Evita's Korean and Other Languages

[Evita]

I see it's been a long time since I last posted. I haven't studied much because of my other project but I did finish lessons 7 & 8 in the last two weeks. My Anki backlog is down to 200 cards, and my hanja count is 301. That's about it.

[Evita]

I haven't added any new sentences to my deck recently because I ran into a problem. The first dialogue of lesson 9 contains the -야겠다 construction, and it hasn't been introduced in my deck yet. The problem is that this lesson doesn't focus on this construction, there are no other examples with it. When I introduce a new construction in my deck, I want to have at least 3 (preferably 5) examples, so in this case I have to get them somewhere else. KGIU Intermediate doesn't cover this construction. Ewha level 2 does, but it's in a lesson near the end of the book so I'd have to do it out of order (and it might contain other grammar that's not in my deck yet). I might just get some sentences from the internet but then I'd have no audio. Another option is to switch to Ewha completely and hope I don't encounter such a problem there. I just can't decide.

But overall I'm quite happy because the last one star review for my deck was deleted and now it has only 40 five star reviews. Everyone's really happy with my deck. My vocabulary deck got a four star review because the person didn't like that the deck was only one direction, he wanted to study in both directions I think that's an unfair reason to downrate a deck with close to 5000 notes that also includes hanja and no typos, but whatever.

The other good news is that I'm finally all caught up with my vocabulary reviews. I got behind during my trip to Korea in September and have been fighting the backlog ever since. Well, now I get only 20 reviews a day so I can study new cards again

Another thing I discovered just today is that a bunch of 성시경's songs have been added to Spotify. Yay!

[Evita]

I'm still studying very little, just keeping up with Anki and adding some new words now and then. I'm also listening to Yoo Inna's show almost every day, and I recently started listening to German radio again.

But what I really came here to talk about is the Korean drama "Remember - War of the Son". I had kind of stopped watching dramas because I didn't like the ones I tried or found them boring... But I'm glad I found an interesting one again. I watched it in 5 days and I'll remember it mostly for the villain, I think. The plot is fairly typical - a poor guy gets accused of a murder he didn't commit, gets thrown in jail, and his son spends the rest of the series seeking justice. The real murderer is a young, spoiled millionaire who thinks he's above the law and above other people. To be sure, Korean dramas are full of villains, but I had never seen one like him. He's not a criminal mastermind, he's more dumb than smart, but his sense of entitlement and untouchability was ridiculous. For example, after committing the murder he calls his assistant to come and get rid of the murder weapon and take care of everything.

I think it's the actor (남궁민) who really brought the character to life and made it so memorable. It was fun watching him throw things and yell at people when things weren't going his way. He also liked to humiliate people, that wasn't so fun to watch, but it still fascinated me how believable the actor was in his role. His name will be my next password on my work computer

[druckfehler]

It's good to see a new post by you! I've also gotten really complacent and lazy with Korean. The only things I've been doing are drama watching and listening to some podcasts.

I don't think I've asked this before. How do/did you study Hanja? Did you use mnemonics or did you memorise them differently?

[Evita]

I don't have any particular method for studying hanja. Since it's an Anki deck, brute force is built-in But I do think up stories sometimes when the character is made of two simpler characters that I have already learned - like 社, for example. (I don't have a story for this particular character, though, and actually don't remember its meaning right now.) Since hanja is not a priority for me and I move forward very slowly, it's no problem to hit "Again" on Anki, the review count doesn't get too high.

[Sol]

So I looked up the 유인나 podcast and was sitting there for 5 minutes trying to remember where I knew her face from and why it looked so similar...and then I realized she's Se Mi from My Love From the Star!

I'm such a beginner I understand maybe 0.00001% of what is being said, the names... haha. But I think I listened to a part where they were talking about the drama because I'm sure I heard Cheon Song Yi mentioned

[Evita]

So, it's been half a year... What have I been doing during this time? Not much Korean, but enough to keep it from regressing.

Yoo Inna's show ended this spring so that made me short on listening material. I wanted to find a daily podcast and a while later I somehow stumbled onto 라디오 극장, the KBS radio theater. They have daily radio dramas. I don't like them nearly as much as Yoo Inna's show but at least it's something. If anyone knows of any other good podcasts, I'll be happy to check them out.

I kept slowly working through my Ewha textbook, adding sentences to my Anki decks, and I'm now up to chapter 7. I'll get back to that once I've finished reorganizing my vocabulary deck.

If you read my log at the old site, you might remember that I also spent a lot of time in 2014 reorganizing my vocabulary deck. By "reorganizing", I mean reordering the words so that they go from easy to difficult and at the same time from common to rare. It was around 4000 words at that time, and now it's around 5000 words. As you can imagine, it's a huge task, especially for someone who's only intermediate at Korean. Once I'm done, I'll post a link to a Google spreadsheet where both lists will be available so you can compare them if you want.

Why do I do this reordering? Because there are no good Korean vocabulary lists currently, and I want to make one. One thing I'm doing this time is putting a little more emphasis on how common the word is as opposed to how easy it is. For example, in 2014, I put the word 성냥 (matches) just after 2000 because words for such simple objects are considered easy to learn. But it's not a common word at all so this time I moved it to after 3000. If, on the other hand, I found a B level word that's high on this list but low on mine, I'd move it up.

I've been doing this on and off all summer, and I really want to finish it before December starts.

As for other languages, I might get back into Finnish next year. It's a shame how I've started it so many times but still can't hold a basic conversation.

[Evita]

I finished the sorting, you can take a look at it here: Google Docs

Column C shows the difference between the old list and the new list. The blue words have dropped lower while the orange words have climbed higher. The "new" words are ones I added in the last two years, they are less than a thousand. It shows you how much I've been studying Korean during this period

I sorted carefully only the first half of the list. The second half is thrown together more haphazardly. One reason I did this is that I wanted to finish the sorting in November and there was simply no time for anything more. Another reason is that I will have to re-sort the 2000-3000 chunk anyway after I add more words from the frequency list so I didn't want to invest too much effort into it now.

When I was moving all the words around, I was worried that I would accidentally move one word over another and the first word would be deleted, so I was anxious to see the total number of words in the list after I finished sorting them yesterday. The correct number in Anki is 5061, but I had 5062 words! LOL. I had to export the Anki deck and compare the lists alphabetically, and I found that the culprit was the word 결석. I remember deleting it from Anki a while ago because I already had 결석하다, and I must have forgotten to remove it from the spreadsheet.

I haven't updated the Anki deck yet, I plan to do it tonight.

[Evita]

I have a question about Korean. I hope someone can answer me.

I was working with my Ewha textbook and saw this sentence:

산 지 이주일이 안 되셨으면 교환이 가능해요.

My question is about the honorific suffix. Why was it added to 되다 even though the subject is "two weeks", not a person? Is there a rule I should learn about when to add it? And also - is it possible to add the suffix to more than one verb in a sentence?

[Evita]

I've been really getting back into Korean. It had been months since I learned a new grammar structure, but this week I learned -서 그런지. It's a bit similar to the standard 아/어서 but it means that the speaker isn't sure whether that's really the reason. For example:

날씨가 추워서 그런지 두꺼운 옷이 잘 팔리네요. - Maybe the reason thick clothes sell well is that the weather is cold.

So with that, I've finished Ewha 2-1 and will start on Ewha 2-2 right away. I do already know most of the grammar in this book, but I appreciate the listening and reading practice. Of course, I'm also adding select sentences to my Anki decks. I will probably order the 3rd level books from Korea in January. I'm sure I've said this before, but textbooks from Korean universities go up really high Korean skill-wise. That's why I picked one series and will try to stick with it.

As for podcasts, I didn't even think to check what's occupying now the radio slot where Yoo Inna's show used to reside. It turns out that the show basically stayed the same, they simply swapped one host for another. That's good news.