The Real CZ's Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Log

[The Real CZ]

I'll be going to Japan with my mom and stepdad sometime in 2018. Not sure about Korea yet. My mom is worried about war breaking out in Korea, and I will have to contact a Korean embassy here sooner or later to be 100% sure that I'll have zero chance of being subject to the Korean draft if I visit.

This happened to me as well. My original plan was to do two weeks in Japan and Korea but my mom talked me out it. Picked the wrong time to try and visit Korea I guess.

Yeah, should have gone in 2016 haha. I'm personally hoping to go by 2020, but we'll see.

[The Real CZ]

So far this year, I've just been trying to get back into the habit of studying. However, since I've spent a good number of time the past few years studying for my accounting license, the thought of more studying isn't the most appealing to me right now. I have been making it a habit of reading sentences out loud from my grammar books, trying to do some each day. For vocabulary, I initially tried going back to Anki, but after just a few days, I was already sick of it. I think Anki has its uses for the beginning levels, and it may be helpful for Mandarin, but I just downloaded the dictionary plugins for Korean, Japanese and Mandarin and plan on just reading more.

I started by trying to read news articles, and while this works for me in Korean since I can understand a lot more, it's harder in Japanese and Mandarin. So I quickly aborted that idea for those two languages and started finding songs to learn the vocabulary from, and started reading Wikipedia pages of celebrities I like, drama/anime I've watched, etc. It's more fun to learn vocabulary about things you like.

I haven't decided what I wanted to do for active activities, yet. I talk to my mom in Korean, but she talks and talks, so that is mainly just listening for me haha. My busy season at work is from February through April, so I'll probably just keep the focus on reactivating the languages and getting more input.

The easiest thing to transition to was watching dramas and anime again. I started watching more Korean dramas a few months ago (I barely watched any between 2014 and the first half of 2017). I needed something to watch while I was stressed from studying for my CPA exams, and luckily those are forever done with.

I do live in a bigger city, so I will try to do some meetups in the summer, as I have already found language groups for my three languages on meetup.com. We'll see where that goes, but that's far into the future.

[The Real CZ]

Since late 2017 I've been getting back to consuming media in my three target languages aside from just listening to music. For Korean dramas, I finished "The Best Hit," "Because This Is Our First Life," "Voice," and "While You Were Sleeping". 2017 had some really good Korean dramas and I picked a good time to get back into them. For Japanese, I watched the two seasons of the anime "Baby Steps" and watched the drama "Nigeru wa Haji da ga Yaku ni Tatsu". This drama starred Aragaki Yui, one of my favorite Japanese actresses. For Mandarin, I prefer Taiwanese dramas (I think they do the slice-of-life genre very well), and just finished"The Perfect Match," which stars Ivy Shao. I was starting to understand more by the end of the drama, so this motivated me to quickly start another Taiwanese drama to keep this momentum going. So I started "Back to 1989," which also stars Ivy Shao.

However, this has motivated me to continue textbook/grammar study. I have downloaded the DLI Chinese courses to get a stronger foundation with the language. I find that the drills help me solidify what I'm learning. I'm simply following the Glossika method of reading out loud many sentences. That's why I'm trying to find some textbooks and grammar books with a lot of sentences and translations of those sentences. The problem I have with the Teach Yourself Chinese book is that the second half of the book doesn't have English translations, so it just makes it that much harder to learn. I think it'll be helpful after going through the DLI books to pick up some new vocab.

I'm also searching for some good intermediate and advanced textbooks in Mandarin (and Japanese). I've found it difficult to simply read and look up words for these two languages since there are so many unknown words. If there's a paragraph, I'm hovering the mouse over 95% of the words, which I find to be inefficient to learning. I might stick to songs for the short term for these two languages while diving back to the textbooks and grammar books. For Korean, I'll just continue as it seems to be working.

[The Real CZ]

Okay, my busy season at work is almost over. I had mandatory 55-60 hour weeks from February through April, and one more week next week of similar hours, before I do any real studying. I have been watching plenty of Korean dramas and anime, but aside from that, very little. I have realized that I need something such as Anki so that I can study and review every day. I realized that being in the workforce and being in university are two totally different lifestyles, as it was much easier to study back in the day.

My main goal is inputting grammar cards into Anki for my three main languages. I hope to be done by the end of the summer with this project. After that, I want to cram a lot of vocabulary for a couple of years.

Hopefully later this spring I can find some language meetup groups to find some people to practice with. I don't have much problem having basic conversations in Korean these days with my mom, but it's still mainly her talking 90% of the time. (Probably because she's a woman. )

[The Real CZ]

Now I'm having difficulties with Anki that I shouldn't be having. It won't display foreign fonts any longer, and whatever I tried researching to fix the issue isn't helping me. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

[The Real CZ]

I tried that and it didn't work.

Oh well, I am past the stage where I need Anki. I just wanted to use it as a refresher since I hadn't studied at all between 2014 and 2017.

[Jiwon]

Reading your blog just makes me feel ashamed... I am one of these people that don't watch any K-drama, hardly listens to K-Pop and knows very little about Korean pop culture in general - even though I am a Korean living in Korea.

That being said, I am going through some interesting time in Korean history right now. If anyone is planning on visiting Korea, make sure it's this month! The NK-US Summit!

[eido]

Reading your blog just makes me feel ashamed... I am one of these people that don't watch any K-drama, hardly listens to K-Pop and knows very little about Korean pop culture in general - even though I am a Korean living in Korea.

That being said, I am going through some interesting time in Korean history right now. If anyone is planning on visiting Korea, make sure it's this month! The NK-US Summit!

I tried getting into k-pop I all I ended up with was BTS. In North America they're pretty popular among teenagers. They even have a YouTube Red documentary, which seems like a big deal. You're not missing much, just overly pretentious young men thinking they're going to change the world in a night with their lyrics, and also their fans who are incredibly obnoxious. That goes for all k-pop fandoms, no matter what 14 year-old tries to tell you they're mature and philosophical. While I am here, is it true that Korean pop culture isn't really "pop" - that is, do most Koreans not pay attention to boy groups and actors and such?

If I ever try to take up Korean again, I want it to be for the history. I want to understand the news that comes out of both countries.

[The Real CZ]

Woah, now I know why I haven't visited my log in a while. Please keep comments like that to yourself.

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Since I last posted, I have had a lot happen in my life, all good things. I went to Japan this summer with my mom, so I ended up speaking more Korean with her than I did Japanese with other people. We spent about a week at our main temple (my mom and I are Buddhist), so there were people from all over the world there. I remember some Chinese-speaking girls trying to ask me for directions, but I just replied to them in Mandarin that I'm Korean and didn't know much else. She followed my mom and I for a bit and kept on shouting "Hanguo (Korea in Mandarin)" to me, but there was nothing I could really do.

I have also moved to the DC area in October for a new job. I know there are plenty of Meetup groups for language learning here, so I can't wait to join them...in April. I'll be gone for most of January, and February and March are busy months at work for me. If I can find a group that meets up on the weekend (many I've seen meet up during the week), that would be great.

I have also gone back to Anki mainly because it is something I can use to review every day. I've realized that I can't read every day in three languages(plus English, which I tend to read a lot in), so Anki reviews help. I don't have many vocabulary cards yet as that hasn't been my main focus since the summer.

I have been focusing more on grammar study this year. Not traditional grammar study as in trying to remember rules and then creating sentences, but another method. I buy a bunch of note cards and write down the target language sentence and the corresponding English translation below. When I do this, I use Professor Arguelles's Scriptorium method. For those that don't know, that is where you say the target sentence out loud before you write the sentence, say each syllable (or equivalent) as you write the target language sentence, and then say the full sentence again once you're done. Then once I finish making some note cards, I shuffle the ones I just worked on and go through them again by saying them out loud. I save these in bundles of 50 cards, so I had to make a numbering system for my cards. Each day I review one deck each of Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin every day, if possible. I don't take these cards with me when I travel, so them being in physical form for this hurts in this respect. However, I know I learn better by writing with a pen/pencil than I do with typing. Plus, it gets me away from reading an electronic screen (which is why I still buy books in paper). I spend all day working with spreadsheets and software at work, so I like to take breaks from electronic screens as much as possible.

Obviously I'm still enamored with Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese pop culture. I'm still watching dramas and anime when I can (getting older sucks in this regard in having less free time),and still listening to music every day. In fact, I'm even going to see Red velvet next year when they have their tour in the U.S.

[eido]

Are you talking about me? Detail what I said was wrong and I’ll take it into consideration. If you wanted me to delete it, I could have. But you already responded.