Korean for Fun

[Sizen]

KO1K 430/1000. Today 아/아서 was introduced. This was a form I'd seen before (만나서 반가워요 for example) but didn't understand. It was translated as "because, since" but this somehow didn't sit well with me. I looked it up in Japanese and found this site that describes it as ので and I still wasn't satisfied. I then found this site that describes it as a sort of explanatory て and it finally clicked.

만나서 반가워요 = 会(え)て嬉しいです
늦어서 미안해요 = 遅く(なっ)てすみません
오늘 너무 많이 일해서 피곤해요. = 今日働きすぎて疲れました
비가 너무 많이 와서 놀랐어요. = 雨が多すぎて驚きました

This seems to map nicely onto my understanding, so I'll go with it for the time being.

Assimil lesson 30. The last two lessons have been an introduction to adjectives and their attributive forms, which I already know quite well from KO1K, so this has been smooth sailing. The honorific version of 먹다, 드시다, was also introduced.

Kimchi-jjigae was also mentioned in one of the exercises. I've wanted to make my own kimchi for a while now, so maybe I should give it a shot and then make Kimchi-jjigae since I'll be off work for 10 days again and it's actually still rather cold where I live.

[Sizen]

KO1K 440/1000. I'm really enjoying the FSRS experience. I'll see a card I learned for the first time over a week ago and remember it just enough that it feels like my brain actually has to do a little work to remember it. This feels better than seeing a card from the other day and just knowing it because it's still fresh in my mind. It really feels like I'm getting the full benefits of the testing effect while not putting that much effort into studying. It feels like Anki is telling me, "Hey, you want to know these things, right? Chill out, dude. Let's stop and smell the roses. You'll remember it in no time, man. Kick back, relax, and I'll remind you about it when the time is right," instead of "Oh, you want to learn these things? Here it is. Now here it is again. And just for good measure, here it is AGAIN! YOU GOT IT IN YOUR SKULL YET!?!?!" This feels good for language learning because it's not like I'm going to be tested on all this stuff tomorrow. It's okay if I only start to feel comfortable with the word or phrase a month or two from now.

Assimil lesson 31. This one was another rough one like lesson 25, mostly because there was just so much vocabulary. Chopsticks, spoon, snack, sweets, dessert, soup. Normally, often, almost always, after. New, more grammar centred ideas like "or" and "as". I usually listen to the recording two times before listening while looking at the text, but this time I must have listened four or five times before I could make heads or tails of it. I made 11 cards and some of them have more than one new piece of information, which is something I try to avoid, but we'll see how it goes.

I wonder about the idea that "Koreans almost always have lunch outside," though. I feel like in the modern day, with work and apartment life, most people would eat indoors.

Completely unrelated, I've been looking for Assimil l'ukrainien for a while now since it's out of print and the second-hand copies on amazon.ca are priced at $300 for the book alone. It looks like Renaud-Bray has some copies in stock (note the hilarious use of the Latin alphabet in place of Cyrillic), though, so I ordered one! Hopefully, it's not a lie because I'd like to learn Ukrainian one day as it was my grandparents first language and my mother spoke it with her grandmother when she was young.

[emk]

KO1K 440/1000. I'm really enjoying the FSRS experience. I'll see a card I learned for the first time over a week ago and remember it just enough that it feels like my brain actually has to do a little work to remember it. This feels better than seeing a card from the other day and just knowing it because it's still fresh in my mind. It really feels like I'm getting the full benefits of the testing effect while not putting that much effort into studying. It feels like Anki is telling me, "Hey, you want to know these things, right? Chill out, dude. Let's stop and smell the roses. You'll remember it in no time, man. Kick back, relax, and I'll remind you about it when the time is right," instead of "Oh, you want to learn these things? Here it is. Now here it is again. And just for good measure, here it is AGAIN! YOU GOT IT IN YOUR SKULL YET!?!?!" This feels good for language learning because it's not like I'm going to be tested on all this stuff tomorrow. It's okay if I only start to feel comfortable with the word or phrase a month or two from now.

Ah, neat. This is super fascinating, because I was realizing this morning how differently I was using Anki from the FSRS model. I'm essentially trying to keep average card difficulty in a narrow band, and to suspend or demphasize difficult cards. But I often muddle through those first 10–14 days of reviews at only about 85% of my final comprehension of the card. Then the card goes away for 20 days or so, and when it comes back, it's usually somehow much easier than it was the last time I saw it. Do you ever get that effect with sentence/audio cards now that you're using FSRS? And what leech settings do you prefer?

I feel like FSRS is a huge improvement for many people's use case, but I really don't want to disrupt a system that's working for me. I wish I could enable FSRS just for my "conjugation" deck, which seems like a perfect use case to try it out. But apparently it's all or nothing.

[Sizen]

Ah, neat. This is super fascinating, because I was realizing this morning how differently I was using Anki from the FSRS model. I'm essentially trying to keep average card difficulty in a narrow band, and to suspend or demphasize difficult cards. But I often muddle through those first 10–14 days of reviews at only about 85% of my final comprehension of the card. Then the card goes away for 20 days or so, and when it comes back, it's usually somehow much easier than it was the last time I saw it. Do you ever get that effect with sentence/audio cards now that you're using FSRS? And what leech settings do you prefer?

Honestly, it feels about the same as it used to. To be fair, I haven't gotten to the point where I have loads of mature cards that have been using FSRS from the very beginning, but I definitely have had the experience of harder cards being easier all of a sudden after 2 weeks of not seeing it. Then again, sometimes the card is just hard enough that I hear it the first time and go... what? Only to listen to it again and understand it perfectly. But I feel like that's where the learning is happening for me, rather than just seeing the card and going, "Oh yeah, right. That thing." I'll probably have a better idea in a few months since language learning really is a long term endeavour.

I think the biggest benefit has been that I don't feel like I've lost anything. In fact, I've gained more time which I can use to study Assimil with, and the synergy there is quite nice. One of the main reasons I stopped studying last year was that doing all of my Anki reps and an Assimil lesson took up so much time that it wasn't sustainable for me. I also didn't feel like I was actually internalizing anything after my Anki reps started taking 40/50+ minutes a day. Now I make cards out of each Assimil lesson manually on top of all that and I average under an hour a day of total study time, with on average 26~27 minutes spent on Anki. And amazingly, I feel like I'm learning better. Or at least familiarizing myself with the language better.

[Sizen]

KO1K 450/1000. More and more I'm getting vocabulary and grammar that I've already seen in Assimil. The opposite is also true. In fact, yesterday was the first time I saw a word, 밖, in KO1K only for it to come up for the first time in that day's Assimil lesson as well.

Assimil lesson 32. I enjoyed this lesson. It was a discussion of common Korean food and drinks that one might get while out drinking. You have soju with samgyeopsal and beer with fried chicken. Don't forget makgeolli with buchimgae on rainy days (a tradition whose origin is unknown but is suspected to come from how similar rain and frying buchimgae sound, apparently). The KO1K card type that I've been using to make Anki cards for Assimil has a handy spot for images that I never use, but I made liberal use of it today to compensate for all the "untranslatable" food and drink names. When I was at university a few years, I actually had a Canadian-born Korean friend who brought me and a couple of friends to a Korean bar where we had plenty of makgeolli, so it was kind of fun to be reminded of that experience. Unfortunately, if I ever went to Korea I probably wouldn't be able to have somaek or buchimgae because of my celiac disease, but I can probably find some gluten-free beer to mix with soju and just make my own buchimgae with a gluten-free flour mix.

I was listening to Fate by (G)I-DLE yesterday and noticed the sentence 피곤해 죽겠네. It took me a moment, but I realized, "Hey! I know all those things!" The only thing is that 겠 seems to have a number of meanings and I didn't know this one. Looks like it can have a similar meaning to そう in Japanese, i.e. 死にそう. So, 疲れて死にそう. Fun! I think this is also an example of the 서 in 아서 being left out that KO1K mentioned.

I've been messing around with asbplayer a bit ever since I saw it mentioned in this thread. I like it a lot better than my experience with Migaku. In any case, I'm tempted to make some Anki cards out of subtitled song lyrics on YouTube with it. I don't want to overdo it, though, since I'm already doing 10 cards from KO1K, on average 6 (2 to 11) cards from Assimil, 2 cards from a Sino-Korean numbers deck and 2 cards from a native Korean numbers deck every day. I could easily spiral out of control if I'm not careful. I might have to save song mining until I'm done KO1K and Assimil if I decide to continue my studies.

[Sizen]

KO1K 460/1000. Much easier day with some grammar and vocab I've already seen in Assimil. I like that 노력 has started to sound almost exactly like Japanese 努力 because of the denasalization of the initial 'n'.

Assimil lesson 33. We're one third there!! This one was hard again just because of the food names. It was pretty heavy on adjectives and food names, discussing the kinds of food that are eaten in each season. Fresh spring vegetable bibimbap in the warm spring. Hot samgyetang and refreshing naengmyoen in the hot summer. Grilled fish in the cool fall. Hot soups in the cold winter. When I was in Taiwan, I remember being offered scalding tea in the summer because the prevailing knowledge was that hot drinks made you sweat and therefore cooled you down, and it sounds like that's the same idea behind eating hot soup in the summer in Korea.

A few other discoveries: I was listening to this video for kicks and noticed that 게임 is actually pronounced 께임. I'd noticed the raised pitch when it came up in lesson 12 of Assimil, but I thought it had more to do with intonation because my listening wasn't as good. Now I know to just never trust Hangeul.

비빔밥, which came up in Assimil today, is also pronounced 비빔빱, but this was pretty obvious from the recording.

인기 also appears to be 인끼. I can't let my guard down for one moment.

I'm trying to focus on what I've completed already rather than what I have left because I feel my motivation wane when I think, "67 more lessons to go," but I feel proud when I think, "Over a month of studying down!"

[Sizen]

KO1K 476/1000. Weird number, I know. I've been enjoying this deck less as of late and I was thinking of reducing the number of cards I do to 5 per day. That would mean it would take twice as long to finish and I'd be long done Assimil by the time I finished, however, and that doesn't feel quite right to me. I've settled on 8 cards per day for the time being so that I finish both "courses" at around the same time. We'll see how I like that and if it's still not doing it for me, I'll go down to 5. I'd like to focus more time on Assimil, anyway, since I feel like I'm getting the most out of it right now. I'd also not considered doing the active wave originally, but as of late I've been doing the exercises at the end of each lesson a bit different form the intended way. Usually it's a fill in the blank exercise, but I've just been hiding the Korean completely and translating the whole French sentence to Korean. I've actually found this quite useful as it feels more like a test that I have to think about. If the whole active phase feels like that, I can definitely see how that'd be beneficial. It just means my study time will go up quite a bit once I hit lesson 51 and I might need to take more time away from KO1K.

Assimil lesson 35. That wraps up week 5 of Assimil! I'd call this week challenging, interesting and fun. Adjectives were the focus in terms of grammar, and today's review reflected that well. The introduction to Korean food and food culture was super interesting, but also made the lessons more difficult than usual. Well worth it, though!

It sounds like I'll get to see more about relative clauses with action verbs next week, which is an extension of adjectives (or the more accurate "verbe d'état" as Assimil calls them). I'm already fairly familiar with the concept because of Japanese, and more so Classical Japanese which differentiated a bit more between sentence final and attributive forms like Korean. These kinds of sentences have also already started popping up in KO1K, so I suspect this week won't be too arduous. I can't tell from the lesson titles if there's an overall theme this week, but maybe I'll be surprised.

[emk]

I'd also not considered doing the active wave originally, but as of late I've been doing the exercises at the end of each lesson a bit different form the intended way. Usually it's a fill in the blank exercise, but I've just been hiding the Korean completely and translating the whole French sentence to Korean. I've actually found this quite useful as it feels more like a test that I have to think about. If the whole active phase feels like that, I can definitely see how that'd be beneficial. It just means my study time will go up quite a bit once I hit lesson 51 and I might need to take more time away from KO1K.

A week ago, I selectively "flipped" a bunch of my Avatar audio cards, and basically created a mini active wave. Because I already know the cards so well in the forward direction, the reverse direction is easier than I expected. (See the last couple pages of my Spanish log for card formats, etc.) This exercise feels like it has been extremely useful so far.

I suspect doing an active wave with Assimil and Anki should work well. But for the average Assimil book, the active wave often becomes messier and more frustrating after lesson 60 or so, when the text starts getting much longer and they start using native texts. Often those can't be reconstructed the same way earlier lessons can.

[Sizen]

I suspect doing an active wave with Assimil and Anki should work well. But for the average Assimil book, the active wave often becomes messier and more frustrating after lesson 60 or so, when the text starts getting much longer and they start using native texts. Often those can't be reconstructed the same way earlier lessons can.

From what I've seen flipping through both the Korean and Chinese Assimil courses, the texts don't get too much longer and don't use native texts due to their inaccessibility to beginning learners after only 2~3 months. I think I might actually be thankful for this, because I dropped Assimil for Spanish once it started delving into native texts. At that point I just started finding native content that was actually interesting to me, instead.

I get it, though. I don't know if I'll do the entire active wave or just up until I finish the course's passive wave, but I do want to do some. Unlike when I was using Assimil for Spanish and activation was easy enough since I was taking an in-person Spanish class and going to a weekly Spanish conversation group, I do think I'm going to want to do some sort of activation before I think of diving directly into an online conversation lesson or anything like that.

[Sizen]

KO1K 491/1000. Went down to 5 cards a day. Was really starting to dislike having to do 10 new cards on top of everything else. I'm enjoying this deck again and I feel it's a good supplement to Assimil, especially since I'm at a point where it makes the load of new words in each Assimil lesson a lot lighter, so I can focus more on grammar, sentence structure, culture, etc. I'll be at around 800/1000 by the time I finish Assimil if I manage to stick to one lesson a day, and then I can always ramp it back up to 10 a day to finish the deck up.

Assimil lesson 38 today. This week is a little scattered in terms of theme, but it's very grammar heavy. I'd seen all the grammar through KO1K, but it's nice to get some more explanations and example sentences.

Lesson 36 introduced the attributive form of action verbs in past, present and future tense.

Lesson 37 introduced the two conjugated forms of verbs to denote "because" or "since". 어서 is supposed to mark a logical reason for what follows while 니까 is supposed to be more focused on personal reasons. This doesn't quite line up with my earlier understanding, so it'll likely just take more exposure to really internalize the difference. 니까 is also the only option for making orders, invitations, etc. This is easy enough.

Lesson 38 today introduced 아 보다 and ㄹ 수 있다. I feels like the past tense of 아 보다 is sort of somewhere between ~てみた and ~たことがある, so I'll be interested to see if there's a more explicit way to talk about past experiences or not.

The lessons feel very "textbooky" but I think the back-and-forth between culture heavy dialogues and more conventional grammar lessons is nice to change things up.