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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More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

Postby kraemder » Sat Nov 02, 2019 8:08 am

I decided to make a separate log from my Japanese log. I think I want to log a lot more about Korean since it’s a new language to me and it needs the extra attention. I’m not currently studying Japanese but I’m using it regularly instead I would say.. reading books (rarely looking up words and never saving words to study later), watching anime, listening to NHK in the morning on my way to work, and chatting with people online both texting and sometimes video or voice.

But I’m studying Korean. Because I can’t use it yet :x . By studying I mean I’m using flashcards and to have grammar or textbooks that need reviewing. I’ve recently signed up with a tutor on italki and I’m trying another tomorrow morning. The one I have is ok but I wanted to try someone who speaks Japanese too. It seems there’s quite a few who do. I don’t know how much difference it will make. My tutor I do have wants to make me talk and I’m game but I don’t know what she’s going to throw at me until she does because I don’t have the book. She’s using talk to me in Korean lessons and I think she has the book they sell. I might go to the website to see how to get a copy. I don’t want a paper copy though. I find paper is cumbersome and well costs more to ship from Korea.

About three weeks ago I decided to get back into Korean and settled on one of the decks in flash cards deluxe I had from before. I made several decks. Some in Anki and some in flash cards deluxe. It has about 850 active cards. It’s a reading deck where on side one I see a sentence (usually) and it reads the text to me using the new google tts voices. They sound nice I think. And side two has English. It doesn’t do a word by word translation but an English sentence that is a translation of the Korean. Most of the sentences are taken from HowtoStudyKorean dot com. I love that site. There’s a few weird things about the site like the order they present grammar but there is logic to it even if it’s not how I’d do it but more importantly there are tons and tons and tons of example sentences with English translations and it’s wonderful for copy and pasting into a flash card app.

My one problem with my study routine is that it doesn’t like up with my tutor’s teaching. I’m able to follow and understand everything ok as well it’s mostly actually review but because I didn’t prepare in advance I’m just fighting to understand and not able to produce much of anything. I think as a tutor that’s just not something she knows how to deal with so I need to get the book and well prepare for those lessons ahead of time and not just study random Korean and then go do a lesson with her. At least I think I’m getting better.

I keep wondering if I have the desire to learn Korean to make it happen. I totally wanted to learn Japanese and that’s how I was able to persevere year after year without even seeing my improvement and attempting to do hard and challenging activities that just hurt my brain. You can say well what was your reason for studying Japanese? I say anime. And then everyone thinks that’s it?? How does that get you to waste years of your life slaving away at this language until you get well literate and fluent (if sounding like a foreigner still). And I’ve come to realize that your reason for studying a language is pretty meaningless. I mean it’s still a conversation starter for when you talk to foreigners or other students but.. yeah.. anime. I like KPOP and kdrama so that’s the same right? I should be able to learn Korean now. No. I need an irrational obsession with the language driving me on. Irrational being key I think because when you look at how difficult it is for an English speaker to learn an Asian language as an adult no rational person is really going to persevere. They’ll stop around the polite greetings and random phrases to spice up their English when they’re speaking to Koreans who study or speak English.

So I need to find an irrational motivation to push me forward. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just proceed forward without any craziness, slowly and steadily, and still reach the goal?
Last edited by kraemder on Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:31 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Sat Nov 02, 2019 6:22 pm

I had my first session with a new italki tutor. I wanted to try someone who spoke Japanese and she speaks Japanese very well. I didn't want to wait very long for the lesson so I ended up taking a lesson early in the morning on a Saturday :shock: and I'm pretty tired right now as a result and not really able to focus on studying... We spent most of the time talking in Japanese about languages and Korean. She actually kept talking to me for a half an hour after the lesson time ended. I enjoyed it and learned a bit about Korean and she showed me how to make relative clauses or relative pronoun clauses. It seems it's just the verb stem plus 'n' to connect it as if it were an adjective and the word order is otherwise just like Japanese. As I think I mentioned I'm using www.howtostudykorean.com to make most of my flashcards and the sentences for all of the vocabulary from there. It's a little slow going because the site has tons and tons of sentences in each lesson. And he doesn't cover relative clauses until he's kind of forced to I think. I get the impression that he thinks it will be so difficult that it will scare people away from Korean. Anyway. The practice sentences I'm using from his site don't include any relative clauses so far and I'm on lesson 8 or so. I have well over 1000 flashcards.

I have another lesson Sunday evening with my original tutor and I'd like to prepare for this lesson in advance so I'm going to see about getting ahold of the Talk to Me in Korean books. I believe only the paper copy was available on the website but I'm going to look some more and on Google. I might actually order a paper copy if I have to.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Mon Nov 04, 2019 5:11 am

ロータス wrote:
kraemder wrote:
I have another lesson Sunday evening with my original tutor and I'd like to prepare for this lesson in advance so I'm going to see about getting ahold of the Talk to Me in Korean books. I believe only the paper copy was available on the website but I'm going to look some more and on Google. I might actually order a paper copy if I have to.


If all you care about is the grammar, you can use their free pdf lessons that go from level 1 to 9. There should still be a pdf file that combined all the lessons together uploaded somewhere.


She actually just sends me the PDF files if I ask lol. I should have asked before.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Mon Nov 04, 2019 5:41 am

I had another lesson with my original tutor tonight. It went pretty well. I glanced at the PDF files she sent in advance but as is usually the case, I spent my time studying what I wanted to study instead. I would like to add some of the vocabulary we reviewed to my SRS deck though. I'm currently not using Anki but instead using Flash Cards Deluxe. It has a setting that I have used a bit in the past not too much. Namely to limit the cards that you study by interval. I've got a Korean Sentence deck mostly mined from well not really mined but copied from the examples on howtostudykorean.com. A few from Naver. This deck is set to show cards with intervals less than 2 months which is the maximum option he gives. I don't know why it's not just user defined but he gives you several choices like 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, and 60 days. These are pretty good options but people like me who spend too much time on SRS would like to pick the interval I think. Anyway, I set the sentence deck to show cards with an interval < than 60 days. I don't really want to review cards with huge intervals anyway. I should know it by then I think and if not I don't know that I care. Plus it seems so nice to have a goal of -finishing- SRS instead of it being a hell that never ends.

I'm very happy with the sentence deck. I read around 100 sentences in Korean every day and I am positive this is slowly building up my Korean. I also tend to get most of the cards right which is super nice. A few sentences are way above my ability but since I've seen the card a few times I know there's a card in the deck that means: "The trash from the town flowed down the river and piled up on the river bank." or something. Most sentences are -not- that hard but a few long ones have snuck in but it's ok.

What I also tried doing a couple days ago, and this was to try to make myself more fluent when speaking to my tutor on skype, is a production deck. If you read about language learning and vocabulary you'll undoubtable find someone writing about research showing that active recall boosts memory far better than passively recalling something does. And if you ever crammed for a test I'm sure you also found that cramming to actively recall information got you a better grade on the test even if it were just multiple choice. But in my many years of experience studying languages and using SRS I found that active recall cards are just too hard on your brain as you increase the interval. At least for me. I know I feel like my memory is crap but I think everyone's memory is crap when it comes to forcing large amounts of foreign vocabulary into your long term memory. While knowing that active recall cards haven't ever worked for me in the past except for cramming for tests, I still experiment with them every now and then. I'm doing that now. I just set up a deck that has a picture on side one (Flash Cards Deluxe makes this easy to add) and the English translation. Side two of course has Korean and native audio courtesy of the howtostudykorean website. A couple words use a nice text to speech engine too.

So what I'm doing on that deck is set it so it displays cards with intervals < than 7 days. I am concerned that this interval may be too big. For words that I'm really just reviewing but already have studied in the past getting them above a 7 day interval is probably going to be very easy but actual brand new vocabulary.. not so much. But the app has a feature to postpone or bury a card for set period and so I can do that to any leeches if I so see fit. My experience in the past is that with production cards there are a lot of of leeches if you increase even when the interval is just a day when studying brand new vocabulary. You can over do it really easily.

But I need to get some kind of an active vocabulary going to just talk to my tutor even so I am going to make this work somehow or other.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Tue Nov 05, 2019 4:31 am

A quick update. I already changed the production deck to only show cards with an interval of 3 days or less. A few cards are giving me trouble and I think an interval of 3 days is plenty :D
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Fri Nov 08, 2019 4:42 am

I had another lesson with my tutor. She was doing back to back to back lessons it seemed. You could tell she was a bit tired. I felt bad because I’m so terrible at just making sentences in Korean for her. I’m totally ok with the word order and particles etc thanks to Japanese but I can’t think of words. Ah it stinks.
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Christi
Orange Belt
Posts: 245
Joined: Thu Jan 18, 2018 7:56 pm
Languages: Dutch (N), English (C1), German (B1), Korean (high A2-low B1?)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=7574
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby Christi » Fri Nov 08, 2019 5:21 am

Which tutors do you have?
I tried a few before but they were really unstructured, so I figured I shouldn't continue with them. But it's really neat that yours send you a pdf beforehand!
How do you plan your lesson? Do you choose a grammar pattern or topic to focus on? And what do you do during the lessons?

I'm trying to get inspirations, in case I will give tutoring a shot again after the holidays.
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2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
Pages read at end of 2020: 220 / 1500

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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Fri Nov 08, 2019 6:38 am

Christi wrote:Which tutors do you have?
I tried a few before but they were really unstructured, so I figured I shouldn't continue with them. But it's really neat that yours send you a pdf beforehand!
How do you plan your lesson? Do you choose a grammar pattern or topic to focus on? And what do you do during the lessons?

I'm trying to get inspirations, in case I will give tutoring a shot again after the holidays.



I don’t feel like I’m getting as much out of the lessons as I could. I wouldn’t say I’ve prepared yet rather just glanced at material in advance. I am so caught up in my SRS routine that adding material from the class is kind of difficult since I have so many cards already and I rather like the cards. She’s very open minded but she has a couple text books I think from TTMIK. Some of the lesson material might be her own because it seems a little unpolished but still good enough. I would say using a textbook of any kind is going to have to give your lessons some structure. I don’t know if her teaching method is ideal for me but I’m happy enough so far. I might give some more direction later but right now I’m just letting her decide what we do next and how we practice. When she teaches new vocabulary she doesn’t really quiz me on it but instead she explains it and gets me to say it with her and then we move on and she tries to get me to say stuff in sentences but if it’s my first time seeing a word then our quick run down together wasn’t enough for me to remember it. Her name is Soo Lee.
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Thu Nov 28, 2019 9:59 pm

I posted another Korean vLog on YouTube. I wonder if I am the least popular YouTube vlogger ever. My last video only got 1 view and I wonder if that was me... I kind of like making the videos so I'll keep doing it but literally nobody is watching them. Almost anyway.

If you're bored https://youtu.be/hMj8KGo2g1s

I'm progressing with the SRS. I have two decks. I have a sentence deck mostly from howtostudykorean.com and then a vocabulary production deck. The production deck 'graduates' cards when the interval reaches 3 days so they disappear. I've always wanted to use production flashcards in my studies but there were so many leeches that I never made it work. This 3 day maximum interval thing seems to be working.

And the big news for me is that I got Harry Potter in Korean. I really want to start reading in Korean and so this has me excited. I have used Harry Potter for studying foreign languages to death but well I guess that can't be helped. If I had access to other ebooks in Korean translated from English then I'd probably go with them. I'm just happy to have this resource though. It cost $63.04 including tax for all of the books. I got the set just for the heck of it. I think you save a little money but I honestly didn't even check. I still have a membership with LingQ and I uploaded book 1 into their app/site and I'm reading it with their software. It's pretty darn good software for reading a foreign language when you need to look up words constantly. It uses a crowd sourced dictionary instead of a real dictionary which puts me off a bit but the crowd sourced dictionary seems adequate to get by. It's very much less than ideal. The software tries to enable you to look up words on free (real) dictionary websites too but that's a few more steps to look at the word which really slows you down. It seems like the best option for now. As far as I know there's no Korean dictionary for kindle so using a Kindle isn't an option either. I would prefer not to use Kindle until my Korean got better though since selecting words is a little awkward and slow in my experience. That's with Japanese though which has no spaces between words so maybe Korean would be better. If they had a dictionary anyway.

I'm absolutely not saving any words from Harry Potter into my SRS stuff. I'm focusing the SRS on textbook type material for now as I lack a lot of basics in the language and that's much more important I think. I wouldn't be against putting a little bit of material in there, particularly the sentence deck, but not from Harry Potter. Maybe some good Kpop songs. I love Kpop videos. They're a big part of my workout routine at the gym. I currently go to the gym about 3-4 times a week and I'm trying to up that to 5-6 times a week. (nothing too awesome just 45-60 minutes on the elliptical machine usually)
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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: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Sat Dec 07, 2019 5:39 pm

I watch a lot YouTube videos on language learning and I like Steve Kaufmann’s videos although they get repetitive sometimes. But I liked this interview he did. And he had a good quote regarding grammar in a foreign language:

“The advantage of focusing on comprehension is that not being able to nail the case endings (difficult grammar points) does not hurt your comprehension... you can still figure out what’s going on... but when you go to speak of course now there’s more of a requirement to get the cases right, not because the other person won’t understand you, but it’s like your shirt tail is hanging out, you’re exposing your weaknesses and errors.”

https://youtu.be/XHJBiA3wHpM

Speaking a foreign language when you’re still learning and getting comfortable can feel like you’re taking a test or giving a presentation. How well did you prepare?
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