Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

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zenmonkey
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby zenmonkey » Tue May 03, 2022 1:43 pm

Just bouncing off the post on the previous page where it seems you are calculating several hrs per day as a break regimen.

My thoughts: If you are doing 30+ minutes a day (3.5 hrs a week) on any language - that is not maintenance - that's active learning. No, wonder you are burned out.

About an hour a week is what I consider maintenance. Heck, you could go a few weeks doing nothing, get back and spend a few hours and I'd still call it maintenance. Sure, over a long stretch you're going to lose some skills, but nothing you can't bring back with an intensive 1 or 2 weeks.

Give yourself a break. Allow yourself to really just focus on 1 language for a limited amount of time a day. Then add or subtract if you feel that it will bring you more enjoyment.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Tue May 10, 2022 10:57 am

I've been working on Korean sporadically, just doing anki and watching lots of drama (but I do this anyway). I joined the super challenge for Korean, and the film portion is simple, since I watch a ton of dramas anyway. However, I'm attempting to tackle the reading portion. This is way more difficult! I've got a few articles which are 1 or 2 A4 pages of paper when printed. I'm slowly making my way through one page of an article about cocktail making.

This article has 12 paragraphs, and I've done about 1/2 of a page. There are way more than 250+ words on this page (Korean Hangul packs a lot more words on a page than the Latin alphabet) so that would probably count as more than a single page of the super challenge. It has taken me almost 1 week to read half a page. So I'm not going to be able to complete the super challenge reading in Korean. :oops:

I've booked a weekly Korean lesson until the end of July, and I've scheduled 2 Korean language exchanges per week. I have zero confidence of speaking or learning Korean in less than 10-15 years. I'm just not the sort of person who learns a language per year.

My plan for Korean is:
  • Do one lesson per week
  • Put all the words my teacher has taught me into Anki and review.
  • Create a phrasebook from my "list of things I wish I had known before landing" and then get a decent TTS audio for this, or ask exchange partners to record for me.
  • Work through the 2 Korean grammar books I have.
  • Do some language exchanges and ask questions and practice some phrases.
  • Super Challenge films (easy)
  • Super Challenge Reading (hard)

The SC reading is always intensive reading. I have to look up every single word, every time. Nothing has stuck yet, but doing this daily should hopefully see some words and the spelling in Hangul stick to my Teflon coated brain cells.

My list of Italian books is still there, and I try to do a couple of pages per day. The book I'm on at the moment is technically 3 books in 1 volume, and it is taking a little work. I could probably whizz through it a bit faster if I put some time on it.

My days and my updates have got a lot more boring since my return from Korea! I'll try to do something more exciting next time. :)
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby DaveAgain » Wed May 11, 2022 1:26 pm

rdearman wrote:The SC reading is always intensive reading. I have to look up every single word, every time. Nothing has stuck yet, but doing this daily should hopefully see some words and the spelling in Hangul stick to my Teflon coated brain cells.
Can you use parallel texts for this? I've found dictionary look-ups for LOTS of words a bit trying.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby druckfehler » Wed May 11, 2022 1:35 pm

It was very interesting and entertaining to read your travel log! It's good to read that travel restrictions have been lifted and you were able to go! If everything goes well I will be travelling to Korea again next spring with my partner and a mutual friend. So it was especially interesting to read about all the changes brought about by the pandemic. Almost empty Myeongdong sounds like a strange and unfamiliar Korea to me. But good to read there were still lots of food stalls to be encountered elsewhere and maybe things will be back to normal before long. It sounds like an ordeal to wear masks everywhere, so I'm curious to see what the situation will be like next year. Would you say the constant mask wearing even while hiking lessened your enjoyment of the trip? Or was it easy to get used to?

Seems rather logical to me that you're motivated to continue your Korean language journey - in my experience this language doesn't let you go once it's got you in its fangs :lol: I think your experience of not being able to communicate much is very normal - and you seem to have fared quite well! I don't think I was able to interact with people at all before I reached about A2 in Korean. It was just really hard to get used to Korean sentence construction and the unfamiliar word formation as well.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Wed May 11, 2022 5:20 pm

DaveAgain wrote:
rdearman wrote:The SC reading is always intensive reading. I have to look up every single word, every time. Nothing has stuck yet, but doing this daily should hopefully see some words and the spelling in Hangul stick to my Teflon coated brain cells.
Can you use parallel texts for this? I've found dictionary look-ups for LOTS of words a bit trying.

I did pickup some pamphlets in the various museums in both English and Korean. I plan to use those for parallel texts. :)

druckfehler wrote:Would you say the constant mask wearing even while hiking lessened your enjoyment of the trip? Or was it easy to get used to?

It was easy to get used to, the only thing that really bothered me was I started to get a chaff behind the ears from the elastic bands on the masks. But after a couple of days it toughened up and wasn't a problem.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Wed May 11, 2022 8:37 pm

Speaking of Korean and of an earlier request you made about deciding how to go on with it. This morning I watched ,

Lýdia Machová - Ten things polyglots do differently [EN] - PG 2017, and she made some comments pertinent to your situation (and inspirational to most of us). To sum it up, she says she learns only one language at a time, spends 80% of her study time on that language, and spends the other 20% maintaining her other languages.
That's the practicality of your situation, IMHO. And only you can know or decide how much you want to learn Korean. Since it is not a language you know and therefore cannot maintain, if the desire is low that leaves working on Italian, it seems to me. Over the years, from your log, it seems to me Italian is where your heart lies.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Fri May 13, 2022 6:35 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:Speaking of Korean and of an earlier request you made about deciding how to go on with it. This morning I watched

Lýdia Machová - Ten things polyglots do differently [EN] - PG 2017, and she made some comments pertinent to your situation (and inspirational to most of us). To sum it up, she says she learns only one language at a time, spends 80% of her study time on that language, and spends the other 20% maintaining her other languages.
That's the practicality of your situation, IMHO. And only you can know or decide how much you want to learn Korean. Since it is not a language you know and therefore cannot maintain, if the desire is low that leaves working on Italian, it seems to me. Over the years, from your log, it seems to me Italian is where your heart lies.

I was in the audience for that one. :)

Thanks for the reminder.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Fri May 13, 2022 7:00 pm

Korean
I've written up my list of phrases I wish I had known before landing, and I've use Google Translate, then got them all checked by a native. Now the plan is to use gradint to generate a Pimsleur like course for me with just these dozen phrases. I want to try to burn those into my brain. I can listen to then when doing the dishes or walking the dog or whatever. I plan to do a little video series on how to setup and use the gradint program. I had a lot of questions after my last video, and so I need to be a little more pedantic and complete.

I've checked back out the Pimsleur CD's from the library and need to listen to them all. I also have a list of words I need to memorise which I got during my last lesson, and I have a couple of hundred words to review from previous lessons. Makes my head hurt thinking about it.

Italian
I had a language exchange on Thursday. It went well and I haven't forgotten anything. It was a nice, pleasant chat and didn't throw up any problems. I've been reading a page or two of Italian sporadically, but I plan to get down to some serious reading soon. I'm actually completing a backlog of English books at the moment as well. Which is delaying things on the Italian front.

French
I had a nice long talk today in French. This is with the same lady I've been speaking with for a few years. She is the one who pushed me to describe how an aeroplane flies, etc. Today was no different, and she had me spend an hour describing my trip to Korea in great detail. So I told her and didn't really struggle, other than hitting some words I'd never used in French before, like protestors (manifestants). At the end of the hour (I normally do 2-hour exchanges with her) she was pondering and said. "While you were speaking, I was wondering if my father would understand you."

I was shocked, since I thought I had done a pretty good job. :( But she went on to explain that her father had left school at 15 and had never travelled. He literally didn't speak a word of English. But when I speak French it seems that if there is a word which exists in both languages I always pronounce it the English way, and on occasion if I don't know a word I take a punt and just say the English word with a French twist. This works surprisingly often, about 60% of the time! But when it doesn't exist, she supplies the correct French word. However, her father wouldn't be able to do this, nor she thought would he be able to decipher the English pronunciation of French words. In the end, she thought he would understand, but if I didn't know the word, I'd have to look it up. She has challenged me to come to France and speak with her father. This she feels is the true test of my French abilities. :lol:

I really wish my Korean was as effortless as French and Italian. I personally think that I'm not that great at either of them, but I can get on a call with a native speaker and hold a conversation for 30 minutes to an hour. If only Korean were that simple. :(
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby druckfehler » Wed May 18, 2022 9:59 pm

With Korean, my experience is that it takes years before a 30 minute phone call is possible. I'm always fascinated how many words of Spanish, French, Italian I know just through knowing English, German and living in Europe. Even just the ingredient list on something bought at the supermarket is language exposure. With Korean, you don't get anything for free - I used to hate and like that fact. I liked it, because with Portuguese I was kind of able to cheat myself into thinking I knew more than I actually did at the time. With Korean, that was never possible. If you know something, you've definitely studied it. I hope it doesn't get too frustrating, though!

I'd be interested in the Korean translations for your travel phrases, if you don't mind sharing them here.
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Re: Rdearman 2016-22 원숭이도 나무에서 떨어질 때가 있다 (Sometimes even monkeys fall from trees)

Postby rdearman » Thu May 19, 2022 8:07 am

druckfehler wrote:I'd be interested in the Korean translations for your travel phrases, if you don't mind sharing them here.


No problem. I put a folder on Google Drive and inside I put the final Gradint generated lessons, the spreadsheet with the final translations, and also the samples I made using the Polly TTS service. Hopefully you can find some use for them.
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