The Real CZ's Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Log

[The Real CZ]

Since my last post was getting a little long, I'm continuing it in this post. This post is my 2019 plan of action. I'm not one for goals any longer. That's not to say that I don't have any, but the long-term goals are more like a vision of what I want (i.e., speaking in Korean easily with all the Korean people I know, being able to read Korean novels/news fairly easy, etc.) I work more from a process improvement/kaizen mindset these days to see what I need to be doing to make my language learning better while still having fun doing so. I think I've done a good job at being more consistent in 2018 after not studying 2014-2017 due to school, work, and professional exams.

1. The main thing I will continue working on 2019 is creating more flashcards for sentences. I find myself assimilating the structure easier this way through a lot of repetition. It also helps learn new words this way. Right now I am going through "Korean Grammar For International Learners" for Korean. This is my favorite Korean grammar book that I have and I have gone through parts of the book a lot, but the first time in a systematic fashion. For Japanese, I am going through "Essential Japanese Grammar" published by Tuttle. I think this book should help me get to a high intermediate level. For Mandarin, I am going through the Living Languages course. There are three books and I have finished the Beginner book this morning. Obviously with this series being a textbook instead of a grammar reference, there will be repeat sentences and I will end up drilling certain concepts much more than I will in Korean and Japanese through this method, but I have a stronger understanding of Korean and Japanese structure than I do with Mandarin, so this is fine. Depending on how this works out for Mandarin, I plan on using this method for German (I have the same Living Languages course for German that I bought at the same time). Once I get through these books (might be during the summer of 2019, but end of 2019 at the latest), I plan on slowing this process down a lot going forward. I will continue using this method for other grammar references that I have, but I should have a good enough foundation to make this a slower process.

2. I will be vocab cramming with Korean and Japanese in 2019. Anki will be my slave master. I have forgotten a lot of words in both Korean and Japanese, but with the little vocabulary studying I have done this year, I have found out that these words are fairly easy to re-acquire. I'm not shooting for a certain number of cards, but I will be spending 2019 reading a lot of political, business, and general news in both languages. This is not a priority for Mandarin as I am not at the stage where vocabulary acquisition is a priority. Once I get through the Living Language course, I'll probably be around 2,000-3,000 words and will have a better base to do vocabulary cramming, but that may be a 2020 goal.

3. Varied reading in Korean and Japanese. This goes along with the second process listed above, as I will be doing a lot of intensive reading for vocabulary acquisition, and then for extensive reading, I have some Korean and Japanese novels (light novels for Japanese, so furigana is included). The extensive reading is mainly for pleasure as I won't be looking up any words (it's a hassle with paper books), so this should help consolidating the words and grammar I'll be learning.

4. Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja study. I haven't systematically studied Chinese characters in about 7-8 years. For this, I plan on focusing on character meanings only, since I am learning these for three (four in the future - Cantonese) languages. My plan will be to make paper flashcards similar to my grammar note cards, but for when I study and review, I will go through a stack and write out the characters in a notebook. I don't plan to start this until May 2019 since I'll be busy with work until April and I want to mainly focus on grammar and vocab until then. I will naturally learn the readings through vocabulary acquisition and lots of reading.

5. Keep watching Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese dramas, and anime. This will be the easiest process to continue. These days I have pushed this down to an hour a night, so it's usually I'm watching Korean stuff for two weeks, Japanese, for two weeks, etc. On the weekends I try to get at least an hour of each language in. I listen to the music every day during my commute (I have to walk part of the way after I get off of the metro).

6. I plan to be a little more active in 2019 here. I noticed that the three Korean learners I used to interact with on HTLAL either aren't here, aren't active as much, or aren't spending as much time on Korean. This will be a good way to meet other learners of Korean, and Japanese and Mandarin. So I want to make this long be more of "hey, here's what I am reading, doing, etc.", ideas, etc. instead of just status updates.

Lastly, today is the start of my "2019" vision, as I am off of work until January 2nd. I got a lot of Mandarin study done this morning, but probably won't get much done today as I am traveling back to Ohio. I wanted to list some stats to see where the 2019 Vision starts, and I'll try to update them once a month.

Grammar Cards
Korean: 539
Japanese: 502
Mandarin: 785
German: 62 (inactive for most of 2019)

Vocabulary Cards (Anki)
Korean: 75
Japanese: 307
Mandarin: 174 (inactive most of 2019)
German: 0 (inactive for 2019)

Chinese Characters
0 (inactive until May 2019)

[Sayonaroo]

Just in case you didn’t know the kindle has dictionaries for Japanese and mandarin so you can look up everything easily . The kindle also keeps track of the word lookups, along with the sentence it was found in if you wanted to export stuff to anki

There’s no korean dictionary for kindle but you can highlight stuff and look it up later.

A while back you wrote that reading korean news easier than Japanese news. That surprised since I find it to be the complete opposite since they use kanji and there are pop up dictionaries like rikaisama/yomikun for Japanese. Are you already fluent in korean conversationally and just trying to improve ? I couldn’t tell what your level is in any of languages based on what you wrote. Do you already understand korean dramas enough where you watch with no subs or do you watch with English subs? Do you watch anime with English subs? Korean subs? Japanese subs? Raw?

If you’re not familiar with all the common kanji readings check out the links on my blog in the about me section

https://choronghi.wordpress.com

[Christi]

This will be a good way to meet other learners of Korean, and Japanese and Mandarin. So I want to make this long be more of "hey, here's what I am reading, doing, etc.", ideas, etc. instead of just status updates.

Sounds good! Am curious to know what things you'll share so I will subscribe to your log.

[The Real CZ]

Just in case you didn’t know the kindle has dictionaries for Japanese and mandarin so you can look up everything easily . The kindle also keeps track of the word lookups, along with the sentence it was found in if you wanted to export stuff to anki

There’s no korean dictionary for kindle but you can highlight stuff and look it up later.

A while back you wrote that reading korean news easier than Japanese news. That surprised since I find it to be the complete opposite since they use kanji and there are pop up dictionaries like rikaisama/yomikun for Japanese. Are you already fluent in korean conversationally and just trying to improve ? I couldn’t tell what your level is in any of languages based on what you wrote. Do you already understand korean dramas enough where you watch with no subs or do you watch with English subs? Do you watch anime with English subs? Korean subs? Japanese subs? Raw?

If you’re not familiar with all the common kanji readings check out the links on my blog in the about me section

https://choronghi.wordpress.com

It's hard to describe my fluency in my languages because of a four year break. I speak Korean with my mom and text with her in Korean. I can watch dramas without subtitles, but no matter what, my rule is to watch anything without subtitles. It doesn't matter if I'm a complete beginner or advanced, I watch without subtitles.

[The Real CZ]

Well, quite a bit has happened in the two weeks since I last posted. I came to the realization that I can't learn intensively like I did back in university because I don't have the same kind of time. It was fine to spend an hour in Anki back then because I still had time for other language activities. These days I don't.

I came to this a couple of days after my last post when I was doing intensive reading and then saving words to Anki (I did two days where I added 100 words to my Korean deck and two days where I added 100 cards to my Japanese deck). For the words I was looking up in Korean, the majority of them were words I had known five years ago when I last studied intensively and found that the words were coming back easier than I expected. I figured it would be easier to do more reading than to do explicit vocabulary study. For Japanese, I found a good amount were coming back and were sticking fairly easy.

During my reviews, I started noticing that once words started having six month lapses between reviews, that's when I would start to forget them. It's probably the flaw in vocabulary Anki decks as I wasn't seeing them in context. For my Mandarin deck, I always pick the "Hard" option and it was still hard for me to remember the words. I knew I needed to stop because these words were not being retained effectively.

So I am back hitting the textbooks for all three languages. I'm just going through the example sentences and reading them out loud. Since these books have a lot of comprehensible input, it is helping me. I'll be spending less time with this in Korean than Japanese and Mandarin. I am also going through my grammar reference books and reading out loud the example sentences. I'm able to get through a couple hundred sentences on a good day in each language. What I'm hoping this does is that it makes reading these sentences more active than just reading them (and it gives me plenty of practice speaking the language, even if to myself), helping me internalize the grammar and learn new vocab (since the majority of the example sentences have English translations). I'll probably make a post at the end of this month giving my thoughts about on how this has helped me after a solid month of having done this.

I also bought some readers/graded readers that are coming next week. I bought some intermediate readers for Korean and Japanese, and even bought a parallel text for Japanese. I bought some really easy graded readers for Mandarin. Luckily I found some graded readers that use traditional characters since I'm more used to those thanks to Korean.

[The Real CZ]

I got my readers on Monday and browsed through them. The Mandarin ones are from Mandarin Companion and are Level 1 graded readers. I'm still debating on whether to get John DeFrancis's Chinese Reader series before going through these graded readers. I'm leaning towards getting them, then finding appropriate textbooks to follow after that. DeFrancis's books only teach you 1,200 characters (but you'll have a lot of reading practice). I do have the physical version of Zhongwen's character dictionary where you'll learn about 4,000 characters. My plan will be to go through the book several times, mainly just looking at the character, the meanings and reading, a few of the vocabulary words associated with each character. I figure doing that will give me exposure to the characters while I consolidate my knowledge through textbooks.

The Japanese readers I have are parallel texts which I plan on waiting until the summer to tackle. I'm leaning towards picking up Kanji in Context and going through those books several times. I already have some light novels that I want to tackle next year.

My Korean readers also came in. I picked up Routledge's Intermediate Korean Reader and a book called Modern Korean. Both books look to help bridge the gap towards the advanced level and also have some grammar tips (though I have a couple of good grammar books already). These are more like traditional textbooks for the upper intermediate level that focus on articles with different subjects and having the vocabulary lists at the end of the chapter. I feel like these will be easy to go through and I should be able to go through these stories several times throughout the year to help consolidate the vocabulary.

As of now, my immediate priority is to strengthen my grammar knowledge by reading out loud sentences as outlined in my previous post. I am using textbooks that I used for Korean and Japanese and the DLI and FSI courses for Mandarin. I wish the text was legible for Korean and that the Japanese version was available. I have finished the first module for the DLI Mandarin course (the first six lessons) and I feel like it has really helped consolidate my knowledge of beginning Mandarin grammar. It has made it easier for me to form simple sentences in Mandarin. Given that I'm at a lower level in Mandarin, I probably will go through these courses more than once (I also have Teach Yourself Chinese and the Living Language Chinese series). This will help me consolidate the grammar and the first 2,000-3,000 vocabulary words easier for me. While going through the second round I plan on starting reading.

For Japanese, man, I have relied too much on my knowledge of Korean to skate by. It is easy to pick up grammar because of my knowledge in Korean, but using it is another story. I've noticed that when I talk Japanese with people, it takes me a lot longer than it does in Korean even though the train of thought is the same. Right now I'm going through the Japanese for Everyone textbook, along with the Beginning Grammar Dictionary. I know I definitely need to ramp up my practice with Japanese. I have found that going through Japanese for Everyone has been great for reviewing. Since there are a lot of exercises,I just go to the answer key and I have a lot more example sentences to practice from. It's also helping me go over more of the formal language, which you tend to hear a lot more in dramas compared to anime.

For Korean, I've been going through Continuing Korean and I just have two lessons left. I would be able to finish it this weekend, but I'm leaving for a business trip for two weeks, so I'm not lugging that huge textbook with me. This book has been pure review as far as grammar goes, but has refreshed me on some grammar points that I don't use as much. For the first 10 lessons, I've had about a 98% comprehension rate for the sentences, but it's dipped to about 90% for the latter chapters. There's some vocabulary that isn't used as much in the example sentences that I forgot the meaning to. I may go over this book again later this year, but I think I'll mainly practice from the two comprehensive grammar books that I have. I may end up getting Korean Grammar In Use Advanced just to have more sentences (and to help with vocab acquisition).

Lastly, I've been doing some narrow/light intensive reading and extensive reading in Korean. I had a slow week at work and I can't read about tax law and concepts for eight hours a day, so I tend to try to read more in Korean when I need a break. I've been reading the webtoon Tower of God (신의 탑) without looking up words (just one that showed up a lot and that I correctly guessed the meaning to). I read about a dozen articles about the first two episodes of a new drama called The Crowned Clown (왕이 된 남자). I work to only look up words that show up at least a few times instead of trying to look up every word. I was able to pick up a couple of words from context and confirmed that I guessed the meaning correctly to words such as 자객 and 참형. This makes reading more palatable when you can understand the overall gist of the story, but don't want to spend an hour looking up every word on one article. This allows you to read more and more articles while looking up maybe 10% to 20% of the words that you would have if you looked up every word in one article. I also saw the same words used in different contexts in later articles and it further consolidated my knowledge of the words I looked up that day. I expect that by the end of 2019 that I'll be back to where I was at the end of 2013 before I had to stop studying Korean and focus on school and work, and wouldn't be surprised to surpass that level easily.

I'm hoping to be reaching this kind of level that I am at now with Japanese and Mandarin either by the end of this year or mid-2020. I'm at a lower level but also want to go through the Chinese character courses for reading comprehension that I outlined above before doing a lot of reading. My grammar should have a much better foundation in both languages by then as well, as I have an advanced passive understanding of grammar but roughly an intermediate output level. That's why the reading is easier for me to continue to do in Korean. I'm mainly trying to improve my vocab at this point.

(Also, please let me know if these posts are too long. I'm trying to avoid just posting stats because then that doesn't really allow anyone to participate in this log, but then again I don't know if these posts are too long to the point where people won't read it at all.)

[The Real CZ]

Yesterday I went to my first language exchange and I had a blast. There were 16 of us and half the people were native Korean speakers with the rest of us being learners. I was surprised with the Korean language learners. Everyone seemed to be at least intermediate so we were able to keep the conversations in Korean for the most part. That lasted for two hours and then we spent three more hours at a different place for dinner, mixing in more English there. This group in DC holds meetings once a month and I'll definitely go every month that I can. It's just great to see all of the work I've put in over the years come to fruition by having fun conversations without too much stumbling. There's more work to be done, so I'll be cutting this post short.

[The Real CZ]

I guess it has been a while since I last posted! In 2019 I started making a lot of Korean friends here in DC and speak in Korean to some extent with a lot of my friends, but mainly English these days. That is because I have been really busy in my career and graduate school. I finish my master's degree this weekend (after submitting my final exam this weekend!) 2020 and 2021 were extremely busy years in my career as COVID created so many changes to my job. However, all of that work paid off and I got a much higher paying job with fewer hours, and with my masters degree almost being done, I want to get back to languages.

I have noticed that my Korean (my strongest language) has dropped a bit, but I have a good foundation to where I can get back up to speed with some studying and a lot of reading. Japanese seems like I've dropped back to a high beginner stage just due to an extreme lack of use.

Lastly, I started dating a Chinese woman last year and I speak basic sentences to hear and she'll speak a lot of Chinese around me. Chinese and to a great extent Korean will be my main two focuses with Japanese being in the background.

I look forward to being back with the community again starting next week!

[The Real CZ]

So in the first week being free from school and an overbearing work schedule, I've been easing myself back into language study. I have been going through the Teach Yourself Complete Mandarin Chinese course that I have. I am on lesson 10 and notice that past few lessons have ramped up the amount of new words and sentence constructions. For now I am just going through each lesson once , hoping to get through the first pass of the book by the end of May. Then I plan on going back to things that gave me trouble while working through other courses.

In addition to textbooks, I have started reading Mandarin Companion's The Prince and Pauper. I feel like I am at around 90% comprehension, so not at the 98% they expect for extensive reading as there are words/characters here and there that I don't understand that they expect you to know going into the books. I try to read a page or two a day and want to try to increase that as I get more comfortable reading in Mandarin.

I have also been going through the beginner lessons on Mandarin Bean. I find the site to be pretty helpful even with all of the free stuff. I am focused on trying to read and the audio helps a lot in getting down the reading of the characters as well.

I have been addicted to the Taiwanese drama on Netflix called "Light the Night". I finished the first season/part and will start the next one soon!

[Xenops]

I didn't notice this before, but congrats on the masters!