Korean for Fun

[lichtrausch]

There was also an insane pronunciation of 교회 (gyohui) in one of my lessons. It honestly sounded like [kye]. Luckily, there was another speaker saying it closer to how I expected it to be pronounced, but I don’t know what to think about the other one. Was it a mistake? A dialectal difference? A modern pronunciation that isn’t reflected in writing?

It's a normal pronunciation, which you'll also hear in newscasts where they of course try to speak in a standard manner.

[Sizen]

It's a normal pronunciation, which you'll also hear in newscasts where they of course try to speak in a standard manner.

I guess so! I searched 교회 on YouTube and within the first 10 seconds of the first non music video I found, I heard it again! At about 6 seconds in. I think I hear it more like [kjø] or [kʲø], now.

[vonPeterhof]

I guess so! I searched 교회 on YouTube and within the first 10 seconds of the first non music video I found, I heard it again! At about 6 seconds in. I think I hear it more like [kjø] or [kʲø], now.

This is interesting, because I'm fairly certain that I'm hearing two syllables every time he says it. Granted the first syllable is said so briefly as to give the whole thing almost a sesquisyllabic feel, but I definitely feel like there are two vowels, [kʲowe] or [kʲøwe], or maybe even [kʲøɥe]. Granted, my expectations might be influenced by the spelling.

[Sizen]

Ah sorry, i just meant the first syllable at this point. I definitely hear the second syllable. It was just the first part that sounded super weird to me.

[vonPeterhof]

This sort of reminded me of the shock I felt going from Biblical to Modern Hebrew, which still uses יש ל (roughly "there is at") as the default structure marking possession, but for definite nouns it also obligatorily adds the direct object marker, resulting in sentences like יש לי את הספר which reads like 私に本をある to my brain (especially since my native Russian also uses the "(there is) at me" possessive structure). This feels like transposing the paradigm of the verb "to have" onto יש most likely under the influence of the first languages of the first generation to revive Hebrew, like Yiddish, Polish, Judeo-Spanish and others.

Just as a bit of a follow-up on this, I got curious about this feature again after reading that the grammar of modern Hebrew is more similar to that of Mishnaic Hebrew than Biblical. I started to doubt my initial conclusion that the feature I noted must have appeared in the modern age under Indo-European influence, so I decided to dig further, and what I found is that while this general idea is correct, it's apparently a bit more complicated than just transposing the "to have" paradigm.

[Sizen]

Things got wacky and I entirely stopped with Korean. I've been back to it for about a month, but I've basically just retreaded my steps. I'll be caught up to where I was in the KO1K deck in a day of two and I'm up to lesson 15 of Assimil Le coréen. KO1K continues to be my favourite language learning resource in recent memory.

I plan on continuing at a rate of 10 words from KO1K every day, but I don't plan on keeping up doing one Assimil lesson every day. I'm currently on "vacation" because I only work Friday through Monday every week and with Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Monday, the only day I'll have needed to work between March 26 and April 4 will have been March 30. As a result, I've had lots of free time and I've been doing 1 lesson every day, but I'll likely go down to doing a lesson on my days off only (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). The reason being that I tend to take about ~30 minutes doing my reps, which seems like a lot, but I like to take time to create new sentences or slot newer/older vocabulary into those sentences, conjugate the verbs to new forms I'm learning, create mnemonics if I'm struggling, or look up Hanja/etymologies. This ends up being a very active process, but I feel like I'm a pro at Korean already because I can make so many different sentences with only about 300 words. I also didn't realize that FSRS wasn't on by default in Anki yet, so I've only had it on for a handful of days. I expect I won't notice the difference until I'm much farther along in the deck and not inundated with reviews.

I realized I could reuse the KO1K card type to make new cards for Assimil, and I've been finding this to be a really nice way of reviewing Assimil, especially considering I remembered a decent bit of the KO1K deck upon revisiting but not Assimil. The cards have a field for the word itself, audio of the word, the definition, the word as it appears in the sentence, an example sentence, the audio for the sentence, a translation of the sentence, an image and notes.

What I've been doing is taking the individual sentence files from Assimil, copying and pasting the sentence in Korean from the meta data, writing out the sentence as it appears in French in the book, filling out the other fields, adding the Hanja if there is any, and adding word audio from Forvo. The benefit of grabbing the audio from Forvo is that I don't have to isolate the word in Audacity (which I will still do if the sentence is too long), all while exposing myself to different speakers. Between KO1K and Assimil, I'm already exposed to 5 different Korean speakers, but the more the merrier.

I don't really know if I plan on studying Korean much after I finish the two "courses", but I found some high quality i+1 style decks with real native audio that I could potential use to support future studying. The decks are split into 3 groups for words 1 through 1000, 1001 through 3000, and 3001 through 7000. I could see myself using the second deck for a while at least if it means saving myself the trouble of making my own high quality audio cards in Anki. I might have to look into all these new tools I hear about if I want to do any immersion, though. For anyone interested, the decks can be found here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/by-author/374470252. They're based on a speech corpus by a linguistics student, Kyubyong Park, that he paid to have recorded by a voice actor.

I also got the ebook Real-Life Korean Conversations for Beginners off Amazon, and I've been flipping through it with the audio. I enjoy the pronunciation exercises because, as I've realized, the idea that Hangeul is simple and phonetic is simply a lie. I got hit with the sentence 아내는 지금 밥 먹는 중이에요 today and while I know the rules that make "bap makneun" be pronounced "bam mangneun", being hit with those two sound changes one after the other in the same sentence short circuited my brain on my first listen.

Also I'd appreciate any encouragement to NOT add Assimil Le chinois and Le cantonais into my current rotation because I likely don't have the time for it right now. I'm very tempted to do what I've been doing with Assimil Le coréen and the KO1K card type for both books. I definitely want to get around to them, but I must (re)learn patience. This hasn't stopped me from looking up the unofficial rerecorded audio for Le cantonais after learning that the original recordings are off and allegedly made by non-native/heritage speakers.

[Sizen]

I'm at the 300/1000 cards in the KO1K deck and I've started getting new cards I'd never seen before. With FSRS turned on now and the initial spacing of cards going up to a few days after first learning the card, I'm a little worried that my brain isn't going to absorb these new words as well. Yesterday's stuck with me throughout the day surprisingly well, however, and when my mind would wander I'd find myself remembering words and playing with them. It was nice for my reviews only to take 20 minutes instead of 30, though. I guess I have to just trust the process.

Today's words were a bit more grammar focused with two particles, 보다 and 한테, being added to the mix. Mostly easy stuff. 한테 is interesting in comparison to Japanese に. It seems to just be used for animates only and it can also have a meaning of "for", as in "Korean is hard for English speakers" which would be conveyed by にとって in Japanese and not just に. It was also interesting to see 덜 (less) in combination with 보다 in Korean. I realized that Japanese doesn't have a similar word and has to use all sorts of circumlocution to achieve a similar idea. I wondered if Korean was interfering with my Japanese (there was that thread about learning a new language ruining your other langues...), like I was having a massive brain fart about very basic Japanese and just couldn't think of the word but a quick google search revealed that, yeah, no. Japanese doesn't have the equivalent of 덜. Fortunately, English does, so it's not like it's a completely new concept. Just thought it was weird that the two languages differed here.

Lesson 17 of Assimil Le coréen down as well. I can't say it's the most interesting course yet, but the sentences are useful. So far there's only 5 lines of the main dialogue and 5 lines of translation exercises per lesson, so the amount of new content is pretty low. The review lessons (7 and 14 so far) have been an assortment of random sentences that incorporate vocabulary and grammar from the previous lessons, so kind of lame, honestly. I tend to make only 2~4 Anki cards per lesson when there's new vocabulary, grammar or new combinations of old words that I want to remember. I'm also just realizing that the creator of the course set an arbitrary limit to the number of lines of dialogue per lesson that is slowly increasing over time. Lesson 19 goes up to 6 lines and lesson 25 goes up to 7. Hopefully this'll make for more interesting dialogues because currently the dialogues can end on a weird note, like a character asking another character what their sibling's name is, only to not receive an answer.

I had a look to compare with Assimil Le chinois because I remember it being a little more... dynamic? At least for the first 30 or so lessons I did in the past. The lessons definitely have more personality, even if that means typical "Women like shopping and being spoiled, don't they?" kind of content... The review lessons do actually reuse the vocabulary and grammar from previous lessons to create a coherent dialogue, which is nice. I'll try to forget what I'm missing out on for now, though. My focus is Korean and while the Chinese course might be more interesting in content, Korean is much more interesting in form to me.

[Sizen]

310/1000 for KO1K. There was a longer sentence in yesterday's batch and then today's batch was pretty much all long sentences. We once again delved into "grammar heavy" territory with a few conjunctive verb conjugations -고 and -는데. We're finally mashing sentences together into long sentences! I'd already known that -고 worked somewhat like Japanese -て to connect sentences, but -는데 was new to me. I guess it makes sense that "but" would be a conjugated part of the verb since that's how it used to be in Japanese, too. けど comes from けれども for which I've heard two explanations of its origin. 1. It's the hearsay past auxiliary verb けり conjugated to the realis form -けれ and given the concessive particle -ど or -ども. -けれども. E.g. ゆきけれども. 2. It's the realis form of a ku or shiku adjective, -けれ, plus the concessive particle -ど or -ども. E.g. 美しけれども. The idea is that this verb/adjective ending got separated from the verb/adjective and shortened over time until it became it's own set of words: けど, けれど, けども, けれども. In any case, the sentences are becoming longer and more complex with more moving parts, and so it took more re-listens than normal to feel comfortable with the sentences. Here's to hoping that they'll feel easy in a week or two!

Lesson 18 of Assimil down! This one was actually very useful. So much so that I added SEVEN whole Anki cards compared to the usual two to four. The lesson focused on making plans, so it included lots of useful phrases like "When and where will we meet?", "Let's meet this Friday in front of the theatre", "I don't know that place", "How do I get there?", "Let's go together!" There was also a cultural note on the Jongno district in Seoul and how it holds 5 palaces from the Joseon dynasty, including one that was built by King Sejong, creator of Hangeul, for his father way back when. I was also excited to hear that Korea had a presidential residence with a cool name: 청와대 the Cyan-Tile Pavilion, AKA the Blue House! Except it's not the presidential residence anymore, not since 2022. Oh well. This district was also another reminder that Hangeul is no longer all that phonetic, though, since Jongno is actually spelled Jongro.

Tomorrow I'm back to work and have plans in the evening, so I'll likely just do KO1K for the day, but we'll see. I'm feeling pretty motivated right now and might try to sneak lesson 19 in as well.

[Sizen]

KO1K 320/1000. This deck is really popping off. I’d have a hard time maintaining 10 cards a day if I didn’t know Japanese. Another grammar heavy day with verb conjugations for “to be able to”, “to not be able to” and also the useful phrase “thanks to”. The sentences are longer and new verbs from the same day are used with these new forms, alongside older vocab being used in new ways and English words that are assumed unnecessary to teach because they’re in theory easy to recognize despite wildly different phonologies. As a result, some sentences feel like they have much more than 1 new element in them, but it doesn’t feel too overwhelming either.

I did manage Assimil lesson 19 today before work. It felt a bit rushed because I start earlier than usual on Fridays, but I made all my cards no problem. The lesson was also relatively simple with mostly just new words for me. Some of the sentences did contain multiple new words, however, and I debated how I should go about adding them and just settled on making two almost identical cards for each word and I can just suspend one if the other feels unnecessary.

I’ll have more time in the morning for the next three days, so maybe I will just keep up with a lesson per day for the time being.

[Sizen]

KO1K 330/1000. Basically 1/3 done! Some good grammar today: must or should with "야 되다" and doing an action for someone else with 주다. The second grammar point is familiar but also unexpected. Japanese also uses the verb to give あげる in conjunction with the main verb of a sentence to convey this meaning, but Korean simply conjugates the verb to the informal present and tacks 주다 on, whereas Japanese conjugates to the て form first. I would have expected 고 주다.

Lesson 20 of Assimil. This lesson felt much more like a regular textbook lesson. "There is a book in front of So-yun. There is a computer next to David." At least it turns into a small conversation about how the book is and where the computer was bought. Dongdaemun is mentioned in the lesson and I expected a cultural note at the end of the lesson, but the note talked about foreign words in Korean instead. I looked it up and it's one of the Four Great Gates of Seoul, which in turn are part of the Eight Gates of Seoul. These were the entrances through the Fortress Wall to Seoul in the Joseon period. They're all informally named after the cardinal directions, but funnily enough, they don't really line up all that nicely with the directions when seen from above on a map, as can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eight_Gates_of_Seoul#/media/File:Map_of_Seoul_8_gates_and_2_palaces.png.