More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

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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: Back to Korean for 2021

Postby Christi » Sat May 08, 2021 10:20 pm

Just caught up on about a year's worth of missed posts. Too much was written for me to respond to everything, but I just want to say kudos for finishing HP 1 and starting book 2! I still haven't finished 1 and after a year of no Korean I think returning to it is going to be so hard!

I think your vocabulary experiment is pretty interesting. Personally, I think I retain vocabulary and grammar much better through immersion by reading. My English and German skills really improved by leaps and bounds just by reading whatever caught my fancy. I'm now using this same strategy for Spanish (my newest language) and it seems to be working still. I think it might also work for Korean for me, however my reading pace is still too slow. There are no cognates, and the grammar and reversed word order still makes reading a chore unless a story or text is super simple..
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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
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Re: Back to Korean for 2021

Postby kraemder » Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:02 am

Sayonaroo wrote:have you tried condensed audio for korean dramas so you can get relistening in etc without the time sink since they don't even talk half the time in dramas. there's a lotta staring and background music etc. just google condensed audio korean if you don't want to deal with making it yourself.


I haven't tried it because I didn't want to deal with making it myself. But if there's people who have done the work and are sharing it then I will definitely check that out. I love the idea.
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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: Back to Korean for 2021

Postby kraemder » Mon Jul 05, 2021 12:06 am

Christi wrote:Just caught up on about a year's worth of missed posts. Too much was written for me to respond to everything, but I just want to say kudos for finishing HP 1 and starting book 2! I still haven't finished 1 and after a year of no Korean I think returning to it is going to be so hard!

I think your vocabulary experiment is pretty interesting. Personally, I think I retain vocabulary and grammar much better through immersion by reading. My English and German skills really improved by leaps and bounds just by reading whatever caught my fancy. I'm now using this same strategy for Spanish (my newest language) and it seems to be working still. I think it might also work for Korean for me, however my reading pace is still too slow. There are no cognates, and the grammar and reversed word order still makes reading a chore unless a story or text is super simple..


I appreciate your reading my log - thanks! Reading is the best way to get started on a foreign language for languages with a similar writing system to English like Spanish and German. Korean's writing system is definitely easier than say Japanese or Chinese but it's still a pain. I'm trying though.
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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: Back to Korean for 2021

Postby kraemder » Mon Jul 05, 2021 2:50 am

It seems like a long time since I updated. I did several grammar lessons with the iTalki tutor but then stopped. I basically got back into playing World of Warcraft Classic because well it's fun and they were re-releasing the Burning Crusade expansion which originally came out in 2007 or so. So much nostalgia around that game for me and I decided I didn't want to miss out on the release of the game. It was a blast for a couple of weeks but then my interest started going back to languages again. And I also realized that despite my dedicating lots of time to this game I couldn't keep up with people who didn't have full time jobs etc.

Anyway. So I got back into Korean and Japanese by opening Anki again. I restarted the Japanese Core deck and was amazed all over again at the quality of the sentences and the professional voice acting recordings. I think I have the Core 10k deck (it's actually a bit less than 10k but they just call it 10k) and Anki is just picking sentences/words randomly and so I get a mix of easy/medium/hard. Because I haven't done this deck in about 5 years, there's a lot of vocabulary and expressions I've forgotten and it's a good refresher.

And I found this Korean deck that is based off this frequency dictionary of the 5,000 most frequent Korean words. It includes a sample sentence for each word and does a good job I think (at least so far) of not making the sentence overly long and complex. For drilling sentences to improve your vocabulary, I think being concise is key. So I like this deck a lot and 5k words is really good enough I think for a premade deck. I know there's a lot of schools of thought to this and some people may think you should only use a premade deck for the first 100 or 300 words, some say 1,000 or 2,000 maybe. If the premade deck is done well with quality concise sentences then I would probably be happy to use it as long as I want to improve my vocabulary in that language. I find it very helpful and I don't have to go sentence mining or anything, just do my reps and I'm done. It's good.

Now there was only one thing missing from this beautiful 5k deck: native voice actor sentence recordings. On a whim I went on Google and checked to see just how much it would cost to pay someone to do this for me. There are free options like Rhinospike.com but if I wasn't paying money I didn't think I'd be happy with the result. When someone does it for free you basically take what you can get and that might be a cheap $10.00 microphone or the built in mic on a laptop of smartphone and it may not be setup right and an air conditioner or something going on in the background. And that's if you can get anyone to do it at all. I've had posts on there for years before someone actually records it for me and I'm thankful but I no longer need it. Well, most of the sites I pulled up required you to submit a text or something and ask for a quote. For some reason I didn't like that and I just kept looking until I found a site that didn't do that. It let you setup the project and then pick the pay rate based on how the recording was going to be used. Commercial purposes, Internet website, etc. As a guide it did a word count of the text. Well I used this site and figured it would cost about $1000 to hire two separate actors to read 2500 sentences each. I wanted a male and female speaker for variety. This is normally way out of my price range and I would have (and should have) satisfied my curiosity there and left but I decided this wasn't too too bad and decided to go for it.

It ended up costing around $2000 instead :cry: . The website makes a big deal about there being no hidden costs and you know up front what you're getting into but somehow that isn't how it worked out for me. I could have tried to back out but instead decided to just do it and study Korean that much more instead. While $2,000 is a huge sum of money to pay for recordings of 5000 sentences just to practice your Korean, it probably wasn't all that much money for the voice actors doing it. The male actor was a lot more professional about it and he returned the sentences really fast within a couple days but the female voice actor was much slower and sent me the sentences a couple hundred at a time until right at the deadline she sent 1000. I specifically said that I wanted a pause between the sentences and she did that perfectly fine for the first few hundred sentences but the sentences that came in at the deadline the pause got really small. I'm using Audacity to split it into separate files for Anki and some of the pauses were less than half a second which basically means Audacity can't automatically split them all. It can split most of them but those few that came in under half a second, I'll have to manually go in and separate. Also, I can't think of an easy way to automate adding the sentences to Anki so I'm doing it manually which is a pain.

If you're wondering how the quality compares to say using Subs2Srs to make a deck from dramas, the difference is really big. They speak so much more slowly and clearly compared to the dramas. Although it sounds natural it's also slower. It's a lot better for beginner and intermediate learners I think for sure and even if you get more advanced and are doing shadowing it's still probably good. Of course you do not NEED it and audio directly from dramas is very interesting to listen to and you can totally argue that it's even better to listen to someone speaking faster since it's more real. But I would argue that you're likely not hearing every sound then and having them slow down just a bit is better for study flash cards. I wouldn't slow down audio when watching YouTube or Netflix though.

Yeah so I pretty much dropped my annual bonus on some expensive native audio files.

And I'm back into LingQ and working on the third book in the Harry Potter series. I bought and downloaded several other books off the Google Play store but Harry Potter is the easiest to understand so I'm sticking with it. I know I'll probably want to check myself after I finish each Harry Potter book to see if maybe it's ok to move onto something else but I suspect I'll read all the Harry Potter books before finishing another book.

And I'm doing something different with LingQ. I'm marking every word known whenever I see a new word. Actually, I turned on the option to mark all words known when turning a page and I'm even premarking them known as I go. Simply put, I don't like having so many words highlighted on the page. It's so distracting that I can't get a smooth reading pace going. I don't want to look up every word I don't know just enough to get the gist right now but the way LingQ highlights words that you haven't seen or are learning is so distracting. And I never liked the way LingQ counted words and I never used the built in system to review vocabulary so just marking them all known is turning out to be a real blessing. I have a lot of words that show up yellow (learning but not know) still though and paging doesn't mark them known so I have to press them. So now the word count in my LingQ stats means how many words I've encountered without any regard to if I really know it. It's still a little bit of an interesting number to track I think though.

As I mentioned I'm working on Japanese again. I had a Japanese language Skype partner with whom I used to talk once a week every week but after 3 years we're calling it quits. I'm pretty sad about that. So I'm using iTalki a bit for practice. If you read my log you may have heard me complain about teachers cancelling on me at the last minute (one teacher did it repeatedly to the point where I just gave up on the multiple lesson package I had bought from her). I haven't had any issues recently though. All of the teachers have shown up and been happy to talk to me and it's been great. I'm picking new teachers however and I'm guessing that maybe iTalki tutors are similar to company employees where they always show up (usually) when they're new until they get a bit of seniority and then feel it's ok to call out sick. Anyway, the teachers have been great. I'm recording the calls and going back and listening to my Japanese to see what I need to work on. Although maybe I won't be able to just fix anything and maybe it'll just be to get a better idea of what I sound like speaking Japanese. It's interesting. I hadn't recorded skype lessons in Japanese before because by and large by the time I started doing them I could understand my teachers so well I didn't think it was needed. They obviously tend to grade their language a bit to what they perceive your level is. Well, there's a word that people were saying in my language exchanges but I couldn't get them to repeat it to me so I could write it down and remember it - 途切れる. I could understand what it meant by the context but I was mis hearing it somehow as とげる or something I'm not sure. Anyway, now I got it. It's actually quite useful if you are a foreigner using skype etc to talk to Japanese people online. It can be used to say when the connection gets bad and you can't understand or it can be used to describe a beginner level language ability where the person is constantly pausing to think how to say something. Why did I need to record a conversation to get this word? Because when I asked the other person to repeat what they just said so I could learn it they had no idea what they just said. At least not the exact words used.

I'm not currently doing any Korean iTalki lessons. I might start up again but I'm thinking I don't want to do any grammar style lessons but just conversation lessons and I'm not confident in my Korean just yet. So I'm going to study more first.
Last edited by kraemder on Mon Jul 05, 2021 10:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Maengin
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Re: Back to Korean for 2021

Postby Maengin » Mon Jul 05, 2021 7:13 pm

I'm using Audacity to split it into separate files for Anki and some of the pauses were less than half a second which basically means Audacity can't automatically split them all. It can split most of them but those few that came in under half a second, I'll have to manually go in and separate. Also, I can't think of an easy way to automate adding the sentences to Anki so I'm doing it manually which is a pain.


If the audio files are labeled " filename_1, filename_2" etc:
Export anki deck to Excel or Google Sheets. Input the audio file names in the correct column then drag the cell down to the bottom of the sheet. Export as .tsv and import back into Anki. Now Anki knows the file names and all you have to do is put the audio files in the collection folder.
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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: Japanese and Korean in 2021

Postby kraemder » Sat Aug 28, 2021 6:19 pm

Well, I haven't been using my super expensive custom professional voice actor korean files to study Korean. Actually, I haven't been studying Korean at all. I've been focused on Japanese completely. I spent too much money on those files so if I could go back and do it again I wouldn't but I did spend the money knowing that I might not use them right away but that they would be available for me for the rest of my life. I have the rest of my life to procrastinate. Hopefully I won't procrastinate TOO much lol.

I've been busy with other things but I'm really into Japanese at the moment. I'm serioulsy considering going back to Japan to teach English again or do whatever. I am just not very happy with my current job and stuff but with the corona situation I really can't leave the country right now anyway. So I've got more time to think about it. I'm also thinking that when they do lift travel/immigration restrictions eventually (I'm guessing this virus will have a 3 year life cycle just like all the other pandemics in history despite modern vaccines) there will be a lot of other people with the same idea - finally I can move abroad and start pursuing my dream of living in a foreign country! Oh well. I found out I am able to get a replacement copy of my proof of CELTA certification (not the certificate but proof of course completion). That's a relief. I'd hate to have to do that again. It's not a bad experience but it's a bit stressful doing something you're not used to doing (most people taking the course have little or no English teaching experience) and being scrutinized and graded on it. It's tough and lasts about 1.5 months or so. In the grand scheme of things, it's really just the equivalent of teaching English for 1.5 months. They do give good tips, have good discussions, and give feedback, but every time you teach a class you can tell for yourself if things went well or didn't and try to think of ideas for next time. You don't really need someone else telling you the lesson could have been better or maybe you hit it out of the park, you can basically tell that yourself anyway.

Yeah, so back to my own personal language studying. I'm focusing on Japanese right now because I'd rather go work in Japan than in Korea where my Korean would have even more catch up to do. Everyone is familiar with the intermediate plateau however and I do think that my Japanese has hit this intermediate plateau. Maybe getting Korean to that intermediate plateau wouldn't necessarily take too long. But whatever.

Matt vs Japan's YouTube videos of course get recommended to me a lot by YouTube and he talks a lot about pitch accent. He's a believer. All of my efforts to date regarding pitch accent including my stint with Chinese have been pretty much a no go. I just can't even consistently tell different pitches apart so I don't have faith in myself regarding this. However, I know Japanese people grade their language heavily when they talk to me. It varies from person to person and they all say they're not doing it but I think they're lying. Actually this phenomenon is something I think about a lot. Sometimes they can't explain something but if they weren't grading their language then it seems like it wouldn't be a problem. Even if it weren't the best explanation they would at least say something. And i notice they often mimic my Japanese when they talk to me - using the same words as much as possible and the same grammar/sentence structures. Part of this could be explained by the simple fact that I'm using the most common structures when I talk and so of course so will they but they rarely mix it up and bring it up a level like I would if I were speaking English naturally. If I were teaching an English class of course to beginner or low intermediate students then I'd be super self conscious of what I'm saying and would likely run into the same problem. But if I'm having a free conversation this shouldn't be the case.

According to Matt, this grading of the language is due to foreigners butchering pitch accent. I don't know how much this is true. I'd have to see more videos of Matt speaking Japanese with Japanese people to see if they really do speak more naturally with him than they do with me. I know he gets compliments on his pronunciation whereas I get compliments on my Japanese but not on my pronunciation unless I specifically ask about it. And of course I'm suspicious of Japanese politeness and don't know how much to trust what they say.

So I went on the Refold Discord Japanese channel just to see what's there. They have a pitch accent channel. I said I wanted to improve my pronunciation and didn't know if pitch accent were the way to go or maybe I should just focus on the sounds of the language - trying to say the vowels more cleanly etc. One guy asked me to upload a short recording of my spoken Japanese. I did 30 second or so quick recording (I goofed some grammar but decided it didn't matter) and got some feedback. One comment was that I wasn't fully saying the い at the end of おいしい and I could probably benefit from practicing the rythym some but that my pitch accent was all over the place and I should definitely give pitch accent a bit of attention. I think the feedback was good. They also pointed me in the direction of some resources including a website with some pitch accent practice. Basically it plays a sound and you have to pick the correct patten of what you heard. I think it's a mix of nonense and real Japanese words. It seems really good. They recomment 30 minutes a day I think. Or you might go all out and just try to keep doing it until you're getting it right all the time. Just get it done. I found it very useful but also boring. I stopped after 10 minutes. I found myself wanting to just pick whatever patterns had been more common recently and I didn't feel like I was making real progress at least on my first try. But I resolved to just do it some everyday (or as much as possible, even if it's only once a week for 10 minutes). I definitely didn't do it every day but I did pull it up a couple times a week. I wasn't seeing any huge difference.

But I started listening for pitch accent in Japanese in general not too long after that. At first just a bit and then I'd just focus on the meaning but the more I started paying attention the more it started to bother me that I didn't know the pitch accent for a word. I remembered that Midori, my Japanese dictionary of choice on my iPhone, added pitch accent markers for a lot of Japanese words and it was a bit annoying but I went into and found the setting to enable it. I guess it's turned off by default. Now I could quickly just check the pitch accent of a word whenever. And my regular Japanese vocabulary deck also has native pronunciations from Forvo. I started focusing on the pitch accent of every word I studied when reviewing vocabulary. And finally, just a couple days ago, I went back to this website to practice pitch accent and for the first time ever I saw an actual improvement in my ability to distinguish pitch accent.

So I'm actually pretty happy and a little curious as to how this will affect my Japanese. I picture Matt and Dogen thinking of the pitch accent of every Japanese word when they talk (I have no idea how true that is) but that's not what I'm doing. At least not right now. Rather, I'm just sort of listening to my Japanese when I talk and whatever pitch accent I'm using. I think in theory I'd have to actually memorize the pitch accent for a word to really speak properly accented Japanese. I think I will eventually learn the pitch accent of a lot of words just by looking it up a lot when I'm curious. Assuming I stay interested. I am not specifically drilling pitch accent. I do have a pitch accent deck by Dogen I downloaded but I'm really bad at doing it and might delete it I'm not sure. I do have a subscription to his Patreon right now and want to go in and watch a lot of his videos. Part of me wants to just get it done but I think I'd just overload my brain if I binged it and I already know it gets boring so I think just doing it ad lib as I go is probably best.

Also, I'm trying to read more Japanese. I'm currently trying to decide if I should be listening to audio books, listening to text to speech books, listening and reading at the same time, or just reading the books. Listening is definitely faster than reading it. Audio books have the best pronuciation of course but text to speech is super consistent and easier to understand sometimes even and I can control the speed better. I can also use text to speech to read any book instead of a limited selection. And then reading books I can truly go at my own pace to better absorb the language.. but it's the slowest of all the options and most tiring.
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Maengin
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Re: Japanese and Korean in 2021

Postby Maengin » Fri Dec 03, 2021 8:03 pm

Hello, how is your studying going?
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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: Japanese and Korean in 2021

Postby kraemder » Sat Jan 01, 2022 4:26 am

Maengin wrote:Hello, how is your studying going?

I took a break from it for a while but I'm back.
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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: Japanese and Korean in 2021

Postby kraemder » Sat Jan 01, 2022 4:58 am

Happy New Year!

It's been a while. I ended up deciding to binge Warcraft Burning Crusade before it died. I stopped playing after Thanksgiving and didn't tell my guild so I feel a bit guilty about that. I'm pretty done with it though. So that means I'm back to wasting time on languages.

Last I checked, Japan wasn't allowing regular foreign tourists into the country which is a big discouragement for studying it. And I'm feeling kind of bored with the language. I still enjoy watching anime and talking to people but I'm not feeling motivation to go study it.

So I'm thinking this year, at least to start, is going to be Korean. I'm dusting off old resources and trying to get a nice routine going again. I want to try to use Matt/refold's I+1 sentence mining method. For some reason I never have been able to. I just lacked the discipline and picked any sentence that looked interesting to me or had a word I wanted. I've always been a bit hypocritical in that if anyone were asking me how they should make their custom flash cards I'd say I+1 sentences all the way. Why not try doing what I tell other people right? And what anyone in the Refold community will tell me too. So I got 10 sentences tonight from Harry Potter. It was surprisingly easy. One big reason why I never gave the I+1 method a good shot was that most sentences, especially as a beginner, are I+2 or more. But that wasn't the case tonight when I spontaneously decided to do this. There were many I+1 sentences. I think it's because I was reading a dialogue heavy part. I love the dialogue heavy parts - the narrated parts are long, windy, and just hard. I was pretty discouraged last night as I was plugging through one part. I'm reading the Prisoner from Azkaban.

I think I'm probably going to just finish all the Harry Potter books before reading something else for a couple of reasons. I bought the entire series as a set so I already have them. The vocabulary does repeat so some of the words the translator likes I've picked up and will continue doing so. And I know the story.. except maybe the last book I don't remember that one so well. One big reason I would love to read something else is that I'm a bit bored with Harry Potter even if it is a good story. But it's hard to find Korean e-books, well ones that I can upload into LingQ anyway. And I've noticed that even if I think Harry Potter is difficult, switching to another book (I do have a couple others) is way harder. So I guess I might as well milk the Potter series for what I can while I can.

I restarted my Netflix subscription. I think I'm going to just watch with English subtitles. I tried without English subtitles and I can hear the language ok - I'm pretty used to the rhythm of Korean and the word order but my vocabulary is just so small I'm missing too much. I am happy that it seems somehow better than last I checked though (how?).

I also have the sentence deck in Anki which I got the professional voice actors to perform for me. The sentences seem very good but they're not all I+1 either. But I really like the voice acting. It's annoying to upload the sound to the cards though - for the money I spent.. oh well. It is what it is.

It would be a bit crazy but part of me is thinking of moving to Korea for a couple years to teach English or something and learn the language like I did Japanese. But I wouldn't want to do that unless the virus situation was almost a non issue. I really dislike wearing masks. I am getting the impression that in Asia it might be years before they relax the mask rules etc regarding the virus. Heck, even in America I have no idea when we'll be able to remove the masks in airports. Actually, to be honest, in airports, it makes a lot of sense to wear masks regardless. I used have a 50% chance of catching a cold or something when I flew out to see family or something but travelling during the pandemic I haven't had any issues at all.
Last edited by kraemder on Sun Jan 02, 2022 12:16 am, edited 1 time 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: More Korean than Japanese in 2022

Postby kraemder » Sat Jan 01, 2022 7:36 am

Ok I was wrong. I found out I can get the ebook version of Game of Thrones on the Google Play Store. I'm now reading it in LingQ and this is going to be much better than Harry Potter. I probably will still get through Potter eventually but this is so much more interesting. The series is pretty long too. I read it back in the day before the drama came out and the whole world went nuts about it. I didn't see the TV show until like season 7 or something, when I was in Japan and my friends there made me watch it with them (it was good, no complaints.) Anyway, enough time has gone by that I've forgotten a lot and it will be good fun rereading it.
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