More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

[kraemder]

Well I was thoroughly demoralized and at a loss on what to do to keep moving forward, lamenting the lack of a solid Korean class at my community college etc. The tutor lessons I do are good practice but college classes really do seem to do a better job of drilling stuff into your head if only because there's tests to study for. That said I am considering retaking last years 2nd semester Korean - I don't remember all the grammar as I kind of gave up halfway through the course. But this time audit it and take the tests but don't do the homework. I hate the workbook and feel like it's just punishment rather than an aid to learning.

Well, I went back to the idea of doing SRS but no right/wrong answers all right answers. And all the information on side 1 Steve Kaufmann style and none of this constantly 'testing' yourself. I tried this briefly but then decided it wasn't good enough for learning new Korean words albeit it might work for Japanese or so I thought. Well, I'm doing it for all of my SRS decks. I have a lot. I am finding it is -wonderful- for the grammar decks. I've always struggled to do SRS with grammar and only got myself to do it consistently when I was in Japan and desperately wanted to pass the JLPT N2 so there was a ton of motivation. This always getting it 'right' and moving forward is just the trick. I am also liking it for my Rosetta Stone Anki deck that I've been neglecting. This deck has a small screenshot of the Rosetta Stone pic, the hangul, and the native audio which is really well done. This material is stuff I made last year I think so it's review. In general I find I can usually understand the vocabulary/grammar from the picture. There's some exceptions but with all the online language exchange programs now a days it's no big deal. I like the always getting it right approach to this deck - Rosetta feels like a grammar type deck anyway.

I'm trying this approach with the huge sentence deck I have from HowToStudyKorean.com. I got caught up over the weekend. I have 1800 cards in this deck, 240 of which are unseen. It's unbelievable to me how long I've been reviewing, reviewing and reviewing without adding new cards and yet the amount of cards to study every day barely seems to go down. And that's even with falling behind and then saying screw this.. just mark all 500 over due cards right to push them out and then start going again. So marking everything right is helping a bit but man.. just so many cards I guess. And there's a lot more sentences to add from that website too.

So what am I doing if I'm not testing myself when the card comes up? I'm sort of trying to practice using it in my head and saying it out loud etc. With sentences this works quite well as I need to make an effort to get the whole sentence into my head so I'm definitely focused. With single words it's a little tricky I might make a really small sentence in my head with the word but usually I'm just saying it while visualizing it and stuff. I want to try to get the pressure to 'memorize' it out of my head. If I'm just saying a word over and over and thinking oh my God I'm going to forget it then that's not the attitude I want. I am finding that flashcards with pictures are better for studying like this as I'm focused on the picture and sort of daydreaming about it while I think about the word. Flash Cards Deluxe has a great built in feature for adding pictures to cards so a lot of my cards in that deck have pictures.

I did read more Harry Potter recently too but it's not an every day thing more of a weekend thing.

[Christi]

Tbh, that's one of the reasons I prefer Memrise over Anki. I can decide to just skip certain reviews and choose to focus on others. Sometimes I just don't feel like reviewing, then I only review the cards that I've recently added.

[AnneL]

It's unbelievable to me how long I've been reviewing, reviewing and reviewing without adding new cards and yet the amount of cards to study every day barely seems to go down.

To finish all my reviews every day I need 1h30 at the moment, and it's too much. I think as long as you're doing something that works, and you keep seeing cards every day, it's fine. I've accepted the fact that I will forget a lot of words, but I have to keep going even if I fail those cards often, because they will graduate once I hear them in my active listening. Once I hear them my mind decides it's actually used in daily life and then that word becomes important and therefore is well on its way to get memorised.
On days like yesterday where I was too tired to do more than the minimum active study (30min), I just limit the number of reviews to 40 (instead of 999 to make sure I see all cards needing review) and because I have a long (20 800) repeat interval for cards in learning/relearning, I still have maybe 150-200 that are in learning/relearning, and I just review those, which makes sense to me as it's the ones I do need to see everyday at the moment because I still don't even recognise I have been exposed to them.
I really really can't wait for the day when I only have a few words I don't know in the content I watch/read, because then just reading/listening will do the job of the Anki vocabulary decks.
For grammar I do the same as you, but I have 5d/15d starting intervals because I don't think seeing cards more often is any use, and it means I have less to review every day. The grammar decks have less priority to me though, because I think vocabulary brings much more to comprehension for the first few years of learning such a difficult language.

[kraemder]

For grammar I do the same as you, but I have 5d/15d starting intervals because I don't think seeing cards more often is any use, and it means I have less to review every day. The grammar decks have less priority to me though, because I think vocabulary brings much more to comprehension for the first few years of learning such a difficult language.

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah I get that vocabulary is huge but I think grammar is even more important for beginners. Things get offset by what I want to study so even if I think grammar is better and more important I’m not always going to do it. Ideally I think you should learn a base “textbook” vocabulary of maybe 300 words just to make sentences etc with grammar that you’re learning. And then I think after 300 words or so grammar is way more of a priority up until somewhere in the intermediate range. Once you learn all the daily common grammar patterns I think vocabulary becomes much more important. I would rather know advanced vocabulary than advanced grammar. I have spent tons of time on Japanese so I would say once you know N3 grammar you can totally slack on the rest of the grammar and focus on vocabulary for the rest of your life and probably not notice the difference too much. Basically I’m at a point now where I can look up every word in a sentence and still not understand what is going on. Not always for sure but often enough that I feel like grammar is just lacking. And I will think of grammar patterns I learned in 2nd semester Japanese that I still can’t say in Korean and well that is a so humiliating to me when I try to talk. I know Steve Kaufmann (and probably others) emphasize vocabulary over grammar but I think here I agree with Billy Korean and I’ve heard him say beginners should focus on grammar and then vocabulary.

It sounds like you’re really putting the effort in for the Anki or Memrise studying. I’m sure you’re going to make steady progress and I look forward to reading your updates.

[kraemder]

It’s so late and I’m exhausted but of course I felt I had to update anyway. A little. I signed up to retake the Korean class from last year. I’m looking forward to it but not the workbook homework. I hated that so much. I hope that this time I will be better and do it early and not at the last minute which kills your motivation to do it since well in my case there was so much pressure and I was tired and really really didn’t want to do it.

So far I’m really liking the new way of doing Anki. In general I find stuff I study randomly coming back into my head later and it seems like most stuff is sticking just fine. I know I learned the word for mistake just the other day though and I can’t recall it but that’s just one of many words. I would really like to make a deck for k-dramas using subs to SRS or something like that... maybe Viki. I think that since I’m marking everything right anyway I don’t have to be concerned about leeches and adding cards of the right difficulty too much. But I know I need to focus on grammar first. I’m still doing beginner grammar

[kraemder]

Today feels productive. I went through the entire Korean in Use for Beginners and made Anki cards for -everything-. Yeah crazy right. Well not the exercises just the examples and explanations. I tried to space it out so not too much information was on one card. And the deck is all side one only there is not side 2. I basically did little screen shots of the pdf file and copied and pasted everything in. I’m not sure how many times I’ll have read the book if I do the deck regularly over the course of a year. I’m not sure how much of this is new to me or new. I skimmed it as I made the cards so I guess I’ve skimmed the whole book now. I do have the intermediate volume but I think that’s for later. We’ll see how much I’ll wait.

There’s over a 1000 cards in the deck and it is thorough so even if I’m aggressive I won’t exactly speed through things and get my hands onto new and probably needed grammar patterns too quickly so I am also making a ‘cheat’ sheet. I’ve looked for someone else’s online but I haven’t found anything. Since I have the book and Anki deck as a defense the cheat sheet will just have the grammar term, a short and dirty English translation and one example sentence with translation. I started making it tonight and some grammar patterns were so basic I just skipped them but now further into the book so it’s getting better. I’m hoping that after I finish it will be a list of examples that I can read in less than 15 minutes. It’ll probably take a lot
of concentration. I’m planning on reading it everyday for two weeks.

[kraemder]

I started the Korean class at school. The teacher is different. She seems really young and new to teaching so I’m guessing she’s a recent graduate of the university of Arizona but I don’t know. She’s nice. Her style is different than the teacher last year but they both use a lot of English in class - I have to say in America that’s expected. I had a substitute teacher last year who spoke lots of Korean (but would repeat most of it in English too) all the time. People were very confused but I was able to follow and loved it. This isn’t that experience. Also, she is going much slower than the other teacher. They aren’t even starting book two. I am pretty sure the curriculum has her doing one book a semester and getting a little behind is ok she cut it down to a half of a book per semester. So I’m reviewing really basic grammar. Really basic. On the plus side there’s a native Korean speaker who is auditing or I don’t know what she’s doing but the idea is that she wants to teach Korean to foreigners when she goes back to Korea. She was a U of A student but after her first year switched to Pima community college and I think is graduating with just an associates. She said the university was too difficult and too expensive. I replied that the difficulty depends on the teacher. When I took Japanese at Pima years ago, the students all told me that this professor was better than the U of A professors and students transferring to the U of A afterwards outperformed the U of A students. I believe it. He was really special. I think my current teacher is going almost half the speed of the U of A though. But the Korean girl is very nice. I am actually trying to speak Korean to her even though I’m still a beginner which is not something I’ve ever done with a foreign language - I waited until I was intermediate. I feel like we could have an ok conversation if I slow Korean and she spoke English but my vocabulary and listening skills are a little lacking. When she speaks Korean I get lost easily. Her English is probably high intermediate or B2ish. She complains about how her head hurts from so much English and she’s been a student in the US for a couple years now. She’s doing well and would definitely hit C territory if she stuck it out here. I don’t know if she wants to.

I did a bit of cramming the grammar as mention in the previous posts and have not mastered the beginner grammar yet but it’s gotten better. At the moment I am now feeling that vocabulary is more lacking for me to speak to my new Korean friend. So I stopped marking everything right on my SRS and I’m doing it old school but I have motivation so it’s not burning me out. Motivation is so helpful. I gotta say that although reading is important for improvement I think it’s more of a long term strategy. It just really seems that cramming vocabulary for stuff I want to say now is much more productive.

[kraemder]

So last class I got more speaking practice and I'm pretty impressed with my speaking skills as compared to Japanese at about the same time. My knowledge of Japanese grammar was probably better but I can make sentences pretty easily in Korean. I did the Anki cramming as mentioned right up until class and then the next day I went back to marking everything right... hehe. The motivation sort of went down I think. But as mentioned in previous posts I think that just reviewing stuff over and over but less often over time is really good enough you don't have to grade yourself constantly. And I discovered a feature in Anki. Auto Advance and I can pick what happens when it auto advances. It can mark it correct. Flash Cards Deluxe has a timer feature similar to Auto Advance but it gives you the option to auto mark it WRONG when it times out not the other way around. I'm shocked that the author of Anki anticipated my need to mark myself right constantly... it does seem to go against spaced repetition (flash cards) but not necessarily but still. However, Flash Cards Deluxe is smart enough to let you enter a time in seconds that it will wait -AFTER- the audio finishes. Anki is counting the seconds right away so long sentence cards finish right away (at least they don't finish mid sentence though).

So I have been using the auto advance feature today and I've racked up 3 hours of study time just with Anki alone. Wow. I think that amount of time spent in itself more than compensates for whatever I'm missing by not marking some cards wrong so they will repeat more often. I will typically burn out at about an hour although on a day off like today (Sunday) I will get more time in probably. Still. I'm pretty impressed. I'm thinking of switching all of my Anki activities to this. However, I've quickly noticed that this doesn't work well for all flash cards. Audio flash cards work tons better than those without audio especially if it's a sentence card or just has more information on it than a single word. So I'm probably not going to do my grammar deck I made using screen shots of the PDF. It has an accompanying audio CD for most of the example sentences so in theory I could make some sweet cards with that for Anki too but it's more work than I want to do right now. I'm keeping it in mind for later when I tackle intermediate grammar. Also, the auto advance feature is super compatible with my Rosetta Stone deck. Pictures and clear audio and succinct sentences go really well with the auto play. I may have mentioned this before but I like imitating the Rosetta Stone voices. It feels like really good practice.

[kraemder]

A quick update during lunch at work on my phone. The class is going really slowly. We have a speech or role play for the mid term and I got pretty ambitious regarding the grammar which is helping me push myself but otherwise the class is really disappointing. If it were really 102 then I think it would be useful for me but it’s just 101 material and everyone is really slow.

I got a book I bought in japan TOPIK 必須単語5700 Scanned into PDF and I’m making Anki cards from it. It has really short phrases or sentences to go with the vocabulary and read out loud by a native speaker. I’m pretty excited about the deck. The drawback is that the book is literally organized like a dictionary and if I add a few pages at a time and then study them then all the words start the same and that doesn’t seem so good for studying. I’ll see what I can do to mix that up some.

Probably in part due to the class being so slow I got wanderlust and started in on mandarin. It might be temporary I’m not sure. I took a couple lessons with italki tutors and the first teacher used a textbook and we reviewed tones. That’s how the book starts. The other teacher just did an informal lesson talking about the Chinese New Year in English but intro sing some vocabulary for me too. Tones are a big deal I can see in Chinese and while I think it’s important to study and understand them at the beginning so you can notice them when you study etc., it’s stupid hard. Imitating and sounding like a native is hard for experienced learners so making new learners do it seems like a good way to make them quit. All languages have tones. If you can speak a language with the proper tones you are actually probably sounding close to native or like someone who has lived in America from a relatively young age. I know that tones effect meaning in Chinese making them more important but it still seems terrible to focus learning on them. I doubt self learners are focusing too much of their efforts on it. If I were in a class I think the utter failure of many students to execute the tones would convince the teacher to focus on stuff they actually can do. In a one on one lesson maybe they don’t get that feedback from seeing so many people do the same thing and will drill it much more. I don’t like it.

[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.