More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Tue Jun 16, 2020 3:58 am

Another ramble on my Korean language studying. (Me reading this on YouTube) Well I'm happy with how the grammar deck is going. According to MIA, they don't recommend grammar decks but don't forbit it outright instead saying if you have to do it, make sentences. They stress vocabulary decks for SRS over grammar basically. I'm doing it backwards. I am stressing the grammar over the vocabulary right now and even toyed with stopping vocab completely but decided not to. I actually like reviewing the vocabulary sentence cards. I will say the grammar cards are a bit painful. The examples from the intermediate grammar book are longer and the target grammar is surrounded by grammar worthy of the higher level target grammar too. It's overall harder. In order to help myself focus on these harder sentences, I decided, "screw it," and added the native audio from the CD's for both books to my Anki deck. Every card has native audio on it now. It took several hours to do but if I use the deck for a year or so, then that's well worth it. It was annoying to do though.

I enjoy studying vocabulary so how could I even consider ignoring my vocabulary sentence decks? Well, I was watching Matt's video that came out shortly before he announced the MIA Anki retirement add on. It was basically a confessions of an Anki addict video and this addon is an attempt to reign in that addiction and maybe keep others from falling into that trap. Or maybe some people might see that trap coming and quit Anki altogether only to miss out on the benefits it does have to offer. Anyway, he made this add on to have Anki auto suspend or delete cards after a certain interval. In his video he was thinking that an interval of a year would be a good cutoff. After you've remembered something a year later, you probably never need to see it again in Anki. Otherwise, you are kind of a slave to Anki. After the add on came out, he sort of adjusted that assuming you grouped your decks a bit by frequency so that beginner cards could be retired in maybe 4-6 months, intermediate cards maybe 8-9 months, and advanced cards at a year or something like that. Roughly. As I watched this video that was like confessions of an Anki junkie, I completely identified with it. That's not to say that I had an Anki deck that I had been working on for years and years and had never once quit. I get the impression that Matt was that hardcore. I quit constantly (maybe every 3-4 months, although I did have an unbroken streak of about 1.5 years or so while living in Japan), but switched to another SRS app instead or made a new deck. However, I was always a slave to SRS when it came to Japanese.

For Japanese but not for any other language I studied previously. If you read my original Japanese language study log back in the day I think I complained about this. Due to kanji, it's very difficult to just immerse yourself in Japanese by reading, and since reading was the most important learning tool for foreign languages I didn't know what else to do except SRS. And when it comes to reading kanji, if you're looking to expand your listening/spoken/overall Japanese ability by reading, it's not enough to just understand a word from the context - you also have to know how to pronounce/read it. Kanji just messed with my head. Even with rikai-sama or furigana I just couldn't get into that zone where I felt immersed. I learned (I roughly estimate) over 10,000 words in German from reading alone and no rote memorization. Reading can be amazing.

Well, Korean has no kanji. Actually, I do occasionally see hanja/kanji in texts but it's always accompanied by the reading. And from what I have seen from talking to Koreans, they don't remember more than 50 or so hanja from their school days. Really, probably less than that. Anyway, the point is, I'm noticing how easily I can immerse myself in Harry Potter using lingQ. Probably any decent dictionary would do but LingQ is what I'm using for now. I am so tempted to just let the SRS go and see what happens from pure immersion. Matt made the observation that due to SRS'ing, you kind of trick the brain into thinking that some uncommon words are more common than they really are, making your speech patterns a bit weird. You would think that if the intervals of said words got big enough then immersion would fix that but maybe it doesn't. I'm on the fence on this - I think that foreigners just kind of don't have a good natural grasp on a language that natives have and funny words sometimes come out as a result unless you make an effort to speak naturally. I never really spoke German to any great extent so I can't say if uncommon words ever popped out of my mouth or not. But maybe it would help if I learned my vocabulary as naturally as possible.

So I'm going easy on the vocabulary sentence deck and still considering doing away with it. Or just not adding to it. And seeing what happens from just immersion instead. If I were to hit a plateau from just reading, at that point I could turn to Anki maybe. Or just use Anki to drill vocabulary that I would definitely want to know if I were travelling maybe. I'm still considering. And focusing on the grammar right now. Some people argue you can just learn grammar from context but I don't think so. When it comes to Japanese, I can actually look up most 'grammar' in the dictionary as I have tons of experience using Japanese dictionaries but not so much when it comes to Korean. I really think a grammar Anki deck is very beneficial.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Sun Jun 21, 2020 6:21 am

Update on my Korean. I still had/have (I'm about to cancel it) my Japanese Audible account active. It makes me buy one book every month at a discounted flat rate of about $13 or so. I should have turned it off ages ago but I had accumulated so many coins and didn't know what to buy. They scare you if you try to cancel making it seem like you'll lose all your coins and you have to spend them before you cancel or something. So I procrastinated. I finally got some books today and I'll cancel it. I actually pre-purchased 天気の子 which I'm excited to listen to. I have the e-book but didn't get too far into it. I haven't seen the movie.

I've been making more videos for my YouTube channel. I don't have many viewers but they're fun to make the same way posting here is fun. I really appreciate anyone that reads my posts so thanks for that. I might try doing one in Korean. One weird thing about MIA is that they tell you out put isn't just not helpful, it's BAD for you if you do it too early. A lot of what Matt says in MIA makes sense - a lot of sense, so people take this at face value too. I don't think it's bad to output early. If you speak Korean every day from day one it is possible you'll get some bad habits but for something to be a habit you have to well do it a lot. Like speak everyday. I doubt anyone not living in Korea is speaking it every day. And if you're living in Korea you better be speaking it everyday. Yeah. And even if you are making some bad habits.. chances are you're learning as you go and you are double checking how to say things if it's important to you so you'll learn from your mistakes so to speak. I think it's good.

Anyway, it doesn't really matter because I'm not in Korea and I barely have any chance to speak Korean at all. Only via iTalki tutors. I currently have one whom I meet with about once a month because she's so popular you need to reserve a lesson about a month in advance. Also, I'm focusing on input and don't feel the need to use her very much now anyway. But I like her personally as a friend so I don't want to just stop either. Yeah, I'm paying her to be my friend but still.

I put a lot of work into and was very proud of the Anki decks I made from the Korean Grammar in Use series. But I have decided I'm not using them. The stuff from the Beginner book is all good but everything from the Intermediate book is basically too hard to put on an Anki for me. My brain feels overloaded when I try to do reps and it's just not working out. Instead I'm going to use the deck I made from this grammar cheat sheet PDF I found somewhere on Google. I'm liking the sentences so far and find they are not too challenging and there's no brain freezes etc. I added it to Anki in case any other Korean learners want to check it out:

Korean Cheat Sheet Anki Deck

Harry Potter is going well. I'm reading it on LingQ of course. I am looking for other options to read stuff in Korean. I haven't found anything too good yet although Learn with Texts looks interesting. It also looks hard to setup. So I'm procrastinating setting it up. What I'd really like is the ultimate pop up dictionary that worked not just in a browser but everywhere. One that would even work in games. That would be wonderful.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:23 am

You can listen to this on my YouTube Channel

Another Saturday and another update on my Korean. Oh, and I cut my own hair again. I'm still afraid to go to the barber to get it done properly. For better or for worse, instead of trying to trim the top, I just used the longest attachment on the buzz clipper and now it kind of looks like I'm maybe MIA, but running from the military or something.

I was doing really well on LingQ and had a 10 day streak or something going but then I missed a day. And well this week I haven't gotten too much LingQ in. I guess I sort of burned out on Harry Potter and reading in general. I did get back into LingQ last night, hitting my daily goal of 100 new links, and I didn't stop Korean either so I'm not worried. But I had been on track to finish my first book in Korean within 10 days and that's obviously been pushed back. Some people say that you should just read something until it gets boring and then immediately switch to something else. I don't follow that philosophy. I really get a sense of accomplishment from finishing a book and especially my first book in a foreign language. I wouldn't want to just switch to another book because this one got dull. Of course it got dull, my reading skills are bad, I'm going slowly, and in fact I've been reading this book since November of last year. But I will finish this book. Oh yes.

But not this week. This week I somehow got into watching tv/videos and listening to real Korean a lot more. In particular on Netfix. I like fantasy, sci-fi, anthing that is a break from reality. So I started rewatching a k-drama I really enjoyed about a year ago or so called, "Black". It's a kind of ghost or fantasy story involving a lot of murder, betrayal, cover ups, and the co-lead is a shinigami (ok, that's Japanese, I don't know the Korean). He basically goes to collect souls when people die to lead them to the afterlife. It doesn't have any Korean subtitles on Netflix unfortunately as i would love to download them and read them in LingQ if I could. Well, maybe because I know the story already (although I don't remember everything), it seems to leave a bit more brain power to focus on the Korean and it seems I'm picking stuff out better than usual. But it's still just bits and pieces.

Which leaves me to the other thing I'm wondering about as I sit through this drama (and some other shows on YouTube etc too) in Korean but which my understanding is fleeting and less often than not. Just how helpful is this anyway? I'm pretty sure it's something Matt and Yoda enourage as part of the immersion and they say you should do it from the get go I think. But strangely they also say not to do Shadowing early on. I don't know how early on I am in their estimation. I guess until I can get the gist of a drama without any subs even Korean I will feel like a beginner. I was on a Discord channel going off about this a bit. I was told it's a bit like a leap of faith. You really have no evidence at all to show that what you're doing is helping but you need to believe anyway and devote yourself to it. That sounds accurate. I tried looking on YouTube for other people's thoughts on this and Google and found a lot of people saying that until you can start understanding most of what's being said that it's a complete waste of time. Not so encouraging.

I haven't given up the faith in it though. It does feel a lot like reading a book in Korean without using a dictionary at all. Ever. Even though I'm completely lost. I am assuming that there is still something going on behind the scenes in my mind and it's making adjustments to deal with this barrage of input, trying to make some sense out of it, and making some progress. Even if it's slow. I'm also assuming that hearing the language everyday (preferably for several hours, but I can't always make that happen), is telling my uncoscious mind that Korean is more important so that when I go to sleep every night, and my subconcious brain decides what information to cut, and what gets retained into long term memory, it will choose to retain more Korean grammar, phrases, and vocabulary. I hope.

I've been doing nearly 2 hours of Anki every day. I'm focusing on the new grammar deck I made from the cheat sheet, the TOPIK 1 and 2 vocabulary book I got from Japan, and my sentence deck with material mostly mined from HowToStudyKorean dot com. I suppose it's weird but I enjoy Anki. Immersion may be the most important studying I'm doing but Anki at least gives me confirmed progress. Just listening to tons of Korean, you can walk away wondering "What just happened?? Did I just get better? Did nothing happen? I got worse. I know I got worse." Anyway, I'm off to go jogging, while listening to Korean YouTube.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Sun Jul 05, 2020 12:09 am

My Saturday update. YouTube blog of me rambling about this. It's the fourth of July weekend in the US and it's a three day weekend so I was off yesterday and got to relax and do language stuff. Although I have a channel, I'm not a YouTuber but I have a subscription to YouTube (for the non ads) and watching YouTube is one of my favorite things to do. It blows my mind watching people make videos about so many things that they're interested in and obviously language learning is high on that list but I like gadgets, technology, gaming, and just about anything is great too.

So I stumbled upon a polyglot's YouTube channel and I don't know how many languages he claims to speak (maybe 8 per a brief glance at his channel) but he's really prolific when it comes to making videos about his language learning and you can tell he puts a lot of thought into the videos. He's also a student of Japanese and studied it 3 years in college before going to Japan to work as an interpreter (I don't know what kind of interpreting) but that sounded impressive. Anyway, I could comment on a number of his videos because they're interesting but he recently made a nice video about reviving his German.
Ever since starting my Japanese studies, I've felt bad because I made a decision to stop using, reading, watching, or even thinking about German in order to give myself the best chance at learning Japanese. Getting my brain to think in this language that was literally backwards from English in every way was so hard I knew I couldn't pull any stops and had to give it everything I had and even then it might not be enough. Part of me thinks that this was due to the fact that I started Japanese later in life as opposed to college age like I did German but I don't know. What I do know is that I can quickly and readily switch to thinking in German even after not using it for such a long period of time. I can also think in Japanese now having put in a stupid amount of time studying it and having lived in the country for 2 years but German still feels like it's rooted more deeply in my brain. Part of me is really frustrated that Japanese can't achieve that. Korean might be ill fated to be even less deeply rooted than Japanese no matter how much time I put into it or not I have no idea.

I actually think that 'thinking' or talking to myself in German was a big part of my language routine. I'm not even sure because it's so long ago now, and I think it's something I kind of gave up on with Japanese. I remember taking Japanese at Pima Community College and walking through my apartment complex parking lot and trying to think in Japanese really hard but German just kept coming out. Even if I started the sentence in Japanese, German just came out. I hadn't been specificaly studying German while I was studying Japanese but I hadn't completely tried to turn off that switch in my head either and was still thinking in German sometimes. I was thinking of myself as a multi-lingual person who could (or would after I studied more) speak German, maybe Spanish (I had some under my belt) and Japanese. But it seemed apparent to me that at least for the time being, if I didn't literally turn off the German in my head, I would never 'think' in Japanese and this would of course mean I would never speak it. Speaking a language and thinking in a language really similar.

So now I'm going to try to revive German. I'm a little nervous. Just switching back and forth between Japanese and English was hard for me. If I were having a Japanese conversation in Tokyo, and we switched to English, switching back to Japanese was really difficult. Other good Japanese students (mostly my friend from India) could switch back and forth really well but for me if I switched to English if I went back to Japanese you could tell I was struggling. Obviously, this isn't how one imagines polyglots or multi-lingual people to operate. You should switch back and forth between your languages with ease or you look like a fake and everyone will only speak English to you as a result (the worst outcome ever!).

So Robin recorded a video of himself speaking German into the camera a week ago and then another video just yesterday. I personally could see the improvement in his German after just a week. I don't know how much time he's putting into it each day. I don't know what his level was before he stopped and how long he stopped for. He's talking about reading his first book in German as part of this experiment, but I think he lived in Germany for a time perhaps so he probably focused almost exclusively on speaking the language over reading it before. Of course I'm the opposite.

My opportunities to speak German were very few and as a result my German was a bit sloppy I think and probably foolishly, when given the choice of phrasing something short and succinctly or dragging it out into a huge run on sentence, I preferred the latter. I think I just liked showing off that I could put the verbs at the end of a long clause or something. Looking back, although native speakers can and probably do do that when appropriate, my everyday thoughts probably sounded a mess to them.

At first I was thinking of halting my Korean studies completely except maybe Anki reviews (no new cards) but I changed my mind. I'm kind of against working on two languages at the same time but German is something I'm brushing up and not a new language and I'm not looking to push it beyond what it once was at least for a while. Getting it back to where it was should be hard enough. I also recorded myself speaking German on my YouTube channel as a reference. I was going to do a video in a week even but I've changed my mind. Especially since I'm not giving it my complete attention, just consistent attention every day, the improvement will be slower I think and not so interesting to see after just one week. Although Robin does say that when brushing up a language you see huge improvements right away say in the first two weeks then it slows down a lot which makes sense. I think I'll do a video after a month. I plan to do about 1 hour a day on German. I was thinking absolutely no anki / SRS but I'm not sure now. I might just toss in interesting vocabulary that I like into a deck and well limit it to 10 a day at most. I hate limiting the daily amount of words per day but I know it's good advice.

And then what about my Korean? Well, I think it has the priority over German. It needs more love for sure. There's certainly no time limit per day on how much I will study it but I guess the minimum is also an hour but likely it will be more than that. I've been enjoying the TOPIK 1 and 2 vocabulary book I got in Japan with its native audio and Japanese translations in Anki but I think I am going to switch to adding new cards to a new deck I will actually do in Flash Cards Deluxe. I know that reading Harry Potter in LingQ was helping my overall Korean ability (mostly reading ability but still) but I was only improving the vocabulary that repeated on almost every page. A lot of that super high frequency vocabulary was also vocabulary I had already studied from beginner vocabulary lists / sentence lists. But I found a way to add good new flash cards to a deck. While studying on my phone just high light the target word, then screenshot it, and then tap it to bring up the LingQ dictionary and take another screen shot. Then swipe over to Flash Cards Deluxe (you could do this in Anki too) and make a new card using the two images. It's a few more taps than if you have a proper dictionary app linked into Anki like exist for Japanese and probably other languages but it's fast enough that I don't mind doing it so this will be easy to maintain I think. I'm actually a bit excited. It's not a true sentence card as per MIA in that I'm only testing myself on one word and not the whole sentence but this also makes review the cards less work because Harry Potter sentences are not usually i + 1 and the sentences are often long. I kind of like the idea that I'm seeing a literal screen shot of the original text I originally encountered the word.
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kraemder
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Mon Jul 06, 2020 10:33 pm

I really enjoy this polyglot’s (Robin’s)YouTube channel but in this video he’s describing his Italian as a strong C1 and saying he was starting to read his first book etc. I’m like his first book and he’s a C1??? Is that possible? I often read my first book an A2 level... yeah it’s hard but I guess I don’t know how you move through the intermediate stages without lots of reading?

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kraemder
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Tue Jul 28, 2020 1:36 am

My philosophy on studying languages has really been to just focus on one at a time and don't mix it up. However, I'm getting bored with Korean now and I was hoping to take another language night class for fun this Fall and I can't find Korean. I was looking at Spanish but I'm still infatuated with Asian languages and found a community college in Glendale, Arizona that does online classes and has Mandarin Chinese. I signed up. I'm going to have to check with the teacher to make sure it's all online and I don't have to come in person for tests or anything since Glendale is a bit of a drive for me. Maybe going in once a month would be ok though. I hope it's not needed. It's not my local community college I usually go to because they're not offering any Chinese this semester (why?!). So I'm now juggling a lot of languages at once. I would say that Chinese currently has the priority for me followed by Japanese simply because thanks to my high intermediate level I can just watch anime without subs or something and call that review or chat with someone on an app. I had made a promise to myself to do something with German but that's turning out to be harder than I expected. I am watching the occasional YouTube video for language learners but otherwise nothing. It's really nice that I can generally understand spoken German fine without subtitles but considering I haven't touched the language in over a decade I feel like I should get a grammar book or something and look at that too. Probably not going to happen however. Technically I could use German to talk to people on apps just like Japanese but I'm too embarrassed by my pronunciation and stumbling for words. Since Japanese is such a difficult language, I guess I don't feel any pressure to be good at it but German is the same language family as English (if a bit distant) and I actually do feel some pressure not to suck too much. Part of this comes from watching people blog about studying German on YouTube and while I think my overall grammar and language ability is perfectly fine even if it's rusty, my pronunciation is just terrible :( .

So onto Chinese, a language I suck at way more than German in all respects but for some reason that doesn't bother me in the least. I've always felt like I should limit my study resources and try to stick to one thing in order to well make more progress and save myself money. For example, if I read 100 pages in one text book, instead of 25 pages in four textbooks, then I'll be reading more advanced material etc. However, in practice I've found that really hard to stick to. Probably because study materials are just boring and so using a variety of them helps alleviate boredom. I saw a YouTuber who said they intentionally enjoy getting as many good resources as possible and studying from all of them and felt this reinforced the lessons and was much more interesting than just reviewing the same lessons over and over again from one resource. It makes sense right? I guess, just try not to get too many resources. I made this choice to study Chinese sort of spontaneously Friday night when I was browsing the Internet for online classes.

So far I've decided to use SpoonFed, a free (well I paid $2 I think..) Anki deck that looks amazing. It has about 10,000 sentences from easiest to hardest, designed with i+1 in mind, and includes native audio. It defaults to testing you both with Chinese on side 1 and then again with English on side 1. I turned off the production testing (English on side 1). Although it seems like good practice it also feels like the equivalent of sprinting for language studying. I really like production studying but I feel like you need to find a way to pace it and just having Anki throw stuff at you according to its algorithm doesn't work for me. I burn out after a week or so.

I'm playing with DuoLingo. I think the owl is cute and the translation exercises they do seem pretty useful just in no way sufficient in and of themselves. I wouldn't ever just do DuoLingo as a language learner but it seems like a fun way to learn/practice basic stuff. I've never really used DuoLingo in the past so I'm curious to see how long I can stick with it.

I am using Rosetta Stone too. I have a lifetime membership for all languages that they suckered me into buying so I have to make use of it especially before they make it free to play for everyone and my membership is a complete waste. The clock is ticking here.

I'm playing Classic World of Warcraft in Chinese. WoW is notorious for being super popular in China so it seems natural to play the game in Chinese. I'm going to have to be careful to keep language learning the focus of playing and definitely do not join a guild or anything that would distract me from learning. I hope. I found a nice piece of software called Capture2Text which does a great job of OCR'ing the highlighted part of a screen using a mouse and a hotkey then it can use Google translate to look up the word. Or you can paste it into a dictionary. It has a log feature but I can't control when it logs the lookups and there's a lot of bad lookups where it just fails the OCR. Well, it doesn't do too terrible a job but I think the log file is pretty useless. Instead, I'm just directly pasting the words into Anki. I'm then using the MIA dictionary to lookup the word and also add native pronunciation to the card using Forvo. Not a sentence deck but I add pictures too. I think it's pretty nice.

I'm not using a textbook yet because I don't know what they're going to use in my class. The description of the course says no textbook which is possible I guess but I'm guessing they just didn't update it. I don't enjoy textbooks so much that I would use two instead of one. At least not when there's apps I can use instead.

I'm really not interested in doing any listening immersion for now. I know immersion is a really big deal and you'll never really get good at a language until you incorporate immersion into your routine. I'm gonna hold off for now. I will argue that Warcraft in Chinese is a bit immersion although it's not the same as watching TV or listening to podcasts or YouTube.

And on a side note I have failed utterly at fixing my bad sleeping habits and I'm functioning on 4 to 7 hours of sleep a night. Usually about 6 hours I would say but for example last night my Phone went off (why?!) just after I had drifted off to sleep and then I woke up and was doomed not to fall asleep again for a couple more hours. I'm pretty sure sleep deprivation is terrible for language learning which is why I mention it in this log (and to motivate me to do better).
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devilyoudont
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Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby devilyoudont » Tue Jul 28, 2020 7:10 pm

I thought it might interest you to know that there is a very large population of Chinese speakers playing WoW even on North American servers. On retail, the unofficial Chinese server is Illidan, not sure about Classic, but it probably exists.
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kraemder
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Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Wed Jul 29, 2020 12:10 am

devilyoudont wrote:I thought it might interest you to know that there is a very large population of Chinese speakers playing WoW even on North American servers. On retail, the unofficial Chinese server is Illidan, not sure about Classic, but it probably exists.


I'll keep that in mind. I'd feel pretty good joining a Japanese guild but it would need to be a very friendly guild to let a noob like me in. I don't even know how to type Chinese on Windows yet lol.
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devilyoudont
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Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby devilyoudont » Wed Jul 29, 2020 2:01 am

The Japanese population for NA servers is incredibly small, but there are at least 3 or 4 guilds on Proudmoore. In all honestly, FF14 is probably a better game to play in Japanese/with Japanese players.
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Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby alaart » Thu Jul 30, 2020 10:12 am

From all the resources I enjoyed yabla the most, which is one of those dual subtitled video learning platforms. But probably not suited for total beginners, although they have beginner material as well. I used it when I was around 6-12 month into the language (full time study as a university student).
The good thing is that you can quiz yourself on the tones you hear in the subtitles, that proved very helpful for my ears - even if at first I did not understand at all where words begin and end, but over time it worked.

I think, learning through content in Chinese is valid, since the grammar is not the main difficulty of the language.

Ah, and the people in the language courses are interesting, since for Chinese the reasons for learning it are usually more diverse than pop-culture alone.

So, good luck with Mandarin!
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