taki tackles korean (with k-dramas)

[takislang]

Heyo. Funny thing. I did start a language log here at the beginning of the year, but never updated it, because I consistently forgot about it. Tracking my language learning was something seriously new to me, and as I'd been learning the language for two years now, I didn't think there'd be anything significant enough I'd need to post. That said, I'm finally doing a challenge where I'll have a logical reason to track what I'm doing.

I've decided to just jump head first into native content. My long-term goal isn't to converse with natives (although it would be a plus), but to watch/read korean media without needing translations. Particularly, K-dramas. I realized the only way I'm going to get good enough to watch K-dramas is to just do it. So, that's what I'm going to do. Screw it.

So, my starting point:

Grammar: good enough? Lol. I'm at the point where I'm no longer interested in following any textbooks. Which is somewhere around level 8 TTMIK (though I can't say I've retained much from level 6-8), and realizing I'm vaguely familiar with over half the vocabulary points in KGIU: Intermediate AFTER I already bought it. There's a ton of grammar out there that I've learned and forgotten and it's a continuous, vicious cycle.

Vocabulary: This is the one thing I have no idea how to track. I'd say I know somewhere between 1000-2000 words, which is incredibly vague, but honestly I don't know. Sometimes I can understand a lot of what I'm reading, and sometimes I can't understand any of it and I question my progress these past two years.

Listening: Non-existent. I can understand small sentences like 밥 먹었어? but add anything with more than two clauses, and I've clocked out. A lot of it has to do with listening speed, I think, because my ears can't keep up and also just comprehension.

Now what I want to accomplish. My goals for this challenge are to:

1. Increase my vocabulary. I want to end the year knowing (passively) 3000 more words. So far, this year, I have about 600 new words in my Anki.

2. Increase my reading comprehension. Since I'm going to be doing a lot of subtitle reading, I want to get better at understanding what I read, and reading faster. Currently, I have to pause to read the subs, which isn't ideal when you're watching something.

3. Listening? I don't know. Currently, I'm doing a lot of subtitle reading which puts my listening at secondary, but if it passively improves, that would be great.

4. I'm hoping the time it takes me to watch 1 K-drama episode will also dramatically decrease as I get to the end of the series. Which means pausing less, reading faster, having to add less words to Anki, etc. I'm hoping for some obvious improvement!

So, for this I'm going to track unknown grammar and vocabulary, time spent watching, and just for fun, I'm going to share some cool slang words I learn. I'll be updating this everytime I finish an episode.

The drama I'm going to be watching first is Love Alarm. It's a simple, high-school Netflix drama about an app that rings if someone around you likes you. I'm already about halfway through the first episode, and I'm excited to share my results so far.

[takislang]

Just a quick look at my set-up. I have Netflix on one half of my screen and Papago on the other.



I'm using the Language Learning with Netflix extension to display dual subs with the added ability to be able to blur out the English subs unless I want to see them.

I like Papago because the translation is instantaneous and I don't have to parse out vocabulary from grammar all on my own. This is actually a really good example. For this, I wouldn't have been able to tell that 칼군무 was two vocabulary words in one without Papago breaking it down for me. I seriously love this site and it's invaluable in my process. It saves so much time. Ah, I wish there was something similar to it for Japanese.

I also really like to play around and put different clauses or phrases from the same sentence into it to see how Papago translates it. It's really great for picking up fixed phrases. It's better than English translations, in some way, because Eng trans are typically focused on localization and when you're studying a language, that's the LAST thing you want.

My last invaluable tool for this challenge is the Chrome extension "Add to Anki". It let's you make Anki cards with anything you copy, straight from your browser. Here's what that looks like.



I love it, because I can add cards straight from Papago without having to have them both side by side to copy and paste. The only caveat is that you HAVE to have Anki open in the background. I learned this the hard way, by getting twenty minutes into the episode, and realizing NONE of my cards submitted. Other than that, I love it.

For my grammar, I'm adding definitions and the specific sentence I saw it in and gathering them on a Notion page. Nothing too special. I'm also using the Forest app to track my time with each episode for later analysis things.

So, that's basically what I'm doing.

[lichtrausch]

You probably know this, but for anyone else reading, 칼군무 doesn't mean a "sharp group dance", which is the translation Papago offers. It means something like "synchronized dance moves". 춤이 칼같이 딱딱 맞아.

[takislang]

You probably know this, but for anyone else reading, 칼군무 doesn't mean a "sharp group dance", which is the translation Papago offers. It means something like "synchronized dance moves". 춤이 칼같이 딱딱 맞아.

I did, yeah! I definitely don't trust Papago's translations but it's a good guide. There's an entry for this word in the Open Dictionary, which is great for words that Naver doesn't have in their actual database.

[takislang]

I finished the first episode! It was way more fun than I realized. I actually tried this sometime last year and almost died of absolute boredom and genuine fatigue. It was incredibly overwhelming, so to be able to finish one episode in two days is a crazy thought for me. I used to not be able to get five minutes into an episode without feeling like it was hopeless.

Love Alarm Episode 1 Wrap-up:

Time it took me to watch: 4 hours and 57 minutes
Number of new vocab: 41 (Ish. There were some things I didn't add to my Anki deck because I thought they were too obscure and I wouldn't see again. Like some League of Legends vocab.)
New grammar: 11

Some cool things I learned:

빨랑 is an incredibly cute, texty way to say 빨리

쌤 is short for 선생님 and is apparently something people say in real life. The translator translated it just as "Teacher" though, which I think is a missed opportunity to use "Teach".

You can use 보다 to mean to work? I guess? The characters would say "가게 안 봐?" or " 나랑 같이 편의점 볼래?" and I'd just never seen that before which is cool. They used it more than 일. I'm wondering if there's a certain nuance to it or not.

극혐 (short for 극도로 혐오스럽다) is a slang word that means something that's extremely disgusting/something you seriously hate and is also apparently something mean girls say to some guy who is not even bothering them. I used to think bullying in K-dramas was overdramatic, but apparently it's just as bad in real life.

존맛탱 is another slang word that apparently means something is fucking delicious. 존 - 존나 (which is most oftenly translated as fucking, but less vulgarly, I guess extremely?), 맛 = 맛있어 (delicious), and I think 탱 is just used for emphasis. In my googling, apparently just using JMT is also pretty recently popular which is so interesting that they use Roman letters.

라고 can be and often is, to my complete and utter confusion for half the episode, shortened to just a 라.

That 달라고 you keep seeing probably isn't 다르다 + 고. You're going to ask about it in a group chat, and someone's going to tell you it's 달 + 라고, and then you're going to feel stupid.


Overall thoughts:

First, disclaimer: There is one scene I did skip in the show. It was a politics speech and I was wholly uninterested in trying to understand it. Okay, moving on.

In theory, I understand way more than I thought I would, but in practice, it felt like I understood none of it. My sentence parsing is worse than I thought and I found myself hovering over the blurred out English translations often just to be able to check if my understanding of the sentence was right. I feel like it's something that can be improved over time with more exposure to the language and sentence construction, which I'm hoping this challenge can prove, but man it sucks to see a sentence where you know all the words and grammar, but you still can't understand it.

I have to keep telling myself it's a common thing for language learners, though. So much so, there's an entire video about it that inevitably comes up on my Youtube homepage once every couple of months.



If you're learning Japanese, I'm sure you've seen it, but if you haven't, give it a watch. It's worth watching the entire thirty minutes. This video has a focus on listening comprehension, but he says some pretty wise things about the difference between knowledge and ability.

This video is the update to that, I believe, but I haven't watched it yet. It's definitely on my watchlist, though.

Anyway, this is only the first episode that I've sat through and watched entirely in Korean (with some English help as an afterthought), so of course I'm not going to be great at it at first. Sentences you read in textbooks and graded readers are always going to be somewhat dumbed down. Nothing in a language is ever as simple as it's supposed to be.

I sometimes joke to my friends that Koreans don't even speak Korean well, because they'll sometimes just say the subject, or sometimes they'll just say the verb, or they'll finish a sentence in one clause and then start it in the next, or they'll start saying one thing and not finish their sentence, but expect you to know what they mean.

Because this natural way of speaking isn't taught in textbooks, of course there's going to be a learning curve. But knowing that doesn't make it any less frustrating, you know.

And the 는 것 principle definitely doesn't help.

Ah, anyway. TLDR: I suck, but hopefully by the end of this challenge, I'll suck a little less.

[rdearman]

You don't have to be perfect, just better than yesterday.

[takislang]

Love Alarm Episode 2 Wrap-up:


Time it took me to watch: 3 hours and 33 minutes

* BTW when I say time it took me to watch, I'm counting the entire time of study session. So this doesn't just include the watching of the show. It also includes pausing to try and understand sentences, looking up new words, looking up/reviewing grammar, adding to anki, etc. The goal is to try and understand each sentence to the best of my ability before pressing play again.

Number of new vocab: 46 (Ish. Again.)
New grammar: 5

Interesting phrases/slang:

일대일로 = one-on-one
찐따 = slang for like a nerd, a loser, a dork

I actually didn't keep up much with any slang or cool words this episode.


Overall thoughts:

Short update, but this one took me much longer to get through (days wise not actually time watching) because I started working so I don't have many cohesive thoughts. A couple things I noticed is that I paused way less watching this time around, which means there was a longer time frame within the episode before there was a word or grammar point I didn't know/couldn't decipher.

That said, I still paused A LOT. I paused even when I knew every word and grammar point but couldn't understand what they were saying, or when I knew what they were saying but lacked confidence in my own understanding so I paused just to check the English translation anyway. Parsing Korean is so hard, man. There are still some phrases I didn't understand and Google couldn't really tell me what they meant. For those, I usually just ask the Korean discord I'm in.

I was also re-searching up some of the grammar I've already learned traditionally through a grammar source or textbook. I'm hoping they'll start sticking eventually. Things like 던데, 더라, 더니, etc. I'd say I've relooked them all up like twenty times now haha.

Something else I've noticed is that learning new vocabulary is so much easier when I'm actively engaging with Korean media. I watched about half this episode and took a pretty long break before picking it back up today. During that time, I was studying all the vocabulary I'd already added to Anki from this episode and last episode and as time went on, it got so much harder to try and understand. I think it has to do with actively reinforcing what I'd just learned vs learning something in somewhat isolation.

Anyway, not many thoughts this update, sorry!

[takislang]

Love Alarm Episode 3

Time it took me to watch: 2 hours and 48 minutes. (I'm getting faster!!)

Number of new vocab: 41 words (Getting lower, but still pretty high. Most of the words aren't repeating much which is frustrating haha)

* Keep note I'm skipping all the news scenes. Like, every word is a new word and I don't feel like tackling news vocabulary for this challenge haha

New grammar: I didn't keep track this episode so I'm guessing 0? Although I did search up some stuff for refreshers

Interesting phrases/slang:

윙윙 = buzzing, humming sound
베프 = best friend
쫄다 = to chicken out
토나오다 = to be so disgusted you feel like you could puke. in this ep, it was used as an insult towards someone
떼쓰다 = has a really long convoluted definition for basically just meaning someone's throwing a tantrum to get what they want
쏘다 = to treat someone with food
얻어먹다 = beg for food or to constantly be treated by food, basically you suck and you never pay for your own food

I'm going to try and catch up on existing vocabulary before I move on to the next episode.

[takislang]

Love Alarm Episode 4

Time it took me to watch: 2 hours and 26 minutes. (truckin along y'all, truckin along)

Number of new vocab: 35

I didn't keep track of much this episode, but there was this scene where the mother, a famous author, was doing a formal interview, and I honestly skipped over most of it so I think my low vocab/time might have something to do with that. You know when a scene is making your learning feel impossible/makes it feel like a chore, that's what that scene felt like, though I should've gone back to it anyway. Oh well. The good thing about this challenge is there's never gonna be a shortage of new words to learn.

[takislang]

A little update on my process, for anyone curious.

I've been using the Forest app to track my time if anyone is looking for a good way to do so. I set a label for each episode I watch and when I sit down to watch an episode, I'll hit the stop watch and stop it once I'm done studying. It automatically logs your time. The cute trees you can plant is a nice incentive.

I stopped using the Add to Anki extension because I kept making too many mistakes with it, BUT I discovered with the Mirinae.io website and I've been, quite frankly, obsessed with it. It's a Korean sentence parser, and it pulls definitions directly from the krdict.korea.go.kr website which I've found, is much more comprehensive than Naver dictionary. I still use Papago for a quick and automatic way to generate definitions from any given sentence, but when I want a full sentence translated, I like to throw it in there instead. It seems to be more accurate as a translator (sometimes!), and it tells you the exact definition it chose to generate the sentence. It still makes mistakes, a few silly ones, but I like it a lot and I like to compare translations between it and Papago just for the hell of it sometimes. I don't rely on translators at all, unless I want to see how a specific phrase is translated rather than a full sentence, but they're cool to mess around with and quick in a pinch.

Won't step foot near Google Translate though.

Anyway, that's all I've got for now.