Evita's Korean and Other Languages

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Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:14 pm

mverse wrote:Hi Evita!

I used your Korean deck back in 2015 to learn most of my meager Korean. Thanks for making such an awesome Anki deck! I saw your name here and realized you must be the creator.

I took the first level of your quiz. I have approximate knowledge of many words, so given the multiple choice nature of the test, I could usually jog my memory to get the right answer even if I couldn't have gotten the answer right without that context. Is that what you intended? In any case, congrats on the release of the quiz!

Thanks. I guess that is what I intended, yes. With a quiz like this, there are basically three ways to determine whether you know a word or not. The first one is simply to let the user choose yes or no. This is what most quizzes use because it's the easiest way but I find it too subjective and not as fun. The second one would be to ask the user to type the answer but that's not feasible because there could be several correct translations for one word. So I chose the third option - the multiple choice test.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

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Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Thu Dec 31, 2020 8:23 pm

So, year 2020 is over. Of course, COVID-19 had the most impact on it. I've been pretty isolated at home since I live alone and worked from home for most of the year. I don't think I had the virus but you never know. As I write this, it's after 9pm and I hear lots of fireworks outside. Usually they would start around 11:30 or so but this year people are not allowed to be outside after 10pm so... yeah.

But what about Korean? Well, I don't think I learned a lot of new stuff, I was mostly going through stuff I already know in order to add sentences to my Anki decks. Here's some statistics:

- 409 new sentences to the general deck
- 196 new sentences to the grammar deck
- 525 new words to the vocabulary deck

Those who have been reading my log for a long time may remember that I once shared a file with the intermediate and advanced grammar points that I had yet to add to my Anki deck. I'm sharing it again. The link will stay open for a week or so, then I will remove it. This year I started with ㄹ 텐데 and finished with 지도 모르다 so you could say that I studied all the grammar points in between. I use this spreadsheet to plan my deck and to check how many example sentences I already have for each point.

As for Korean dramas, I don't think I watched any this year. I've been watching US series recently, mostly NCIS and NCIS LA. I especially love NCIS LA, I've watched many episodes already twice. I think it's because it has very likeable characters, lots of humor and a nice vibe in general. I just like cop shows, I have also seen most of Castle and Bones. Case in point, I did start watching the Korean drama "Flower of Evil", which is also about police work. I watched most of the first episode and I think I will like it and that's why I stopped watching it for now. I want to wait until I have the time to marathon it.

Hmm, what else? Oh yes, the website and the quiz. I need to keep working on that, add more words. I also want to start selling my first deck next year, we'll see how that goes. I've put a lot of effort into all the materials, it would be nice to get something back.

As for textbooks, I'm currently working on Ewha 3-2, chapter 3. I have also been listening to 바른 한국어. I'm almost done with level 2. I don't watch it for the grammar, I watch it to improve my listening comprehension and I'm happy to say that I can understand almost everything the teacher says. I think level 3 will be more challenging. I'm also still watching The Return of Superman, up to episode 238 now.

I think that's it. Happy new year, everyone! :)
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My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

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Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Sun Apr 11, 2021 1:45 pm

I haven't posted for a few months but I'm still working hard on my Korean projects. A while ago I updated my quiz up to 1500 words total so now I've been focusing more on Anki and textbooks again. I've finished 10 lessons out of 15 in Ewha level 3 but that's on hold again. I feel like the texts and the vocabulary they choose to focus on are so random. The last straw was a text about 태몽 (a dream about an unborn child). The one before that was about 성악가 (classical singer). Maybe I wouldn't mind it so much if I was just learning for myself but I'm also adding the sentences to my shared Anki decks and I just don't think they're a good fit.

So I went hunting for a new textbook and found Master Korean. It was developed by Sangmyung University (I think) in a way that allows it to be used in a classroom setting but that's also good for self-learners. Level 3 contains 10 long chapters. Each chapter has lots of texts (with everyday subjects), dialogues, and 8 new grammar points. Eight! That's 80 in total for level 3. That's a lot. Well, not many will be new for me but I like books that focus on grammar this way. So far I've done almost two whole chapters and I really love the book. I think it's my favorite out of all the Korean textbooks I've tried (and I've tried a lot).

A couple of days ago I had an issue with Anki. I still don't know how or why it happened but suddenly I couldn't sync my desktop Anki, I got a message to run the database check, and when I did that it said that my Anki collection can't be merged, I had to overwrite one side. The problem was that it had been a week since the last sync and I do my vocabulary reviews on my phone. But adding new cards and doing the sentence reviews, that's all on the computer. I had entered about 35 new sentences during that period. But vocabulary reviews take the most effort for me, I really didn't want to lose a week's worth of data. What to do???? Well, in the end I exported my decks to text files, removed all the cards except the ones created during the last week, downloaded the collection that was on my phone and contained the vocabulary reviews, and then imported the new words and sentences from my text files. So in the end I lost only the reviews of the sentence decks. Not too bad. I will try to sync more often in the future, though.

I'm still watching The Return of Superman. Just got to episode 300, which was shot a year and a half ago, before COVID was a thing. Gah, those seem like the good old times. I wonder how the show changed. Maybe it was even canceled? I hope not. But don't tell me, I don't like spoilers.

Anyway, there are two families on that show where one parent is a foreign national. One of the dads is Australian and one of the mothers is Swiss (German). And they are raising their children differently language-wise. The Australian dad has lived in Korea for a long time (10 years?) and just speaks Korean to his children. They might hear some English when they go visit their grandma in Australia but that's it. The Swiss mom, on the other hand, always speaks German to her children and even has books in German, and the children are growing up bilingual or even trilingual, since the mother speaks English to her husband. It's such a huge advantage for the children that I'm wondering why the Australian dad didn't/doesn't do it.
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My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

kraemder
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Posts: 323
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Languages: English (N)
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Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby kraemder » Sun Apr 18, 2021 9:36 pm

Why indeed don't a lot of immigrant parents teach their children their native language, right? In my family my great grandfather from Germany could hardly speak English but he basically stopped speaking German when he moved to the US and the whole family only spoke English. They could barely understand him. Go figure right. Obviously not in synch with people on this forum.

I'd like to check out this textbook you mentioned. I haven't found a textbook I really like for Korean - the closest would be the Korean Grammar in Use series but the sample texts are just really really short dialogues.
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Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Mon Apr 19, 2021 5:05 pm

kraemder wrote:I'd like to check out this textbook you mentioned. I haven't found a textbook I really like for Korean - the closest would be the Korean Grammar in Use series but the sample texts are just really really short dialogues.

You can buy the book from Amazon or order it from Korea. Here's one site I have used. I imagine you would want either 1-2 or 2-1.

Also, have you checked out the Sejong Institute books? They're free and you don't even have to register.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

User avatar
Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Sun Apr 25, 2021 5:58 pm

I have some progress to report so I thought I'd post again. I've done another chapter of Master Korean 3; it took me two weeks. My brain is usually quite tired after work so I mostly study during weekends. Two weeks for one chapter is a very good result and I'm sure I won't be able to keep up this pace - both because life will get in the way and because sometimes I won't feel like studying. So let's say it will take me three weeks on average to finish one chapter. Seven chapters left, that's 21 weeks so sometime in September. If I can finish level 3 by then, I'll consider it a major success.

The other news is that I finally decided to treat myself to another drama. I picked Stove League on someone's last year's recommendation and I'm glad I did. Even though it's about baseball and I have no interest in it, and even though I don't think there will be romance in it, I'm enjoying it because the writing is good and the acting is good. And best of all - I can understand a lot of the dialogue. Well, not about baseball but other things. The baseball stuff goes right over my head even in English, but otherwise I understand 50-60%, maybe even 70% of the dialogue. Sometimes when they say an unknown word several times during a conversation (like 해체), I will look it up and add it to my Anki. Sometimes I will realize that it's already in my deck and I've been reviewing it for years. I think I've mentioned before that I mark the word as "Good" in Anki quite often even if I didn't remember it in order to keep the number of reviews down. But after encountering such a word in a drama, I'm much more likely to remember it. So it seems I actually need more exposure to spoken Korean (or any Korean). I do listen to podcasts sometimes but it's difficult to mine words this way since there are no subtitles.
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My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

Sayonaroo
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Posts: 256
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Languages: English(N), Japanese -fluent?, Korean - advanced?, Spanish (b1?)
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun Apr 25, 2021 8:33 pm

hvae you tried reading on http://www.koreanreader.com or http://www.vocabtracker.com?? i think you'd progress faster if you read instead of watching dramas just in terms of learning the vocab. you'd benefit more from wtaching dramas if you had a bigger vocab foundation.
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User avatar
Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Mon Apr 26, 2021 5:01 am

You are right that reading would help me more and I would do that if I didn't have to think about my shared Anki vocabulary deck. I want it to be complete in the sense that it should contain all the words that I know, so I have to be careful to add all the new words to it. And if I read a book or a story, there would be just too many new words. For now I think I'm better off just reading the texts in my textbook. They also serve a similar purpose - to reinforce the vocabulary I sort of already know.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja

Sayonaroo
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Posts: 256
Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2017 12:13 am
Languages: English(N), Japanese -fluent?, Korean - advanced?, Spanish (b1?)
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Sayonaroo » Mon Apr 26, 2021 3:44 pm

Evita wrote:You are right that reading would help me more and I would do that if I didn't have to think about my shared Anki vocabulary deck. I want it to be complete in the sense that it should contain all the words that I know, so I have to be careful to add all the new words to it. And if I read a book or a story, there would be just too many new words. For now I think I'm better off just reading the texts in my textbook. They also serve a similar purpose - to reinforce the vocabulary I sort of already know.


Vocabtracker.com would serve you in the purpose of making your deck since it tracks all the words you click and you can easily export the words you clicked on. Then when you import you can tell anki to ignore words that match. Reading a textbook is really boring while you can read whatever you want on koreanreadsr and vocabtraxkwr. I really recommend trying both sites out if you haven’t yet. I don’t get why you have such a preoccupation with your deck. I don’t get your priorities. It sounds like making an anki deck > reading in korean almost.
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User avatar
Evita
Orange Belt
Posts: 182
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2015 7:02 pm
Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1141
x 289

Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Mon Apr 26, 2021 7:49 pm

Sayonaroo wrote:I don’t get your priorities. It sounds like making an anki deck > reading in korean almost.

You should not be surprised by this if you've been following my log. I've never had a particular desire to read anything in Korean. The Anki decks, on the other hand, have always been important to me. At first it was a combination of altruism (to help others) and pride (to create the best decks available). Now that both of those goals are satisfied, I plan to earn some money with them. I know that making the decks has slowed me down significantly but I'm not in a hurry and I think it's worth doing as long as I have the inclination.
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: 6480 / 8000 Korean Vocabulary

My Korean Anki decks: Grammar Sentences | General Korean Sentences | Vocabulary | Hanja


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