Korean, somehow

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dadofchos
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Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Mon Sep 19, 2022 4:10 pm

I've been browsing on this forum for over a year now. Began thinking about starting my own log about a month ago. I wanted to call this my "Korean extensive reading" log. I was all excited last month when I finished my first book in Korean without relying on a parallel translation. But having a child born in a Korean hospital shortly after finishing the book was an eye-opening experience: I might have initially been impressed with myself for reading a children's novel, but it would have been a lot more useful to be able to do...well, anything via speaking with the people around me in the hospital.

For context, I first approached studying Korean in 2013. I mostly only actually studied when we were visiting Korea, so until recently, that was maybe one month every two years or so. Needless to say I made no progress. In 2020 we began spending more significant chunks of time here, and that's basically when I started seriously making an attempt to learn the language.

Up until recently, my main goal was just to be able to read close-to-fluidly in Korean. I told myself I was fine with not being able to really communicate. My thinking was that, eventually, I'd be able to read effortlessly. Then I'd work on subtitles or audiobooks to nail down listening. Then finally start speaking properly. But...I actually live in Korea now. I have kids who interact with Korean doctors, teachers, peers, etc. I'd like to be able to converse with these people around me. I spent a lot of time buying into the "just consume media and you'll naturally come out the other end speaking like a native" line-of-thought seemingly prevalant among some corners of the web (YouTube). Unfortunately, I made little-to-no-progress in the speaking department just waiting for it to happen. Really, I've made remarkably little progress overall with Korean for the amount of effort put in. And I can see that a big part of that is because I was allocating my efforts towards the least-unpleasant parts (reading) while ignoring basically everything else and waiting for magic that didn't come.

Outside of banging my head against the wall with Korean, one of my primary hobbies has been browsing this and other forums and plotting my language learning approach. One of the most important pieces of advice, that doesn't apply just to language learning and took me ridiculously long to properly internalize, is that you get better at whatever you spend the most time practicing. When I spent most of my study time reading, without much dedicated grammar or vocab study and no effort whatsoever put into productive skills, I did eventually make discernable progress with reading in Korean. I got much better at guessing, tolerating ambiguity, and just pcking up what I could and plugging along. But I'm still far away from being able to just read to fill in all the remaining gaps in my knowledge. The gaps are more like chasms.

My receptive skills for conversation are sort of OK. I can usually follow along in basic, everyday interactions but more than I would like of that is reliant on my guesses to fill in what I didn't quite comprehend fully. It's hard to properly assess my level of understanding in real world interactions, and lately I've been doing some more focused watching which lets me check understanding a bit more carefully. I can watch 똘똘이, a kids animation available on Netflix here in Korea, and understand pretty much everything in an 11 minute episode. I think the last episode I watched I encountered 2 unknown words (some episodes would certainly be more, but it's a fairly simple - though, at least for me, enjoyable enough - kids show, so you could probably argue you can understand almost everything without knowing a word of Korean). I would definitely miss more without subtitles. I've been watching some of 갯마을 (Hometown Cha Cha Cha), a K-drama, as well. There I can go stretches where I understand most of the dialogue, but only short stretches where it's fairly simple things. It's still a very nice feeling to be able to understand even that much. Then my vocabularly rapidly begins to fail me. Even with pausing and looking up words (or checking the English subs with Language Reactor) to eliminate the vocabularly weakness, a lot of the grammar I am way too slow to parse in real-time, even if I "know" the grammar patterns in question and would be ok reading them. At spoken speed my parsing falls woefully behind.

My spoken responses are horrible. Lacking grammar, unable to come up with the correct vocabulary words in a reasonable time, or just not knowing the required vocabulary at all. I struggle a lot with pronounciation as well (another area where listening to certain YouTube polyglots and becoming overly afraid of "fossilizing errors" did me no good). I've worked on this quite a bit in the last few months, and can finally get pretty much all of the sounds of Korean right, at least some of the time (I can apparently pronounce ㅅ and ㅆ, but I can almost never actually hear the difference). But when nervous speaking and pausing to find the words, my intonation is horrible and my ability to mostly pronounce the right sounds in isolation completely disappears. But when I am able to respond with some amount of "automaticity", it seems like I can usually be understood.

So, what I was doing up until recently: reading. My big "success" was reading The Endling by Katherine Applegate translated into Korean. It's a fantasy novel for middle-schoolers. I read the Animorphs series by the same author as a kid and have a lot of nostaligia for those. The Endling was not as good, or at least not as good as I remember the Animorphs. But it was fairly easy to read, nearly 500 pages, and there are two sequels. Ideal for extensive reading, as I understood it. I started out with the english text in parallel, but after a few chapters started reading farther and farther ahead in Korean, and read the last ~150 pages or so without looking at the translation at all. This was a good experience and I definitely learned something, but primarily that I could plow through and read a not-too-hard book with a decent amount of sword-fighting and talking animals and (kinda) enjoy the experience. I loosely followed some advice from rdearman here and similar advice from imron from the chinese-forums site and would occassionally read a page or two intensively, looking up all unknown words. I kept track a couple times, and I would usually know between 80-90% of the words on a given page: which didn't seem like it would be enough, but apparently I was lucky and my known words skewed heavily to the most important for this particular text (I could almost always figure out who flew out of the window to safety and who got captured by the guards).

I ended up with just under 1k anki cards (Kr -> En) from the Endling and some other reading over about a month long period. I semi-automated the card creation process from dictionary lookup -> Anki, so I was happy to create so many cards as deleting them later didn't feel like much of a loss, which has previously been a sticking point for me with using Anki. But I ended up with only about a 70% retention rate for these cards a month later. This is with a large number of learning steps, to try to make sure I would remember the words once they matured. What my experience was that Anki certainly didn't hurt, it wasn't enough to really solidly know the words unless I was reading enough to have encountered them multiple times since originally creating the card - I think this is a common experience, and is certainly not bad, but it also made me realize that just cranking the size of the deck up to 10k cards or so won't guarantee I retain all of the words just via SRS's "magic" alone.

What I slowly seem to have been realizing is that I need to use the language to learn it. And using it means a lot more than just reading and (sometimes) trying to passively recognize words via Anki. Using it is hard and I've been trying to avoid it, but that obviously isn't working :-)

What I've been doing since these realizations:

  • Pimsleur Korean 2: Did a few lessons. Was nice to discover that I could kinda-sorta do this while jogging, as up to now all attempts (e.g., audiobooks, podcasts) to learn Korean while exercising had been just way too hard for my level and of little benefit. Pimsleur is certainly useful and helped me get a couple more semi-automatic phrases, but I'm not sure they're the most efficient use of time compared to the next two items (given my status as a "false beginner", at least).
  • Glossika-style prompts: English prompts followed by the Korean translation. This is also nice in that it can be done while exercising and seems helpful. Drawback is I basically am just practicing random sentences, so not systematically developing automaticity in any particular area.
  • FSI Korean: These drills are hard. I finally tried them for the first time just last night. I've only done a bit of Unit 19, along the lines of "is X as easy as Y?" -> "Yes, X is as easy as Y". I could almost do these while walking outside, not at all while jogging. Much more intense than Pimsleur. But the initial experience plus a number of threads here containing advice from iguanamon have me convinced that these are the type of things I need to be doing. A couple drawbacks of FSI Korean that kept me from even really trying until yesterday:
    • Unit 1's workbook is all in romanization, and a romanization unlike anything I've seen elsewhere, so I basically can't read the drill prompts at all. This can be overcome, but it does feel a bit silly learning to decode the romanization...alteratively, I could just improve my listening skills so I don't need the transcript, but that probably be awhile...jumping into Unit 2 is doable at my current level but definitely a big challenge.
    • The audio recordings, according to my wife, sound a bit different than "modern Korean". Specifically, her initial thought was that the speakers were North Korean...however, given that I don't sound anything at all like any type of native now after many years of listening to Korean, I don't think a few hours of drills will have me sounding like these natives either, so that's not a major concern.
  • Pronounciation/Intonation: I quite like the voice of 김선호 in Hometown Cha Cha Cha, so I've been experimenting with "chorusing" with some audioclips taken from the show. I have a couple pronounciation textbooks for Korean too that have been really helpful with improving my ability to produce/recognize the individual sounds properly. Those both have "intonation" sections that I should start looking at as well.
  • Watching: I've mostly replaced reading with watching-plus-reading-subtitles. 똘똘이 has been great for that - it's a confidence boost to be able to understand most of the show, which previously was not possible for me with any type of media. I quite like the idea of just binge watching a show to improve listening, but I don't think I'm ready for that yet - if I don't know 10%+ of the words in a random K-drama, it's not strictly listening that's the problem.
  • Textbooks: A lot of very reasonable advice has been given on this forum to buckle down and work through textbooks. It's not fun and I've ignored that advice for years, but finally the time has come. I'm going through Elementary Korean, as I like the exposition and the exercises are plentiful. There are two more books in the series after this one. Smallwhite's advice, in particular, about doing the exercises quickly and verbally has been really helpful, as it lets me do them even when not sitting down at a desk (e.g., when putting the kids to bed, although I just _think_ the answers instead of actually speaking at that particular time). This experience has been very humbling as well, as I basically understand 99% of the sentences used in the middle lessons of this beginner's textbook but can see how my productive skills are still challenged at this level.
  • Production SRS: Inspired by some posts I came across by smallwhite about SRS and flashcard usage. I haven't wanted to make a deck from scratch yet, so I'm having a go with Evita's korean vocab deck, modified to be from English to Korean. I'm trying to keep the overall amount of time spent drilling vocabularly not too high, but my vocabulary has been a weakness for basically two years and recognition SRS + reading has not done the trick so need to try something.
  • Speaking practice: I am now making a bit more effort here. I am surrounded by native speakers (including family), but currently limited by my own limitations...sometimes I am able to e.g. meet the parent of another kid at my son's school and exchange a few sentences (where are you from, what age are the kids, etc) and feel proud of myself for the success. Other times I am unable to make myself understood when asking the name of a dish I see at a restaurant. Either way, my "conversations" are at most a few sentences, at least for now.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby rdearman » Mon Sep 19, 2022 4:24 pm

I feel your pain. Fighting!
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Sat Sep 24, 2022 3:05 pm

I've been practicing speaking when I get the chance. Mostly just "how old are your kids?" type quick exchanges with other parents, but did have a several minutes long - probably a record - conversation with my mother-in-law about the differences between Korean and Mexican food. Had a longer talk with another parent at soccer class. Was mostly a running commentary about the kids' activities, which was nice in that I think I could mostly understand but was also my first experience where I spent a lot of time nodding and saying "네", as I wasn't always sure I totally understood but there wasn't time/need to ask clarifying questions either. Was quite like my experience with extensive reading: the words flowed by and somehow I had a pretty solid ideaguess of what was going on, while also being painfully aware I might be misinterpreting things horribly. On the other hand, I failed pretty completely in an interaction at the bakery - every time I go, there is either no bread ready or the bread is apparently too hot for it be sliced. I may have eventually got my point across (essentially by asking "sliced?" over and over, then finally saying "tomorrow - one or two pm?"), but I had to ask my wife for the proper way to ask this for next time: "언제쯤 와야 빵을 자를 수 있어요?". I thought I had tried something vaguely similar ("언제 썰도 돼요?") but no go. Also, apparently my pronunciation of 과일 is off, as two unsuspecting visitors were both unable to understand that I was offering them fruit. My wife says it sounds fine, but that would seem to just show that she's used to my version of the language...

I finished going through the second half of Elementary Korean. By the last couple chapters I was only doing about half of the exercises, as they pretty much all run something like "translate 20 sentences using this grammar pattern". It was useful to quickly go through the chapters, but I'm not sure about continuing on with the next book in the series. I find the grammar explanations in Modern Korean more useful, although I'm still not sure how to tackle independently going through a (more or less) reference grammar as opposed to the structure of a regular textbook.

A recurring thought I've had is to write diary entries in Korean. I could use this to guide the grammar study (Modern Korean's second half is organized to go from "how do I express this?" to the equivalent Korean patterns) and also to reinforce every day vocabulary. Most of my conversation chances are likely to focus on the kids' recent activities, so writing should help me focus on filling in knowledge that I'm likely to be able to apply soon. I started this tonight but am now writing this blog entry instead of finishing it...

For FSI Korean, decided to make things simple on myself and just started from Unit 1. There's no hangul in the guidebook for the first 18 units, but the content in the initial chapters is fairly simple so it's actually quite useful to just use the audio alone and do the drills. Was able to do Units 1 and 2 while (slowly) jogging, which is the type of thing I've been looking for for a long time (would be nice if the drills were actually fun, but I'll be able to comprehend the fun native materials someday...)

I watched a couple more episodes of 똘똘이. Tried several other shows as well but couldn't really get into them. 똘똘이 is good as far as kids shows go but I still have to force myself to watch it.

Also had a family visit to the library here. Picked up a couple Korean books about language learning but haven't done much more than flip through them. I'd like to resume reading but can't see a domain yet where reading is going to be much help for my more immediate speaking goals, so holding off on this for now.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Mon Oct 03, 2022 10:45 am

Vocabulary

I've tried anki half a dozen times with my own decks (since deleted), various pre-made decks, vocabulary notebooks, word lists, gold lists, shopping lists. I've tried omitting dedicated vocab study and just concentrated on reading. None of it works. Or it all works, but painfully slowly.

I mentioned earlier that, over about the last month, I had accumulated a 1k card anki deck of words I had encountered in reading. These were all recognition cards, and generated from a subset of my dictionary lookups.

I had a very high leech rate on this deck after about half the cards reached mature status. So I ended it up letting it sit for the last two weeks before returning to it. 600 reviews due, I did 250, and got about 55% correct. I deleted the deck.

It's too easy for me to equate "I have a card for this in anki" with actually knowing a word. This encourages me to accumulate massive decks of cards, but not to retain them properly. I don't think I can pin down exactly what it means to know a word, but I thought about some kind of an operational definition. E.g., if I knew the word 기적, then I would be able to:

  1. given the word, recall it's definition (기적=miracle)
  2. given the English word miracle, recall 기적
  3. use it in a sentence
  4. recognize it when spoken

1 and 2 correspond straightforwardly to anki cards. I went through some articles about cloze deletions, ended up flipping through fluent forever again, and settled on a cloze card as an easily-testable stand in for 3 with a fill-in-the-blank "[miracle]이 지평선 너머에서 다가오고 있는" card.

4 shouldn't really be necessary given the phonetics of 한글, but I still have a few sound pairs in korean (아/어 most vexingly) that I can produce properly, I can (usually) distinguish when heard together and answer properly on minimal pairs tests, but often remain firmly in some kind of "these sounds are the same don't worry" bucket in my memory when it comes time to retrieve a word that uses either. This probably needs to be addressed separately from vocab study, but adding this additional card type can't hurt.

Adding a card with the sound (snagged from krdict.korean.go.kr) takes about one minute. This has always seemed too slow in the past, but after my third or fourth time building a 1k word deck only to realize I'm not actually learning anything, maybe 1 minute per word is not so bad.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby rdearman » Mon Oct 03, 2022 2:48 pm

Many people here will disagree with me, but what you're saying it takes to "know" a word in Korean, I think is not accurate. Because when you are speaking in another language "fluently" then you aren't really translating from English into the target language. For example, I have just come off a call with an Italian, and we were speaking in Italian for the last 30 minutes. At no point in that conversation was I thinking of the words in English and then translating them into Italian. I had an idea that I wanted to convey, and I said it in Italian. If I have to stop and think about what the word is in Italian and translate from English, everything grinds to a halt. I'm sure you've had conversations in the past in English and couldn't remember the word you wanted, and the conversation came to a complete halt while you racked your brain for the word. Same problem when using another language.

So perhaps rather than anki cards, you might want to concentrate on #3 & #4 on your list. Use words in a sentence. Try to say everything you say in Korean, try to think everything you think in Korean. If you don't know a word, substitute the English word, write down the English word, so you can look it up later and move on. For #4 lots of reading and lots of conversations.

Active use of the words will drive them into your head faster, I think. BTW, I have a similar sort of issue with Korean words. My level is very low, but with the anki deck I don't immediately recognise the spelling of the word, and I don't actually know it until I sound it out. Even something which should be simple like: 주스 I cannot figure out until I hear it in my head. This goes for just about every Korean word I have ever seen. So I can eventually puzzle out a sentence like: 저는 한국말 잘 못해요. if I take my time and slowly pronounce it. I think the difference in alphabet is an added hurtle for remembering vocabulary. For example, in French, the same sentence: Je ne parle pas bien le coréen. is much easier (for me) to remember because it is in (more or less) the same alphabet.

I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about it, it happens to everyone. But the words you remember most are the ones you actively use. You might want to change the way you use anki to something like this.

Stick 200 nouns into a deck. When you get a card, you have to make 5 sentences with that word. So suppose you get, 우유. Try to use it in 5 different sentences.
I bought milk.
I'm going to buy milk.
I drank milk.
I hate milk.
I spilled the milk on the floor.

Next: 기적
It is a miracle that I am still sane.
She said it was a miracle.
Miracle on 34th street is a great film.
My days are filled with miracles; a flower blooming, my heart beating, the purr of a cat.
It isn't a miracle, it is just science.

Anyway, you get the idea. For me, one word I know by heart is 공부하다. Because my tutor asks me about studying all the time. Did you study? When did you study? I didn't study last week. I will study harder next week. I study Korean every day.... blah, blah... but I definitely know 공부하다 in its various forms. I might not know any of the other words in the sentence, but frequent use has made that one well known.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Tue Oct 04, 2022 12:24 am

Thanks, that is good advice!

rdearman wrote:Many people here will disagree with me, but what you're saying it takes to "know" a word in Korean, I think is not accurate. Because when you are speaking in another language "fluently" then you aren't really translating from English into the target language.


This all makes sense. I realize I didn't word my previous post properly: I didn't mean to define knowing a word, rather just identify some consequences of knowing a word, in some sense. For example, milk and 우유 are pretty much burned into my brain at this point. Given one, or presented with the physical item, I could instantly recall either word. (For non-concrete nouns, these consequences might not always hold.) It's not clear anki-ing these tasks will actually help anything. But it should be true the opposite direction, that if I knew the words as well as I know 우유, answering the cards would be a breeze. I guess the intent here would be that each anki card is a mini-test for whether I know the word as solidly as I would like. I know from past failures with anki that these tests by themselves are not sufficient make much progress, and I need to actually use the words as well.

As far as using the words, describing things as I go in korean, etc. This would probably solve most of my problems :) I am working towards this. Not sure if it is due to an inherent difficulty or just my laziness, but slowly making progress in this regard.

rdearman wrote:I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about it, it happens to everyone. But the words you remember most are the ones you actively use. You might want to change the way you use anki to something like this.

Stick 200 nouns into a deck. When you get a card, you have to make 5 sentences with that word. So suppose you get, 우유. Try to use it in 5 different sentences.
I bought milk.
I'm going to buy milk.
I drank milk.
I hate milk.
I spilled the milk on the floor.


This is a good idea. I should try this. One question if you've done this previously: how helpful is the SRS aspect with scheduling these types of drills? It seems like this could be a useful way to "force" output, either inside an srs or just as random drills for a certain amount of time each day.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby rdearman » Tue Oct 04, 2022 7:36 am

Just answer Bad to the words and you'll see them again. It works as a random word picker. You could just as easily use a spreadsheet. Put a column of random numbers beside the words and then sort by the random numbers. Then every time you sort by that column it will shuffle the words.
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Sat Oct 08, 2022 2:07 pm

The last couple weeks have been a bit rough with two out of three kids alternating being sick (not the one month old, luckily). Sleep has been hovering around 5 hours a night, but this evening everyone seemed much improve so maybe sleep schedules will start getting back to normal soon.

Studying in the last two weeks has been mainly:

  • Watching: Finished 똘똘이 on Netflix. That show seems to be absolutely perfect for my level: can understand 95%+ of the words, short 12 minute episodes, vocabulary all very relevant to my (kids') daily lives. Unfortunately there are only 24 episodes. I should probably rewatch without subtitles, now that I think of it. Watched some of two kids animes, Zoids Wild Zero and Avatar. Both are a little above my level right now (with subtitles; without it's far beyond me).
  • Grammar: Finally just dove back into the fountainhead: Routledge's Korean: A Comprehensive Grammar. Really like this book and for each particular grammar point, I generally find its explanations and examples both more helpful and more concise than other resources, e.g., regular textbooks. Unfortunately with close to 500 pages of concise explanations of grammar points, it's always a bit daunting. I feel now that I've made enough progress elsewhere with the language that I can maybe handle dipping straight into the grammar book. Trying to browse a few sections per day, either whatever seems familiar but not fully internalized or based on patterns noticed in listening/reading.
  • Output: Still a small but steady amount every day of actual speaking practice. For drills, finished FSI through Unit 4 and shadowed TTMIK's new "150 Sentences" audio, which was great but relatively short (it came out on their podcast feed recently, I haven't checked if there are more such tracks in their premium content).
  • Anki:
    • Dipped heavily back into Anki. It's ideal for the recent schedule with the kids, where I have a lot of short periods of time where I can use my phone but not much else. The Fluent Forever-style cards I mentioned earlier do seem helpful, but it is a major drawback to take 1 or more minutes per card - it's fine for a few words per day that you really want to learn, but if you just want to have _something_ in Anki to grind through in bits and pieces throughout the day, a few cards is not really enough.
    • I started with cloze deletions from the grammar textbook. These - along with making as many example sentences as I can myself with each pattern - seems to be helpful at least for short-term review of the concepts. Been "mining" some grammar patterns from 나는 유튜브로 여어를 배웠다 (I learned English with Youtube) and the first Hunger Games book.
    • Subs2Srs: Played around with these at various times before, but never felt like they were a great fit for my current level in Korean. Maybe this is different now: experimenting with using these as a bridge towards watching without subtitles, so just audio on the front. First episode of Avatar made ~340 cards. Not quite all the way through, but seems like about 125 of those will be useful (new vocabulary and/or just need more practice parsing the audio).
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby dadofchos » Wed Nov 02, 2022 2:40 pm

Listening

Haven't been doing much new input, but have at least been keeping up with Anki/Subs2SRS daily. Made it through the cards for the first four episodes of Avatar, part of an episode of Hometown Cha Cha Cha, and one episode of The Hollow. The Hollow is an animated show on Netflix - it's dubbed and the subtitles are not close-captions, but they actually almost perfectly match the audio. Sentence endings etc all match, they just occasionally omit a word or two from the captions. More than good enough for subs2srs use. I'm basically always marking the cards as passed, picking between hard/good/easy based on how I was able to understand (or not) the audio alone. I've been doing this long enough to have seen cards marked "hard" come up for multiple additional reviews, and they do seem to be getting easier each time. The subs2srs cards alone are certainly not enough listening practice on their own, but it's helpful to keep it as a baseline of sorts.

Reading

I've been trying to get back into reading the last week or so. Subs2SRS left me spoiled with the ease of generating anki cards, and I'd never been happy with the (non-existent?) options for a Korean popup dictionary like Yomichan for Japanese. So I finally decided to put something together myself - I'd played around with the https://krdict.korean.go.kr/ API for things like offline text analysis, but I'd put off trying to make any kind of popup dictionary since I mostly read on a tablet or phone and didn't want to have to write/modify an Android app. Then I somehow was reminded of Yomichan, installed it, and thought that maybe doing some dedicated daily study on a laptop wouldn't be so bad if the tooling was anywhere close to what Yomichan+AnkiConnect gets you.

So I spent most of my language "learning" time this last week instead working on a Chrome extension that does the basic things I wanted: define a word on hover (stemmed, so can usually handle conjugated verb forms, particles, etc without trouble) and one-click export to Anki, with sound and context on the cards. I used it to read a couple Donga kids news articles yesterday, and worked through some of 고양기 학교 this evening. It could still use some improvements, but I think I liked the process of reading with a popup dictionary.

popupdict.png


Animated gif: https://s1.gifyu.com/images/20221102230242.gif (there's some caching of definitions going on, so it's not always as responsive as shown - the krdict api isn't always super fast to send its response)
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Re: Korean, somehow

Postby Maengin » Thu Nov 03, 2022 1:46 am

dadofchos wrote:I'd never been happy with the (non-existent?) options for a Korean popup dictionary like Yomichan for Japanese.


There is a Korean dictionary for Yomichan.
https://github.com/Samuihasu/krdict-yom ... ses/tag/v1

But what you created is much better since it includes the audio and example sentences. Do you plan to post the extension to the chrome store?
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