Evita's Korean and Other Languages

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Evita
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Location: Latvia
Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
I study: Korean
I'm slowly forgetting: Spanish, Finnish, French
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Mon Sep 11, 2017 6:03 pm

tarvos wrote:I am definitely in awe of your Korean skills. My Korean has lagged so hard since I joined that HTLAL team years ago and right now I am trying to make up for lost time, but the Korean vocab and syntax completely do my head in. It's taking me much longer than I expected, so now I can really see I am in it for the long haul.

My Korean is still very basic...

You've taken up Korean again? Good luck then! But my Korean is nothing to be in awe of yet, I'm really surprised you would say that. The number of words in my Anki deck may be impressive but I wouldn't recognize many of them if I heard them because I haven't really used them outside of Anki.

But I'm excited today because I just got my books from TTMIK! I already read 3 pages from the children's book and it feels really great to understand the majority of the text without a dictionary. I did look up 문어 다리 (the arms of an octopus?) because it seemed central to the story. I also tried to look up 핑코 but that's not in the dictionary. Then I googled it and was reminded of the Coldplay music video :lol: Only then did I notice the picture in the book which made it clear that 핑코 is a piggy bank.

Speaking of octopuses, I've been watching The Return of Superman a bit. It's all on Youtube. It's a reality show about how fathers take care of their children when the moms are away. One of the fathers has triplets who are maybe two years old, and he took them out to eat octopus. That's when I also saw how Korean children learn to eat with chopsticks. I had never given it a thought and didn't realize that such chopsticks existed. I should try to get a pair for me because I don't know how to handle them at all.

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tarvos
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby tarvos » Mon Sep 11, 2017 7:49 pm

Korean chopsticks do my head in - they're made of metal, so they're much harder to handle than their Chinese and Japanese counterparts. I learned how to eat with chopsticks in China and am probably the only family member that has some experience with how to handle them properly in a restaurant. And I am clumsy with them but at least I can manage with chopsticks - my parents are much worse...

I'm reading the comic book they're selling on TTMIK called My Korean Husband. I don't get ANY of the annotations, but the comics are okay. I'm also watching a Korean sci-fi drama called Vampire Detective (뱀파이어 탐정) which I don't understand half of and doesn't have Korean subtitles for me to peruse, so I have to make do with English, but I can hear words here and there (connectors, verb endings, personal pronouns, some common verbs and expressions). Like, I can hear whether they are speaking informally or formally, and I can sometimes get an entire short phrase, but the longer ones lose me entirely.
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby qeadz » Mon Sep 11, 2017 8:15 pm

My son has a pair of those chopsticks! He's recently been able to graduate on to picking some easier food items up using real chopsticks. He's 4. Of course we almost always eat with forks so it's not like he has had a great deal of practice.

I have used chopsticks for years and am somewhat capable with them. However most of the time at Japenese restuarants so I was accustomed to wooden chopsticks. Anyhow years back I went to Korea (for the 2nd time I think) and my inlaws took me out to a restaurant which had quite oily food. I tried my best with those damn skinny metal chopsticks but alas it was proving to be a little beyond my ability and after a while my brother-in-law asked the waitress to bring me a fork...

How embarrassing. One doesn't expect foreigners to be familiar with everything in a foreign land, but I can't imagine what it must look like to see adult foreigners struggle so with simply getting food into their mouths. Of course those from chopstick-using countries do understand, but I'm sure it still doesn't detract from the hilarity of what they are observing...
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Elenia » Mon Sep 11, 2017 8:23 pm

I'm a lover of Korean food, which is where my interest in Korean as a language comes from. I've eaten a lot in Korean restaurants with those pesky slivers of metal, and I can quite proudly say that my ability to use them is okay more often than not!

But you have all spent your time learning how to read and pronounce the menu, so you're still all doing better than me.
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Sep 17, 2017 6:12 pm

Just caught up with this log. Although I don't study Korean, I find your detailed entries quite instructive. Thanks.
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Evita
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Languages: I speak: Latvian, English, Russian, German
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby Evita » Sun Sep 24, 2017 7:33 pm

I'm back from Berlin. My trip was fairly uneventful, except that I caught quite a bad cold from which I'm still not completely recovered. It made the trip less enjoyable but I think I still got a good overview of how Berlin is. I had little need to speak German but I could hear it all around me. When I went to Korea 2 years ago and heard Korean, I was amazed that I was actually there and I was also anxious because my Korean was too bad to be somewhat useful and it's always stressful when you go somewhere and you are not sure how you will manage to communicate. Well, going to Germany was the complete opposite - there was no stress for me language-wise so I just sat back and enjoyed all the German conversations I could hear.

But now it's back to Korean. I've already finished lesson 4 of Sejong 5. It was about the location of buildings and about explaining how to get there. I had already covered this topic in other books so it was pretty easy. My goal is to finish Sejong 5 this year and also work on Ewha 3 at the same time. I also have the Hangeul Master book from TTMIK and I've started doing the writing exercises in the book. Let's see whether I will have the patience to do all of the exercises.
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Evita
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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 Oct 15, 2017 3:13 pm

I've been working on lesson 1 of Ewha 3 and I finished it today. There's a little more listening and reading material in level 3 compared to level 2 so I'm happy with that. The grammar gets more interesting, too. But for now I'll go back to the Sejong book.

I also updated my grammar sentence deck on Ankiweb yesterday. The previous update had been in May, I think, and since then I've added about 100 new sentences to it. Of course, the majority of my sentences have gone to the other deck that is unpublished as of yet even though it already has more than 1500 sentences. It kind of seems a waste to keep it to myself so I thought long and hard about publishing it, weighing the pros and cons, and the cons won in the end. The best thing about my decks is that they go naturally from easy to hard, but this deck is not even half-sorted so I don't want to put it on Ankiweb. I could sort it now, of course, but what about the next 100 sentences? And the next? Many of them will need to be sorted somewhere into the middle and it will be very difficult and time-consuming. That's why I'm going to wait until I have more sentences.

One thing I started doing a couple of weeks ago is skip translating the sentences for the unpublished deck. It was just taking up too much of my time. There is a field for notes, though, and if a sentence has an obviously difficult word I put the translation of this word into the field. I think it will be a good system since once you reach a certain level it's best to stop relying on translations anyway.

Another thing I've been doing for several months already is studying from KGiU Intermediate and mining sentences from it. I'm not doing the lessons in any particular order, I mostly look up those grammar points that come up in my textbooks and for which I need more example sentences. I use a spreadsheet to note down which listening files are done already. Currently it's a bit less than 10%.
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druckfehler
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby druckfehler » Mon Nov 27, 2017 9:56 pm

Great to see that you're still dedicated to Korean! :) What are your plans for the next trip to Korea?
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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 » Tue Nov 28, 2017 6:40 pm

druckfehler wrote:Great to see that you're still dedicated to Korean! :) What are your plans for the next trip to Korea?

I don't plan to go next year, maybe I will go the year after that. The plan is to enjoy being in Korea :) And visit some of the places I haven't seen yet, notably Jeju Island. I'm watching the video below right now and coincidentally that episode takes place in Jeju.


I find myself liking Korean variety shows more than dramas these days. Or maybe I just haven't tried watching the good dramas.

Anyway, I do almost all my Korean studying on weekends because I'm too tired in the evenings. I listen to podcasts much less than a couple of years ago - but I don't really feel the lack. My ears have already been completely trained to Korean so now it's simply a matter of acquiring more vocabulary. Which I'm doing slowly. My Anki word count is 5376. That's less than 500 words this year, I think. Oh well.

I've finished chapters 1 and 2 of Ewha 3 and I'm up to lesson 8 on Sejong 5. I will not finish all of Sejong 5 by the end of the year but that's okay, I'll try to finish by the end of January. I also read about the new textbooks for children in AndyMeg's log and I checked some of them out. Very nice! I have a feeling I'll be using them as reading practice.
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druckfehler
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Re: Evita's Korean and Other Languages

Postby druckfehler » Tue Dec 05, 2017 11:02 am

Evita wrote: I listen to podcasts much less than a couple of years ago - but I don't really feel the lack.

Ever since Yoo In Na and Sung Si-kyung's radio shows stopped I've been a lot less enthusiastic about Korean podcasts... I loved falling asleep to those :D

I haven't yet been to Jeju either, neither to Busan. That is definitely planned for my next trip, whenever it may be...
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