessons that are all in Korean. This seems to be right for my level, I should study them more. I'd guess I understand about 70-80% without reading the subtitles and 90% with reading them.

[Evita]

It's been 4 months since my last post. During this time, I've been busy with work and other things and didn't want to work on my Korean materials. I only kept watching Return of Superman (up to episode 97 now) and a little Running Man and doing my Anki vocabulary deck half-heartedly. Then two weeks ago my vacation started and for some reason I became really motivated to work on my sentence decks again. The result - I finished book 3-1 of the Sejong for kids series a couple of days ago. Not having to translate every sentence for my second deck helps with entering the cards quickly.

I also spent a lot of time gathering information about intermediate and advanced Korean grammar points. My Anki grammar deck is organized into levels and the first 5 levels are basically done. I plan to also have levels 6, 7, 8, and 9, with level 9 probably split into 9a and 9b. Level 6 is about halfway done, level 7 is only 10% done. My plan is to put most of the intermediate grammar points into levels 6 and 7. Level 8 should contain some advanced grammar that is still useful for everyday situations and for TOPIK, like 길래 and 불구하고. Level 9 will be for the advanced grammar points that you don't have to know in order to pass TOPIK 6 because they're so rarely used. I've heard there's a lot of them in Ewha 6 and KGiU Advanced.

The problem I have now is that I'm not always sure which level would fit best for each grammar point. For the beginner grammar it was easier because there were a lot of resources to consult and compare, but the higher up you go, the resources become less and less. So to help me choose, I created a table of grammar points that have yet to be added to my deck and which resource covers them and at what level. If you're curious you can check it out here. I collected 219 grammar points, which was more than I expected. It will probably take me 4-5 years to add them all to my deck. But for now I'll keep working on Sejong for kids 3-2.

[sumeet]

Hi Evita, I just noticed you published an update to the grammar deck several weeks back. Looking forward to reviewing them.

Thank you for the new cards!!!!

[Evita]

The new sentences that I published are actually all from the first half of the year, I haven't added anything new since my last post. The reason is that I've been busy with another project. I have created my own blog about investing via peer-to-peer lending. My main goal was to try to inform people because very few know about it and I think it's an excellent opportunity to earn some money.

As for Korean, I'm still watching Return of the Superman and I'm on episode 146 already. It's such a cute and positive show, I love it! Although sometimes it is too dramatic and sometimes a bit boring.

My big Korean project at the moment is the reordering of cards in the vocabulary deck. I know, I know, I've already done it before but I thought it was necessary anyway. The word count is up to 5765 at the moment so I'm slowly getting closer to my goal of 8000.

I started studying Korean in 2012 so you might expect me to be at the advanced level by now but I'm not. I'm smack in the middle of the intermediate stage still. It's probably because I haven't really been focusing on studying Korean for a long time. In my head it's a lifetime project so I have no need to hurry. But I always keep watching some TV shows and doing my Anki reviews, I never abandon it totally.

As for 2019, my first and only goal it to publish the updated Anki vocabulary deck, hopefully in January or February. Then I will focus on work stuff for several months at least. Then I might get back to my Anki sentence deck.

[Evita]

I uploaded the new and much improved version of my vocabulary deck to Anki today. Whew. Reordering the words was all I did the last two or three weekends so I'm glad to be done with that. The deck now also has four tags: eng (220), food (136), double (56), and color (40). Check it out if you're interested.