More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

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AnneL
Yellow Belt
Posts: 60
Joined: Tue Dec 31, 2019 4:34 pm
Languages: By order of when I started learning:
French (N)
English (C2+fluent)
German (B1)
Spanish (A2)
Italian (A2)
Korean (A2) damn hard to reach any level, 18 months studying - B1 now at 32 months lol
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby AnneL » Fri Aug 07, 2020 11:06 pm

kraemder wrote:
I'm still very intrigued with the speed review method I was trying out but I'm finding it's really not good for newly learned material and not if you're not ready to really focus. It's particularly not so good for sentences that aren't i+1. It's inevitable that you will need more time to puzzle over those cards.

I tried that way too around the same time as you it seems, that made me totally burn out from Anki, esp trying to use it with sentence cards. I think you can only use this when indeed doing reviews, rather than in learning, and with vocabulary only.

From one of your previous posts, I added more fields to my cards and have space for 10 sentences for each vocabulary word on my standard card. I rarely fill it up but if I struggle with a word I will put 10 sentences (Example/Translation). I get those sentences from Naver dict for Korean learners (https://korean.dict.naver.com/english/main.nhn?sLn=kr). My Evita cards are like that for example, so I can add example myself.
I'm reviewing quickly everything in those recent decks made by Retro (grammar and vocab) because he uses sentences for all the vocab and I think no english at all (lots of images) at least on the intermediate grammar deck I'm reviewing right now.
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10000 Morphman morphemes KOREAN : 10000 / 10000 11/2018->08/2020
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Aug 23, 2020 12:37 am

alaart wrote: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!


Thanks. I'm excited about the course and we'll see about the reasons for learning Mandarin. It's one of the first questions anyone asks you and I'm not sure what to say. I suppose people who study Japanese kind of naturally gravitate towards it since they put in all that time studying kanji. And over a billion native speakers allegedly. My experience talking to Chinese people (in English at least) has been very positive throughout my life too. But English is still the language of business so I don't expect people will say they need to learn Chinese for their job but maybe someone will.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Sun Aug 23, 2020 7:04 pm

AnneL wrote:
kraemder wrote:
I'm still very intrigued with the speed review method I was trying out but I'm finding it's really not good for newly learned material and not if you're not ready to really focus. It's particularly not so good for sentences that aren't i+1. It's inevitable that you will need more time to puzzle over those cards.

I tried that way too around the same time as you it seems, that made me totally burn out from Anki, esp trying to use it with sentence cards. I think you can only use this when indeed doing reviews, rather than in learning, and with vocabulary only.

From one of your previous posts, I added more fields to my cards and have space for 10 sentences for each vocabulary word on my standard card. I rarely fill it up but if I struggle with a word I will put 10 sentences (Example/Translation). I get those sentences from Naver dict for Korean learners (https://korean.dict.naver.com/english/main.nhn?sLn=kr). My Evita cards are like that for example, so I can add example myself.
I'm reviewing quickly everything in those recent decks made by Retro (grammar and vocab) because he uses sentences for all the vocab and I think no english at all (lots of images) at least on the intermediate grammar deck I'm reviewing right now.


I just took a peek at the Retro decks in the Anki shared library and they look interesting. I will definitely come back to Korean in a bit and I'll check those out. The card count size is less intimidating. A lot of people say you need to go all out on the sentence decks instead of doing vocabulary cards but in my experience the sentence cards can often lead to burnout. You need to really keep the sentences short and sweet or your reviews will mentally tax you too much I think. Chances are that I'll just end up doing a vocabulary deck and adding example sentences on the back of the card for clarification like you're doing. Burnout is the worst and most dangerous thing to language learning. You're always getting better until you stop studying.
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sat Sep 05, 2020 3:07 am

So the Mandarin class started. We're using Zoom for the class and the teacher is older and not so good with technology but she's getting better as we go. The first class was a disaster really where she didn't even have a mouse. I assume she got one after fighting a lopsided losing battle with the trackpad on her laptop during our first class. She is older and obviously has a lot of experience teaching Chinese to Americans though and so I am curious to see what we'll learn and practice. The first class was mostly a cultural introduction to Chinese rather than going over language but the second class we hit the book and started practicing the sample dialogues. Zoom has break away classrooms so we can partner up and practice with each other. There were some technical issues for me on that as my first partner had a barely working microphone and then lost connection after 1 minute but my second partner later had a stable connection and it was fun. On a lot of people online belittle language classes because you end up being paired up with other learners who stink with the language to practice but I enjoy it.

If I can stay motivated of course I should go way beyond what we cover in class but even if that were the case it should be better than my Korean class where I was not only retaking the class but they were going so slowly they were actually doing material from the previous class instead of the one I signed up for. We don't have a huge class. Getting enough students to justify having the class at all is a challenge for many junior colleges and this teacher solved it by combining Chinese 1 and Chinese 2 into one class where Chinese 1 meets on Mondays and Chinese 2 meets on Wednesdays. Normally of course we would meet for both days but then the class would get cancelled most likely. I'm ok with it. The lazy part of me is a little relieved even lol. I considered asking the teacher if I could 'audit' Chinese 2 on Wednesdays but I decided not to. I still might ask however.

Most of the other students are, well, college age students pursuing degrees. There's a few of us older folks taking this class for other reasons though. Most of the older students are taking it because their kids are going to study Chinese in school and they want to be involved instead of lost. I think that's very cool. The college age students are probably taking it to satisfy a language requirement. One student signed up for it because he grew up bilingual English/Cantonese and wants to learn Mandarin too. I don't know how much crossover free vocabulary etc., he'll get but in theory he should do well with the pronunciation if nothing else. One student is half Japanese and she grew up going to Japanese weekend school even and must have really strong Japanese ability and know a lot of kanji. It was a little surprising to me but a lot of the girls chose Chinese because of the Chinese Dramas they like watching. I wonder how new of a phenomenon that is. I guess C-pop is a thing now though and probably has been for a number of years.

I like studying Chinese with the simplified characters. They're similar enough to Japanese that I don't seem to have to try too hard to remember them. If I read texts with hanzi and pinyin both it's really easy to understand. I'm tempted to try to just reading, reading, reading to improve since that seems easy. I don't know very much grammar yet however. I am currently watching some cheesy Mandarin dramas on Netflix with the language learning add on so it shows simplified hanzi with pinyin and English translations. It's really nice. I'm already able to reinforce some of the vocabulary I've studied using flash cards using this.

One thing I'm concerned about are the tones. On one hand I seem to be absorbing the tones for some words without too much effort but I know that's just a percentage of the vocabulary I'm studying and many words the tones haven't stuck at all yet. All the YouTube videos about studying Chinese emphasize the need to learn tones from day one. And yet it seems like a "do as I say, not as I do" thing since they all regret how they didn't do it and now they're suffering. The brain can only take so much. Learning an exotic writing system, completely new sounds, a total lack of cognates, and throw in tones on top of that something might have to give. That might be why they didn't learn tones from day 1. Or maybe not. I do also have the advantage in that although the writing system is new to me, it's not too terrible. So I think learning tones wouldn't be impossible probably. But how to do it? All of these people in the videos don't say how to study tones just that you need to. When it comes to memorization, flash cards have been my go to for about 10 years now. If I make vocabulary cards and use SRS should I grade myself wrong if I fail to recall the meaning AND the tones? I suspect that would be too hard for me. For now I'm just trying to remember the tones by thinking about them a lot as I study them but I don't have any tone specific SRS cards.

I actually am trying something new with my vocabulary cards at the moment. On side one I have a picture, usually it has nothing to do with the meaning of the word and is just random, and the audio of the word from Forvo. Then side 2 has all the vocab info. The random card picture is that I want something visual on side 1 to engage my brain but I don't want it to just give away the meaning of the word either so I always mark myself right without even trying. I don't know how well these cards will work. At least they seem to make studying more enjoyable so far.

I have the Chinese Spoonfed deck but I've fallen way behind with it. Sentence cards do take more energy and motivation to do. I don't know if I'll try to do them again or maybe I'd rather spend my time on LingQ or Netflix (Netflix is a lot of passive studying for me as I'm just reading the English and then the Chinese as it pops up assuming I have time to read both and I often don't). I'm also playing with the idea of making a sentence deck with Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone has great sentences, good pictures, but it's kind of boring as it's all isolated sentences and there's no story or characters at all. But the pronunciation is first rate and I could totally make a listening deck form it too and it would be a good difficulty I think without being too hard like many listening sentence decks can be for beginners. I'm also thinking about making a Netflix deck from the dramas. If I put a screenshot on side 1 with a picture, the Chinese with pinyin and then side 2 had the English I think that could work. The Chinese would of course be above my level which is a concern but the picture, audio, and hanzi would be a lot of clues to figure stuff out.
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Fri Sep 18, 2020 6:01 am

This week's Chinese class was ok. We spent the first hour going over the homework. We had to present / do a presentation. I was like Woah woah woah! And said that pretty much to the teacher and whole class on my mic. The teacher isn't a native English speaker so I think she doesn't understand the dread and horror that is associated with the word presentation for students. It turns out she just meant we had to read our homework answers out loud to everyone. Not a big deal at all if you did the assignment. I work slowly and it took me 30 minutes tops to do the homework (two weeks worth). I think it took me less time. And I went slow. I was surprised how many students goofed it or did part and they seemed to have legitimately forgotten to do parts like just writing their answers in hanzi but no pinyin.. they couldn't read what they wrote basically. Some students put a lot of effort into it also. I got to partner with a young mom who's pregnant and plans to send her baby to an Chinese immersion daycare / preschool. I think she's one of the better students. I don't get the impression that she's studied a foreign language at length before from her attitude but she does really well and in particular I'm jealous of her pronunciation. I might be wrong but she seems able to do tones really well already. Some people have a good ear and can also hear their own voice I think so they can match the pitch of their voice to what they're listening to. My mom and sister both seem able to do that and my mom was a bit disgusted with me that I absolutely couldn't. I didn't realize that I couldn't but recording myself singing along to Queen songs I think she was right in her assessment and this carries over to foreign language tones and accents. I have studied the theory behind pronunciation of pinyin more than my partner though so I was able to give her some tips but I was sure to explain that I know theory but do not imitate my pronunciation as I can at least hear the pitch of my voice well enough to know it's off. But ignore pitch, just basic reading pinyin like the difference between "q" and "ch" or "sh" and "x" etc., I at least have looked over a few resources on that so I have the basic ideas down. The teacher's (book's) explanation was good for some of the combinations but lacking for others and I think the students are a bit confused. As is typically the case they don't seem to have spent a bit of extra time researching other resources on Google. I've noticed that with classes. A lot of students rely too much on just one resource: the class textbook and the teacher. They're great but you totally need to be alert to anything that seems out of synch that you don't understand and if you're not comfortable or getting it even after asking the teacher just go look online.

The class gave me a bit of motivation to study Chinese more as expected and I got caught up on my SpoonFed Anki deck. I switched it up so it's reading the audio to me and has a picture on side 1 but no text. Before I was making it as easy as possible to keep myself motivated and focused and well just doing the cards. But I think this way makes me hone in more on the pronunciation and tones and also learn the vocabulary better. But particularly the tones. I was jealous of my partner a bit I think in that her pronunciation was clearly better than mine.

For Korean I'm starting a new Anki deck. It's a sentence deck. I think a big reason I burned out on previous sentence decks is that I wasn't doing i+1 cards. I'm not good at mining i+1 cards. Which is why I was trying to mine sentences from the website howtostudykorean because I figured he would present example sentences more or less in an i+1 fashion. Sometimes yes and sometimes no. And in my sentence deck of course I wanted to add cards for words he didn't give sentences for and those sentences were pretty challenging. So as a solution I thought why not just pick one target word in the sentence and then on side 1 list the words and definitions of any words I don't or might not know if they're a little shaky. That's not quite i+1 but it should help. So I am doing that. But doing the SpoonFed deck I want to also try audio cards out. I don't know if it will work since it would be text to speech. Audio cards might need native audio to be understandable enough that you don't need any text. And putting the definitions for the unknown words on side 1 too. I hope it words if not I'll just go with the korean sentences and audio plus extra definitions on side 1.

I saw a youtube video reviewing an advanced reading comprehension textbook for korean learners: https://youtu.be/BN3Soe7JsOQ. I found it inspiring and I got to thinking that I should be reading stuff like that. Forget LingQ. And for me it's not advanced but beginner / early intermediate level. The lowest reading level hehe. I already have something that looks good. I think it's called Essential Korean Reader. I bought it a while back and fought my way through the first chapter / unit but then stopped as it was boring and hard. Well it is a little boring but it's much better than just isolated sentences on Anki. And my Korean is a bit better since last time so reading it is easier. And there's a vocab list for each reading passage that's quite extensive and grammar notes. I like that this isn't a fake dialogue like you see in most classroom textbooks. They try to teach a bit of culture in each unit I think. The first unit they talked about how Koreans often bow to each other as a greeting and greetings in general in Korea. The next chapter which I just read for the first time tonight was about food stands and the food you can get there. Most people studying languages are really just foodies looking for excuses to try lots of new foods and they end up learning all the food vocabulary and little else. This isn't me but reading this sure made me hungry. I'll try to remember the food names but somehow my brain tends to tune food names out.

That's it. I'm continuing on with two new languages for now.
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golyplot
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1726
Joined: Mon Jan 16, 2017 9:41 pm
Languages: Am. English (N), German, French, ASL (abandoned), Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Japanese (N2)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=12230
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Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby golyplot » Fri Sep 18, 2020 5:14 pm

Thanks for the log! I'm not studying Chinese or Korean right now, but it's still really interesting to see different peoples experiences and learn what it's like to take a language class over Zoom. It never even occurred to me that you can pretty much sign up for community college classes anywhere in the country now.
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:28 am

This week felt like I was all about doing the minimum and not much else. I've changed up Chinese Spoonfed again. It's currently got pinyin and audio on side one then everything else on side 2. I like it this way. Having hanzi on side one, my visual memory since I'm used to Chinese characters is a little too strong I think. But just audio is unfortunately just too hard for me at least with this deck. It introduces new grammar and vocabulary gradually but it's not professionally or even amateurly constructed. I think it's just an algorithm like Morphman maybe. Anki also bugged out and wasn't introducing the cards in sequential order for a bit and I got some pretty hard sentences. I added a hint field where I'm putting some vocabulary definitions to show on side 1 to make sure it's i+1 as I previously stated. I've only just started doing this but it seems like it will do a good job of keeping sentence flash cards from getting too hard.

I did the completely wrong assignment for last week's class. That is, I did the workbook exercises but we were supposed to use the textbook. I can only assume that this was said in class because on the assignment page online she didn't specify any book at all just put chapter/sub sections to do. Since I was doing it last minute I didn't have the luxury of confirming with her what I'm supposed to do. I literally finished at 7:10 PM as class was starting and barely submitted it in time. She was really nice though. In fact she complimented me because unlike the textbook, the exercises I did had hanzi without any pinyin and I had to read them etc which would normally be challenging for beginner students. It was stupid easy for me though as I only had to understand it not read it out loud with tones. So I was happy that she was impressed.

I started a language notebook for Chinese. Or rather I dusted off the old one I started making in August and added a lot more to it. I added a lot of vocabulary with hanzi on the left, pinyin in the middle, and english on the right. I also made some sentences with hanzi/pinyin on one page and the English on the opposite page. This seems like a good way to study and I was thinking it might be a nice break from SRS but I'm changing my mind again. It's kind of nice in that you can do a super quick review just scanning over said vocabulary without quizing yourself or you can choose to quiz yourself. But I'm really curious to see how my pseudo i+1 sentence method works. I'd like to find a good resource for grabbing example sentences for Chinese vocabulary words and just focus on the HSK 1-4 vocab. I'm not sure what vocabulary Spoonfed teaches you and in what order if it's similar to HSK or what. HSK seems like it would be very close to a frequency list so pretty ideal.

And I'm finally reading graded Chinese readers on Pleco. It doesn't have pinyin but it has an interesting feature where it reads the text to you word by word showing the dictionary definitions as it goes. You can just manually tap for it to go to the next word or let it automatically read it. This seems great for a beginner like me. I wonder how awesome my Chinese would be if I were to just read with it for say 2 hours a day. I don't think I have the time and discipline to do that unfortunately right now though but maybe I can work up to it.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:30 am

golyplot wrote:Thanks for the log! I'm not studying Chinese or Korean right now, but it's still really interesting to see different peoples experiences and learn what it's like to take a language class over Zoom. It never even occurred to me that you can pretty much sign up for community college classes anywhere in the country now.


Yeah although you might want to sign up for classes in your state to get in state tuition. I like classes so much more than one on one lessons for learning grammar etc. Obviously conversation is a different thing. You would be way better served with an iTalki lesson there.
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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
x 498

Re: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Fri Oct 02, 2020 3:48 am

I finally finished my first book in Korean: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I know it was a long time coming. I'm not even sure if it took one or two years to read it it's been so long I'd have to check old posts/blog entries. I basically read this using LingQ and looking up most of the words I didn't know. Honestly, even knowing the story in advance, it was pretty rough as my grammar is A1/A2. I've been focusing mostly on Chinese lately in part because I'm taking the class and I hadn't even looked at Korean for over a month before I decided to not focus exclusively on Chinese and get this knocked out. I think I was in a good mood the other night when I got through most of the end of the book and more than before it felt like I was connecting with the text. I haven't felt that with Korean yet and this disconnect with text was a huge obstacle for me with Japanese. I'm hoping this feeling of being connected with the text continues but it was only so-so tonight (although I had some things on my mind from work distracting me).

I'm doing a lot of reflecting on how I study languages and I think I would much rather use the approach I took for German and little or no SRS. Obviously that's not how I studied Japanese and breaking the SRS habit is hard once it's engrained I think. Reading only works if I actually do it a lot. With Anki I'm pretty good about getting a good hour in per day at least. I don't currently have a reading habit developed. Certainly reading Harry Potter took forever. Let's see if I can be consistent about reading every day and if so then maybe just putting Anki on hold completely until I later feel like I've hit a wall reading and need to go back to it which shouldn't happen until I'm pretty darn good I would think. I know as I was reading Harry Potter I was getting frustrated with how I kept looking up the same words over and over and therefore thought that flash cards would help with that. They probably would but it's so time consuming I think if I just keep reading it will solve itself anyway and my Korean/Chinese "brain" will have developed that much further too as a result. So this is my promise to myself to read read read. I might actually renew my LingQ subscription although I'll be looking for alternatives. There are so many apps out there to teach you a language but LingQ and ReadLang are the only major tools for actually reading. There's the option of using a pop up dictionary plugin but I'd much rather read on a tablet or my phone than my computer if at all possible. Although my goal is to not SRS anything it would be nice to have a list of words I lookup to just read over real quick now and then. LingQ might have something for that. Although with the way it tracks words this would probably drive me crazy with Korean but since Chinese has no conjugations LingQ might be ok for this.
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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: Was learning Korean, now I'm doing Mandarin. The hard way of course.

Postby kraemder » Sun Oct 04, 2020 8:10 pm

My last update was just a few days ago I think and not a lot has changed but I really enjoying LingQ quite a bit. One small setting I changed is to have it automatically read the word to me when I tap a word. I had this turned off because the computer voice isn't the greatest and I thought it was distracting but now I've changed my mind. When I'm reading to myself the words I know or think I know I can hear in my head and the flow continues. When I hit a word I don't know this flow obviously can stop. Depending on how many unknown words I'm encountering. Having the computer just say it out loud to me seems to help keep my brain engaged instead of tuning out I think. And I think the chance of me retaining the word goes up just slightly too. When I did extensive reading previously, it amazed me how few words I seemed to remember afterwards. I would write down lists of words in notebooks. Initially I tried studying them, later I just used them because words do repeat and glancing at my notebook was faster than flipping through a paper dictionary. But the thing is that these words that I wrote down, and there were a lot, typically didn't stick. I guess the words I wasn't looking up must have stuck and very slowly the known words accumulated to 10k+. And yet if I were to go back to those old lists I think I would still not know many of the words. At least out of context (these are word lists without sentences). If I read German and see a word in context I'll understand it much easier.

So bringing that back to Korean and LingQ. As I read through Harry Potter there are a lot of words that just aren't going to stick for me even if they repeat. But that's ok. That's what happened with German and I know my German vocabulary reached a really high level. As an SRS junkie you kind of get a tool to force stuff into your brain and get too reliant on that I think. Certainly if you need to be conversational in the shortest amount of time and will need to use certain words then SRS/flashcards is probably going to save your butt. But otherwise, over the long term, just reading seems like the better choice to me. You just need to get into a good reading flow which is terribly difficult for Asian languages but LingQ, in all it's ugliness, seems to make this possible. When I was in Japan and trying to get my Japanese to the next level I was desperate for interesting material with furigana and really the only thing I could find was manga but that isn't going to get you to the next level. It's good but lacks the deep immersion of a real book. Encountering kanji whose pronunciation didn't come to mind quickly even if I knew them was just a real annoying pain in the butt. On LingQ you can add furigana to all the texts and it's a proper e-reader where it saves your place and I'm finding that the built in crowd sourced dictionary is generally ok the more comfortable you get with a language.

Anyway, I'm really getting into LingQ now thinking of using it for Japanese even. I can read books on my kindle and it's much better than it used to be but if there were furigana for all the kanji then that would increase my reading speed and enjoyment even more. Of course, I'm focusing on Korean and Chinese at the moment and not Japanese. I'm totally spreading myself thin here. I'm doing so much Korean at the moment that I also signed up for another iTalki lesson with my old Korean tutor. She had to cancel a couple of times in a row and so I lost interest but I have a package with her that might be running out soon so it's good timing that I am regaining my interest in Korean I think. I'm reading Harry Potter book 2 Chamber of Secrets and I'm on chapter 3 already (as LingQ splits them up) so it's going pretty quickly compared to the first book.

I could go back and reread chapters or pages as I'm going to maybe retain vocabulary better. I didn't do this much with German though. I was too interested in reading what happened next and I think that's a good thing. I have reread a couple of pages and it is a much different experience as I can just reread the page mostly without having to lookup any words. And yet if some of that unknown vocabulary repeats itself on the next page I usually have to look it up again. Which is frustrating but just the nature of beast I guess. I don't plan on rereading too much just a page every now and then I think.
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