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

[Le Baron]

The committent to 1 hour of French/Italian maintenance every single day might well cause you to want to avoid it and even not put proper effort into it. Thus squandering quite a few hours a week.

I think of it like this. If you know a language reasonably well (including your own language which is more than 'reasonable') it doesn't mean you have to speak it every day to keep it oiled or learn. Something like how you exercise, then you rest. Do it weekly by all means, but maybe not every day, so that when you come to it it's welcome rather than a chore to get done.

And no need to bump up the hours to make them up. No. 30 minutes on Monday/Wed/Fri or Tue/Thu/Sat or even twice a week. Or on alternate days. So long as it's quality all the way. You'll know how to assess if it's working and enough or not.

[gsbod]

Well that was a plot twist I wasn't expecting!

In terms of maintenance, I think you're planning to spend much more time on it than is necessary. Given that conversations are your biggest motivating factor, I'd maybe consider keeping up the language exchanges and then aim to listen to something once or twice a week. Any more than that you'll risk learning something new

Or another approach worth considering is not bothering with maintenance at all. My French is no better than B1 all round, and I tend to neglect it for years at a time without doing much harm. It takes a few days to bring it back after a long break, but this is more time efficient than spending a couple of hours a week just treading water over a long period of time.

As for sentence mining, it's a technique I did use a bit for Japanese (it was fashionable at the time) but didn't really work for me. I think the only thing it really helped with was drilling kanji readings (not an issue for Korean). But setting up the cards took so long, it just turned studying into a lengthy data entry task. I don't think the benefits were worth the time spent. For improving listening and conversational skills, I found listening to and shadowing scripted conversations several times over to be much more beneficial, and also much quicker to set up.

Anyway, good luck with whatever language you settle on.

Personally I think you should book a trip to Italy.

[rdearman]

For improving listening and conversational skills, I found listening to and shadowing scripted conversations several times over to be much more beneficial, and also much quicker to set up.

Can you give me an example of this? I think I know what you mean, but want to be sure.

[eido]

I mean, by the time I've written this post, you'll probably have decided on something you want to do, but I'll throw my 2c in the fountain and make a wish to see what comes of it.

I take the side of @gsbod and @Le Baron (I'll be pulling in some data from @iguanamon, as well).

In terms of maintenance, I think you're planning to spend much more time on it than is necessary. Given that conversations are your biggest motivating factor, I'd maybe consider keeping up the language exchanges and then aim to listen to something once or twice a week. Any more than that you'll risk learning something new

As any long-term user of this forum knows, language learning is a process. We're always learning. And while I'd love to see you learning something new in Korean every day, I feel like that may not be the best path forward.

You're obviously considering your needs with the languages you want to learn, but you're not factoring in the practicalities. You were doing more of this when you were actually in South Korea. Your "phrases I wish I knew" list was entertaining and real for a lot of people, most of all you. I don't blame you for abandoning this for wild flights of 2-hour-a-day study, since you no longer have a reason to speak Korean daily. It's not necessary anymore. So I get the feeling that the motivation you have to learn Korean has flipped back toward the extrinsic side of the scale. In my limited view, though, the more of a "sunk cost fallacy" it is to learn something, the more we hold on to it and resist, trying to find "better ways to learn".

I've been there, fighting that fight. So I know a bit about it.

The grass is always greener on the other side: meaning, of course, that if only we had a better way, if only we maximized our time better, if only... We'd have reached our goals, whatever they may be. But it's not that way. We need a low-burning fire on the inside to keep us going. I actually had a bit of this discussion with my Korean teacher the other day, and he was very excited to see a student (i.e. me) have intrinsic motivation; however, he wouldn't leave me be after one session. That's because intrinsic motivation--like a flame--can go out and need to be re-lit.

@iguanamon says you always know the answer to your own question, sometimes even before you ask it. (Forgive me if I misquote, I'm paraphrasing ) Perhaps you know what to do, @rdearman? Personally, it seems to me that while you enjoy Korean, you might be afraid of the time commitment.

And for that, I'd re-direct you to this part of @Le Baron's wise advice:

And no need to bump up the hours to make them up. No. 30 minutes on Monday/Wed/Fri or Tue/Thu/Sat or even twice a week. Or on alternate days. So long as it's quality all the way. You'll know how to assess if it's working and enough or not.

Good luck! 화이팅!

[gsbod]

For improving listening and conversational skills, I found listening to and shadowing scripted conversations several times over to be much more beneficial, and also much quicker to set up.

Can you give me an example of this? I think I know what you mean, but want to be sure.

In my case I used the dialogue part of the Japanesepod101 podcasts, but you could do it with anything level appropriate where you have audio and a transcript. I had a subscription at the time so could get audio files of the dialogue only (which I edited down some more to get rid of all the introductory announcements/jingles etc), along with the transcripts. I worked through a bunch of dialogues at an appropriate level for me at the time. First I'd listen, then listen with the transcript, making sure I understood the content, then I'd listen and repeat and then I'd move on to shadowing (that is speaking at the same time as the recording). Once I was comfortable with a dialogue and ready to move on, I'd add the dialogue audio file to a playlist on my phone and listen to them all on repeat on my lunchtime walks.

I couldn't do blind shadowing, my brain just doesn't work that way.

[DaveAgain]

Mr Arguelles has/had a system of alternating within a language family.

As you have seemed so negative in the past about French, perhaps you could try putting all/most of the time allocated to those two into Italian instead, and relying on transfer between the two to keep your French useable?

[rdearman]

In my case I used the dialogue part of the Japanesepod101 podcasts, but you could do it with anything level appropriate where you have audio and a transcript. I had a subscription at the time so could get audio files of the dialogue only (which I edited down some more to get rid of all the introductory announcements/jingles etc), along with the transcripts. I worked through a bunch of dialogues at an appropriate level for me at the time. First I'd listen, then listen with the transcript, making sure I understood the content, then I'd listen and repeat and then I'd move on to shadowing (that is speaking at the same time as the recording). Once I was comfortable with a dialogue and ready to move on, I'd add the dialogue audio file to a playlist on my phone and listen to them all on repeat on my lunchtime walks.

I couldn't do blind shadowing, my brain just doesn't work that way.

This is interesting to me, because one of the things I was considering was creating simple dialogues taken from my list of things I wish I had known before I landed, and then ask my exchange partners to translate them and record them for me in Korean. Then practice speaking using those dialogues. I was considering not just sentence mining, but actually doing audio drills using these types of dialogues.

How well did this work for you?

Mr Arguelles has/had a system of alternating within a language family.

As you have seemed so negative in the past about French, perhaps you could try putting all/most of the time allocated to those two into Italian instead, and relying on transfer between the two to keep your French useable?

Yes, I don't really like the French language much, but I do know a couple of nice French people. So I'm really only maintaining it to speak with them. I read Luca's system for maintenance, and it seems similar to the Professors.

[gsbod]

This is interesting to me, because one of the things I was considering was creating simple dialogues taken from my list of things I wish I had known before I landed, and then ask my exchange partners to translate them and record them for me in Korean. Then practice speaking using those dialogues. I was considering not just sentence mining, but actually doing audio drills using these types of dialogues.

How well did this work for you?

I think that's a great idea, as long as your partners are comfortable recording themselves (not everybody is...)

I found the biggest benefit was for my listening comprehension, I got a lot better at parsing the language in real time. And when it comes to conversation, listening is an underrated skill.

But it also helped a lot with pronunciation, and also putting useful fragments of language in my head for later use, especially as Japanese can get a bit tongue twistery and the more polite you need to be the more of a tongue twister it is...

[rdearman]

Well that was a plot twist I wasn't expecting!

Why?

[gsbod]

Well that was a plot twist I wasn't expecting!

Why?

I guess I assumed you were done with Korean after your trip to Korea. Maybe if I watched more telenovelas I would have seen it coming