More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

[kraemder]

I'm still plugging along at Korean. I made an update to my Korean vlog if you like watching videos but I do ramble a bit and there was no editing:

https://youtu.be/FkX7QwXvgpM

This whole virus thing has turned many people's world upside down I'm sure and on the face of it, being home all day you have more opportunity to self study languages etc. Well that wasn't the case for me. I mean sure, I had more opportunity to self study but mentally I was not at all in a place where I could easily sit down and focus on Korean. Maybe I could have done so with Japanese since I basically do the same things in Japanese that I do in English but Korean is not at all there. I would try to study Korean but it was very much a struggle. It's getting better recently though although the world isn't normal yet. When it's normal maybe I can -go- to Korean right?

So basically the benefit of taking a Korean class mostly dried up when it went online. I am not seeing anyone in person and the video conferencing tool we have is adequate but not great and we're limited in what activities we can do. I really dislike it. Even though all the material was review and we spoke almost no Korean in class, despite that, after class I felt motivated to go home and study. Just being with other people interested in Korean did that for me. But this online class does not. It's almost done though.

Rosetta Stone is offering free group lessons for current subscribers right now. I really like the Rosetta Stone lessons because the teacher is supposed to only use your target language no matter how much you stink. They break that rule a little bit sometimes but sometimes you still get a beginner lesson all in your target language. Because they use so many pictures you can actually do a lesson that makes sense with terrible beginner level Korean.

I think that Rosetta Stone sentences have been the most helpful for me in terms making me a little bit conversational. I really want to spend more time on Rosetta Stone to finish the course and review the material enough that it sticks in place. This would get me to a solid A2 and ready to study B1 material level I think.

With Korean I'm really struggling because unlike when I studied Japanese I am not 'forgetting' my other foreign languages and focusing 100% on Korean. I'm still using Japanese quite a bit even though I'm not really studying it. This hurts the immersion effect I think where your brain is kind of thinking in or about Korean a lot even when you're not studying because that's all you really do. I'm wondering how other learners do it. Maybe I should really do my best to not think about Japanese unless I'm literally having a conversation and using it? Oh well.

I feel like I'm definitely struggling to learn new grammar in Korean. I have at least read through all of Korean Grammar in Use for beginners but I haven't absorbed the later structures yet. They don't come up as much I guess. Certainly not in Rosetta Stone. I really wonder how far Rosetta Stone goes.

[eido]

"취미" is pronounced pretty simply.

"우" and "이" make a dipththong, so you get a "w" sound. "Chwi mi," [chwee-mee] in short. When you get compound vowel blocks like that, they're always dipththong-like constructs.

[kraemder]

It is nice to see someone have nice things to say about Rosetta Stone. I also enjoy it's sentences and am learning a lot with just them. They do a great job of introducing new grammar with words you know first then adding the new words with the new grammar.

Did you add all the sentences to Anki? picture +audio? I couldn't be bothered to get them so just use the sentences with TTS.

Thanks for the reply. I try to add all the questions/answers from the core lessons. If I skip one then I goofed so I've only skipped a couple. I think I would hate typing the sentences out more than anything lol. I can't touch type hangul so it's slow and painful.

What I do is take a snapshot of the Korean text with the picture and then record the audio to a file and stick both into Anki. Actually I made a YoutTube video showing it I think. This is over a year old now (wow). The Rosetta Stone deck starts at about 9:55

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud8dl2QvxdE

[kraemder]

"취미" is pronounced pretty simply.

"우" and "이" make a dipththong, so you get a "w" sound. "Chwi mi," [chwee-mee] in short. When you get compound vowel blocks like that, they're always dipththong-like constructs.

I'm aware of the diphthong but somehow it's not getting understood when I say it really well. I hope this gets better on its own but if not I'll take steps to address this. Foreign language pronunciation is something I hate. So yeah, I'm not great at it. I do try my best to speak well enough to be understood though.

[kraemder]

Oh I didnt type the sentences. Rosetta Stone gives out the sentences for free. Just copied and paste to spreadsheet and imported into Anki :3

From your video, you make doing listening card look easy lol. Maybe I should add a second deck that I do that is all listening cards...

I really recommend it. I've used the Rosetta Stone deck for about a year and never gotten bored of it. I've gotten distracted but not bored with it. The quality of the audio is so good. And the sentences are never too hard that they turn into leeches just because the sentence length or the grammar etc., is beyond what you can do on an SRS card. I've tried sentence mining and using audio cards from other sources and it seemed good at first but didn't work out in the end for various reasons. Rosetta Stone works great.

[AnneL]

I feel like I'm definitely struggling to learn new grammar in Korean. I have at least read through all of Korean Grammar in Use for beginners but I haven't absorbed the later structures yet. They don't come up as much I guess. Certainly not in Rosetta Stone. I really wonder how far Rosetta Stone goes.

Yeahh I was too, for the first 6-8 months I'd hear stuff and it wouldn't stick. I just completely left that part for a long time, just spent time watching stuff with English subs trying to understand what was going on. Then when I went back to grammar, everything was easy to understand, not more effort than a European language. Personally I just read or watch grammar videos or the TTMIK podcasts when outside for a walk, I don't really try and remember, just understand. I keep learning vocabulary via any means I can think of / been advised, and listening to stuff I'd like to understand (now I can understand slightly better because I have vocabulary)... I cycle through grammar points, rewatch videos several months later if I can't even remember something (happens often), and then it sticks... if it doesn't I don't care, I'll come back to it later. As long as you keep doing something, listening to something everyday, I believe you don't need to stress too much about grammar, it will stick when you're ready. I've made 0 effort on stuff that was hard and I'm still making progress.
Was Japanese much easier on this subject?

[kraemder]

I feel like I'm definitely struggling to learn new grammar in Korean. I have at least read through all of Korean Grammar in Use for beginners but I haven't absorbed the later structures yet. They don't come up as much I guess. Certainly not in Rosetta Stone. I really wonder how far Rosetta Stone goes.

Yeahh I was too, for the first 6-8 months I'd hear stuff and it wouldn't stick. I just completely left that part for a long time, just spent time watching stuff with English subs trying to understand what was going on. Then when I went back to grammar, everything was easy to understand, not more effort than a European language. Personally I just read or watch grammar videos or the TTMIK podcasts when outside for a walk, I don't really try and remember, just understand. I keep learning vocabulary via any means I can think of / been advised, and listening to stuff I'd like to understand (now I can understand slightly better because I have vocabulary)... I cycle through grammar points, rewatch videos several months later if I can't even remember something (happens often), and then it sticks... if it doesn't I don't care, I'll come back to it later. As long as you keep doing something, listening to something everyday, I believe you don't need to stress too much about grammar, it will stick when you're ready. I've made 0 effort on stuff that was hard and I'm still making progress.
Was Japanese much easier on this subject?

Yeah it was a lot easier because I was lucky to have a great Japanese teacher at my local community college. They were great for grammar. Basically A1, A2, and B1 grammar got covered (JLPT N3). I'll be forever grateful for that experience. I really wish I could find a Korean class like that.

[kraemder]

My Korean class ended last night more or less. I think officially there's one more class but it's not required. The teacher was good friends with a lot of the students and would like to see people in person one last time since she's going back to Korea and not staying in the US. She initially brought the idea up in early April and that's when my dad actually got the virus and I was like, uhh I'm not going. Well thankfully he's recovering ok so I'm less paranoid.

I really enjoyed the project we did for class at the end. This seems to be a staple for Korean at Pima Community College. We all have a presentation of some kind to do at the end. This time it was supposed to be a book fair where we all did a big poster board with pictures and artsy writing maybe show casing what we learned or whatever from the book. It didn't happen. We ended up doing Power Point presentations (or something similar if not Power Point) and presenting online. Recorded presentations were ok, or we could present live on camera. The teacher was very very vague about how we were to present except that it had to be multimedia. I think the intent was to not stress us out as she was going to be grading us very leniently. A lot of students did stress out though and crammed tons of information into their presentations. I expected that. I purposefully made mine close to the minimum length possible for this reason, to give more time for other students. And I figured we would be staying late past the end of class into the night, to let everyone go if that's what it took too. And we did.

It's 4:20 long.


I decided to use this software I just downloaded for doing let's play type videos or you could use it to make a variety of videos I guess. It's totally free and seems very powerful (there's an even more powerful paid version I think). I also used it to make a let's play of my Rosetta Stone studying session:



This was actually pretty fun to make and makes me want to make more, which would get me to do more Rosetta Stone. My channel is mostly dead though and my videos barely get double digit views and no comments. I don't advertise or promote the channel at all. Despite that I like making the videos so I think I might continue. I was even eying a cheap teleprompter for vblogging for your smartphone. I notice a huge improvement in content quality (my previous video presentation is 4:20 scripted, I think it would be 20+ minutes unscripted) when I write a script out in advance, but I hate losing the eye/face contact when you're just talking to the camera. Also, I would have a ton more confidence making videos in foreign languages if I'm using a teleprompter. I know some people use one to 'cheat' and make it seem like their foreign language skills are much better than they really are. I don't want to come off as doing that so I might put a disclaimer in the notes. I'm undecided. And I haven't gotten any teleprompter yet so I don't know if it will make me seem like an amazing Japanese/Korean speaker etc. overnight. There are already actual videos of me speaking Japanese off the cuff with no preparation or anything and just talking at the camera. They are very honest I think .

Now that my Korean class has ended I definitely have more freedom to do what I want. Part of me wants to just forget about studying and jump in World of Warcraft Classic completely, escape reality, and immerse myself in pure alternate reality fantasy MMO goodness. But the language nerd in me is appalled by that and wants to hit Korean really hard, to make the progress I maybe couldn't make before because I was studying a Korean 101 textbook. I know that due to Coronavirus just about all schooling is online which might make it a lot easier for working adults like myself to attend classes we otherwise couldn't. I checked briefly online. Checking for available classes is a little time consuming though.

[kraemder]

I had a really good experience with a Korean teacher/tutor on iTalki. I've had some good tutors already but they're all booked solid for weeks now so I had to find a new teacher. She's pretty new to iTalki and so her schedule is very open. I'm sure that given a month, if she teaches all her lessons as well as she taught mine, she'll have more lessons than she can handle. Her prices are a little higher than my other teachers though so hopefully that'll keep the crowd away. (they're not too prohibitive just not a give away). $20 for an hour or $27 for 90 minutes. I really liked the 90 minute lesson. I think students who are new to foreign language learning will be exhausted after 90 minutes of one on one teaching. In a group class you can sit back a bit and rest some when it's someone else's turn to answer etc. but there's no break for you in a one on one lesson. I booked the lesson for like two days in advance I think or maybe a day in advance.. I'm not sure but she didn't have tons of time to prepare the lesson. I didn't really take that into account when I booked the lesson I just selfishly grabbed Friday night because it worked well with my schedule. As an English teacher I would try not to spend too much time preparing a lesson. Maybe 15 minutes per lesson or so if possible. Berlitz kind of set it up so that was all the time I had anyway so I didn't have any choice. I think she spent tons of time preparing this lesson. I said I wanted to work on reported speech because I haven't covered it with any class at all and although I've read it in my Grammar book I am completely uncomfortable using it in conversation. Which isn't surprising - it's pretty complicated in Korean compared to other languages I think. There's so many ways to do it. In no way was I thinking we should cover them all and I said as much in advance but I left it up to her to decide which to do since well I don't know what's best. I'm pretty sure she spent all night doing the power point presentation. She actually said that after the lesson when I was complimenting her on the material and asked if it were all custom just for this lesson. I think I was the first student to ask to do reported speech so next time she'll just whip out these slides. I hope more students ask her to do them. We didn't do all the patterns she prepared just two of them which was really plenty for me. And then we reviewed one of the ways to say -but- in Korean. There's a few. I now have to take another grammar lesson with her at some point to make sure those other reported speech slides don't go to waste.

I asked her about doing a vocabulary lesson. She really didn't seem comfortable doing a 'vocabulary' lesson per se. She said several times that she thinks vocabulary should be learned in context. Which I totally agree with but I also think that just reviewing vocabulary with another real live human, no matter how you do it, gives it a lot more of a chance to stick in your long term memory than otherwise. And I'm totally learning vocabulary out of context as well as in context at the moment. I'm using Evita's Korean vocabulary deck which seems to be very well organized in terms of words that students should learn first etc. But any flashcard deck that you download is out of context I would say even if it includes example sentences. In context to me is in real life. From movies/shows/conversations/reading material. I'm on the fence regarding using that vocabulary in an SRS deck. I think I might end up pushing myself to remember words that above my current level creating tons of leeches and frustration.

Anyway, I signed up for another lesson with her for Tuesday evening. she has a few different lesson types. The one we did is 'grammar'. This one is 'reading' 'listening' 'writing'. I wrote her a message saying let's not do writing. I have no intention of writing anything in Korean anytime soon if ever. And she already replied back to me asking me what I expect etc., she wants to -prepare- for the lesson. Not a let's wing it type of person. Which is good, we had an excellent lesson today. But I don't know what to tell her. I don't really know what to expect and I'm open minded . I wonder if she'll wring more information on what I want out of me before the lesson that I didn't even know was there.

[kraemder]

I had a second tutoring session with that same tutor and it was ok but not as good as the first one. I think she is a bit annoyed at my going into Japanese mode all the time when I am trying to go into Korean. I've found she's not the only tutor to get annoyed by this. The only tutors who don't are tutors that speak Japanese... so basically they get annoyed when they can't understand or relate to whatever is coming out of my mouth. Which is understandable.

One thing I've tried to do most of the time that I've been studying Korean is to maintain Japanese at least a little bit while using Korean. Because I worked -so- hard to get to where I am in Japanese it seems a waste not to enjoy it and let it get worse. But when I studied Japanese I totally shut off my other foreign languages so that I could obsess or focus on Japanese better and it worked. Japanese was still really hard but I'm sure it would have been even worse had I pushed myself to maintain my much stronger languages. A youtuber I saw recently called her languages rooms in her head and the metaphor works well I think. She felt that most of her languages were separate rooms that didn't overlap or get confused... except for Spanish and French where she would often mean to walk into one room but go into the other by mistake sometimes without realizing it (and sometimes realizing it). According to her she is very confident that as she reaches a C1 level in those languages that will just go away. Well, for me, especially for Asian languages, I seriously doubt there will be any C1 level. But Japanese did get to a B2 level and when I go Japanese, mostly Japanese comes out. I say mostly. Occasionally I've found myself wanting to say 'ne' for yes in Japanese because I was studying Korean earlier that day or the day before. I haven't outright just spoken Korean instead of Japanese without realizing it though. Mostly just 'ne' or something similar where the Korean popped into my head first and I had to concentrate a bit to remember the Japanese too. If I get better at Korean will that also keep it out of my Japanese? Being a polyglot stinks. I think I qualify as a polyglot if a rather inept one. Although I'd feel more like a polyglot if I brushed up my German, French, and or Spanish. Not going to happen very soon though.

I'm going to try to ignore Japanese and really focus 100% on Korean. I'm just not a great multi tasker. At least right now. I will say that I think I was better when I was younger. I sort of studied all three of those languages at the same time without any adverse effects except maybe my progress was a bit slower as a result. But now I think it's a lot worse. There's still one thing I haven't tried yet however. Getting a full night's sleep every night consistently. I tend to average between 6 to 7 hours of sleep a night sometimes a little less even. It's ok for me to get by ok but pushing yourself to learn a new language and then juggle multiple languages even is a whole other thing. I really think getting more sleep would help a lot. I am also very doubtful that I can pull it off except for weekends. Every night I tell myself to go to bed before midnight and every night I'm watching YouTube, Netflix, or doing something, anything instead. I just can't resist squeezing a little more me time in before knocking off to sleep to wake up and start work the next day. I truly respect people who maintain a consistent sleep schedule where they get 8+ hours of actual sleep a night.

Anyway, in part because my class ended maybe, I've felt a bit less motivated and focused on Korean. I think that by trying to limit myself to just Korean and no Japanese (or any other language) etc, it should help get me back on track and doing SRS reps and reading and listening etc.