More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

[kraemder]

Mandarin going to tempt you away from Korean lol. Especially since you already now JP. Can easily hit the ground running bc of the easy beginner grammar and familiar hanzi. Have fun

Yeah the hanzi don’t phase me in the least. When I was only a few years into my Japanese studies and still relied a bit on RTK to help me with Kanji, I tried learning hanzi just for a short time. It was damn hard and annoying. But now after almost 9 years of Japanese my brain is just used to the way kanji are formed I think. And if they change it a little to “simplify” it then that’s ok. Interesting how the brain adapts.

[kraemder]

Have a look at the mimic method they have a free intro on Chinese which will include tones. Unfortunately I never remember what is mandarin and the other one, but maybe it's the one you're studying. If you do end up downloading that intro let me know what you think. I was thinking of using it at some point just to practice paying attention to sounds I don't have in the languages I know well.

That looks interesting but the course costs $200.

[gsbod]

That's funny, I've also been having a little dabble in Mandarin lately. I've got a free account with Chinesepod and for now that's enough for me. I'm focusing almost exclusively on pronunciation, because I have the feeling it's going to be the most challenging-yet-important bit. I consider it a bit like with German where you have to do so much leg work up front to be able to say anything grammatically correct (and if you mangle the grammar enough, people won't understand you...) - except with Mandarin the legwork is to be able to pronounce anything correctly enough to be understood. I'm also looking forward to whatever discount I may get from having learned Japanese (assuming I stick with Mandarin long enough for it to make a difference...)

[AnneL]

Have a look at the mimic method they have a free intro on Chinese which will include tones. Unfortunately I never remember what is mandarin and the other one, but maybe it's the one you're studying. If you do end up downloading that intro let me know what you think. I was thinking of using it at some point just to practice paying attention to sounds I don't have in the languages I know well.

That looks interesting but the course costs $200.

*free intro* on Chinese I said

[kraemder]

Well due to current events right now I have more time to study. I got distracted a bit by Chinese but I'm back to going 100% on Korean. I booted up World of Warcraft Classic for the first time in a while. It has full Korean localization including Korean voice actors (granted not a whole lot speaking, just greetings from NPC's but it's still fun). Especially with Japanese, I got really hung up on pop up dictionaries since I had to draw kanji into my phone not knowing or even being able to guess the readings as a beginner. But with Korean that's not an issue at all. I'm just going through the game looking up lots and lots of words on my dictionary app on my phone. I'm using YBM EKE on my phone. I tried a few others and this one seems the best although not as nice as Midori for Japanese. The dictionary itself is wonderful. Good definitions and example sentences. But the flash card option is a bit limited (at least it exists) and you cannot export anything. Anyway, it feels like when I studied German. The good old days. Go read something, anything, and then write down a list of vocabulary words. Back then I started by trying to make flash cards (paper ones) but I was writing down so many words that it actually got expensive. At least for a college student budget it was expensive. And frankly studying flash cards was pretty ineffective anyway. I ended up just writing down lists of words in a notebook and this was much better because I could use that as a quick reference if I had looked something up recently and yet already forgotten it. And you can read it over and even study off the list too but mostly I just read it over and not too much at that. I found that drilling vocabulary wasn't worth it as my brain would arbitrarily forget stuff against my will based on whatever criteria it used.. probably a combination of perceived usefulness, similarity to known words, and repetition. Anyway, so I'm doing that now with World of Warcraft. And also the k-drama Goblin on Viki (using the learn mode). The app lets me organize several lists (some apps just have a favorites and that's it... ) and I'm going pretty basic with my word lists. I'm on list one and it's named 1-100 (I'm up to 70 so far). As you can guess the next list will be 101-200.

The built in flash card system on this app has almost no configurable options. At least that I can find (the instructions are all in Korean and I'm not so ambitious to try reading them). The default option is to show the hangul and hanja on side 1 and then everything on side 2. This isn't the end of the world but ideally I'd rather not see the hanja on side 1. It's so close to the Japanese that it's like telling me the answer on side 1. Although I'm saving basically every word I'm looking up and wouldn't want to SRS this vocabulary, it would be nice to quiz myself a bit more. I expect I won't review 1-100 too much after I start a new list 101-200. Basically, it will need to repeat in real life (well in World of Warcraft) or forget about it.

I also signed up for a few more tutor lessons on italki. It's probably no surprise but my Korean class at the community college is up in hiatus right now. We're technically on spring break but the whole university is officially closed after it was discovered someone with the virus was on campus. Allegedly we'll be moving to online lessons and I'm not sure how that will work considering our teacher was unable to make the classroom computer and projector work in class. Thank goodness classrooms still have white boards.

So back to the italki tutors. I had a tutor several months ago whom I did several lessons with because she is friendly, seems serious about teaching, and surprisingly cheap. But I never really tried other teachers out so I'm doing that now. I upped my price range to $20 per lesson and that opened up a lot more teachers. One tutor spoke English at a C1 level and I really liked talking to her. She also speaks Japanese very well and we spoke a combination of three languages.. English, Korean, and Japanese. I enjoyed the lesson a lot and that might be because there was less Korean. My old tutor I think speaks English at a B1 level maybe. Definitely good enough that we can communicate but I can't just throw in jokes and expect her to get them. She did speak English but more Korean I think because she's more comfortable in Korean. I also took a lesson from a tutor who's living in Spain. I chose her because she speaks Japanese very well. She speaks some English too but not really conversational. It was only a 30 minute lesson and I liked it a lot too. She understood all of my Japanese so communicating was easy. It turns out she's married to a Spanish guy whom she met while she was studying abroad in Japan. Their common language at home is Japanese. Her Spanish sucks, his Korean sucks (I don't know if he's even tried learning), and her English is not very good either. So Japanese it is. In Spain. I thought that was weird. She was super nice and I had a textbook for Japanese learners (I assume most of her students of Japanese) and I liked that. Today I have a lesson with a guy who according to his profile doesn't really speak English. He says he uses Korean to teach Korean in part because he can't use other languages to do so. I'd looked for someone like that before but didn't find anyone. Well, I did find one lady in her 50's but in her profile she says that she is not good at teaching beginners just people who are conversational in Korean (I can see where she's coming from). I wonder how this lesson will go with someone speaking all (or mostly) Korean to me. It's for 8:00 P.M. tonight. I think I may have Papago up to help me say a few things but obviously that's slow and I'd rather use hand gestures I think instead if they would work.

And as I was writing this entry I got a message from work. They expect to have work from home up and running in 24-36 hours. I'm happy about that although a couple more days to study Korean would have been good too.

[kraemder]

Have a look at the mimic method they have a free intro on Chinese which will include tones. Unfortunately I never remember what is mandarin and the other one, but maybe it's the one you're studying. If you do end up downloading that intro let me know what you think. I was thinking of using it at some point just to practice paying attention to sounds I don't have in the languages I know well.

That looks interesting but the course costs $200.

*free intro* on Chinese I said

I didn't see that but I could have looked harder. I have a tendency to impulse buy language products so I sort of didn't want to end up doing that here.

[kraemder]

Well the tutoring session with the Korean teacher who says he uses Korean to teach Korean failed to live up to expectations. He used English to teach Korean but just very basic English and a lot of Papago. He didn't even say stuff in Korean first and then repeat it in English. My biggest complaint with getting tutors to help with a target language is that they don't use their own language to teach you which is what you need the most. I can use Papago or any other dictionary and textbooks with professional English translations and explanations (and I will do that), but I need someone to engage me Korean to make it more alive in my head for me. I get that it's annoying and using a language that I'm stronger in is more efficient but that's not what I'm paying for and that's not the point.

The way they do feedback on iTalki, I'm afraid of rating a teacher poorly. I gave him 4 out of 5 stars. But if he's just going to use English to teach me I might as well use a teacher who's English is high level. But really, I don't want that at all. Really, I would rather have a lesson for an hour in Korean, record it, and not understand anything at all but have good material to go back and review later. I don't think I would fail to understand anything all however. I know about 700 to 1000 words and sure that's not enough for normal conversation but it should be good enough for this with the occasional English translation or so. People studying English don't have this issue. English speakers are happy to speak English to their students. Why is the reverse so difficult?

[kraemder]

Korean in Korean
https://www.mastertopik.com/index.asp
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... HbWbXaUmBK (videos with green background)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNjCmU ... kGkkHt3wWQ
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... GvHT0FwhlB

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE6A9I ... t5hB4PBTzQ
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... i_cKmlCY4r
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVaZ5T-1c1Y

I'm looking at the first video link and I'm very impressed. I haven't met a teacher on iTalki who can speak like that. Of course it may be scripted. I'm trying to figure out how their system works.

Class duration/Number of lectures
60 days / 23 lessons

Does this mean I have to finish all the lessons in 60 days or pay again? Anyway, I'll sleep on it at least and look at the other links. Thanks so much!

[kraemder]

I had two more iTalki lessons today. Both went better than the last one - I wonder if the previous tutor would do a lot better with some feedback on how I want him to teach but I'm not sure. Anyway, I had a 1 PM lesson for just $10.00. It turns out she's in the US staying with her husband who is studying at a University (maybe for a graduate degree I forget) and she's just doing volunteer work and teaching Korean online when she gets lessons but it seems the amount of lessons isn't enough to become a full time deal. Which means she isn't burning herself out teaching like I was in Japan. Anyway, I really enjoyed the lesson. She speaks a very high level of English I would say but she didn't know the word Goblin. So I taught her that. And we spoke a lot more Korean than I did yesterday. It was a lot like a language exchange which I have pretty often in Japanese on apps but she was all focused on me. I would have liked her to speak even less English maybe but I can't complain she definitely went out of her way to speak lots and lots of Korean to me and it was super helpful. Then in the evening I had a lesson with my previous tutor I had stuck with back in the fall and have had several lessons with already. She was the same as always and I really enjoyed that lesson too. She mixes English and Korean as we go saying most things in both English and Korean so I definitely feel like I get a lot of Korean practice and she does practice role plays with me etc. too. It's quite nice. But she doesn't explain things to me in Korean like the teacher in the videos above. I don't know if she does that for more advanced students or not. Either way it was a good lesson.

I went out and bought a note three subject spiral notebook from Walgreens after the lesson. Writing about how I used to study German back in the day got me nostalgic I think and I am going to give that a go. Just a notebook with Korean on the left and English or hanja or even Japanese on the right. The third subject I'm putting example sentences that could be taken from anywhere. I wrote a few phrases from Goblin tonight and then a couple example grammar sentences. Five sentences total I think. I filled up a whole page of vocabulary from my dictionary list on my phone. I know I did this method sort of already but it was using really small notebooks. Anyway, at that time I decided I wanted to go back to Anki instead of just doing lists in a notebook but here I am trying this again. I know Anki has some definite pros - the biggest one being the ability to add native audio to cards. But the more I watch k-drama or YouTube the less important getting listening practice from Anki will be.

Also, I found out that my pronunciation of 취미 (hobby) isn't very good. Both of my tutors whom I said it to failed to understand me until I used English. After they knew what I meant if I said it again they got it but clearly that isn't how I want my conversations to go in real life. It's the first vowel combination I think that is making it hard to understand. I group it with 최 in my head and say them the same. I don't think I can hear a difference between these two spellings and thought that the context would be good enough but it doesn't seem to be working out that way. And this is a pretty common word to use when you're meeting foreigners from another country. I'll definitely work on it.

[AnneL]

Korean in Korean
https://www.mastertopik.com/index.asp

I've got to say I'm not really impressed with MasterTopik. Like you I'd seen that the videos after the beginner level, were in Korean only. The videos you can see for free seem great, you think you're going to learn new stuff, but actually, for most of the expressions and words that they use, that I do not already know, in the other paid for videos, the teacher just waits a second, does an mmm... sound, like we know what the word means, and then just goes on! Things are not explained properly, as if the teacher was unable to realise that the expression or word needed explanation.

So I know, it seems exciting, you're thinking, awesome, that's a full list of stuff organised for me, but in the end you will have to spend time online to research on the explanations that are missing in the class for you to actually understand the expression you are learning.

Plus you *have* to use Internet Explorer on Windows to just about get a 100% read on the video the first time round (it's needed to get the additional 6 months) because the player doesn't work well on other devices. You can still use it on Android/iPad, but any issue, they just tell you you have to use IE on windows... it's 2020 FFS. Also this player I've been told will prevent you form recording the videos (inc from screen recorders) so don't think it'll be easy to just keep the videos for later.

That said, if you like being really lazy, you can just listen, grab what you want from a video and are ok with not understanding the lacking explanations, it's better than nothing. They also send you textbooks separate from the video classes, that are great because again it's mostly in Korean, it's got colours and it reaches a fairly high level - I am starting using them to check the level of my current comprehension, and see if I can learn words from context at my current level. The cost of shipping is insane, but they reach you in 10 days in Europe, and they're exciting shiny new things. All in all (this post has become a review now!) I don't regret too much buying the course (considering the cost of going to local classes and the fact that you can jump level any time, perfect for self-learners), but know that you will get frustrated with a few things... The free videos made me imagine much better than what the videos are in reality.