Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

[leosmith]

On Monday I finished reading 힐러 (Healer)! It was so hard in the beginning, I couldn't even imagine finishing it. There were about 1000 unknown words before I read the first episode, according to lingQ. By the time I reached the last episode, it was down to 400 or so. That doesn't mean my reading has progressed by 60% or anything like that, but it does show decent progress.

I'm getting close to the end of TTMIK's Iyagi lessons. I thought I'd finish this week, but I just realized they've started to add more lessons for the first time in over a year (I think). So I may not finish them before going to Korea. I was wondering what I'd use for my extensive (easy) reading after I finish them, when I noticed the pile of lessons in my koreanclass101 download contains audio blogs and advanced lessons with full transcripts. There are actually several quite long (~20min) commentaries on audio blogs made by, you guessed it, Hyunwoo Sun and even some with the team of Hyunwoo Sun and Kyeong-eun Choi of TTMIK fame. I'm interested in the history of these 2 language learning resources, why Hyunwoo decided to split off and create TTMIK, etc. But for now I'm just glad to have all this material. After that I'm going to cut the umbilical chord and read only native material designed for native speakers. That means I'll continue to read news and drama scripts.

(edit - first episode of 미생 has 800 unknown words in lingQ - looks like I have my work cut out for me )

[Evita]

I'm interested in the history of these 2 language learning resources, why Hyunwoo decided to split off and create TTMIK, etc.

If I remember correctly, 현우 has said that he didn't like the direction the company was going and that the atmosphere at work became worse and worse. But I may not remember it correctly, it was so long ago.

By the way, I also have Healer's script but I've yet to read through it. Congrats on all your Korean progress!

[leosmith]

I'm interested in the history of these 2 language learning resources, why Hyunwoo decided to split off and create TTMIK, etc.

If I remember correctly, 현우 has said that he didn't like the direction the company was going and that the atmosphere at work became worse and worse. But I may not remember it correctly, it was so long ago.

By the way, I also have Healer's script but I've yet to read through it. Congrats on all your Korean progress!

Thanks for that info, and for the congrats! Are you using the actual script, or just the dialogs? I only did the dialogs. I tried the actual script for Signal, and it was brutal. Long descriptions of scenes and such; maybe 5 times as much text as the dialogs. But it could be more appropriate for your level.

[Evita]

I'm interested in the history of these 2 language learning resources, why Hyunwoo decided to split off and create TTMIK, etc.

If I remember correctly, 현우 has said that he didn't like the direction the company was going and that the atmosphere at work became worse and worse. But I may not remember it correctly, it was so long ago.

By the way, I also have Healer's script but I've yet to read through it. Congrats on all your Korean progress!

Thanks for that info, and for the congrats! Are you using the actual script, or just the dialogs? I only did the dialogs. I tried the actual script for Signal, and it was brutal. Long descriptions of scenes and such; maybe 5 times as much text as the dialogs. But it could be more appropriate for your level.

I have the full script, but I'm not "using" it. It's just gathering dust somewhere on my hard disk together with the other drama scripts that I have. My priority at the moment is my Anki decks so I'm working mostly with textbooks.

[leosmith]

I finally finished TTMIK's first season of iyagi. There were 148 lessons, and they finished making them in 2014. However, November 2016 they started season 2. The first lesson just seemed to sit there forever, so I thought they'd changed their minds, but in June they started up again and kicked out 4 more lessons. I'll probably end up reading those too, but I consider my goal of finishing the iyagi to be completed.

[The Real CZ]

Hi leosmith, it's great to see you learning Korean! I followed your log back on HTLAL and am surprised at your quick progress, but then again, having a background in Japanese and Mandarin doesn't hurt! For me, I feel like it's easier to "understand" the other two if you know one, but for using them, there's no getting around actual practice and usage haha.

[leosmith]

I thought I'd share this comment from my Italki teacher, because it will probably be that last one from her, my favorite teacher, for a long time, depending on what I decide to do in Seoul as far as learning.
무술 같은 어려운 주제에 대한 설명 잘 해주시고 새로운 언어 배우기에 대한 아이디어도 이해하기 쉽게 설명 잘 해주셔서 감사해요!

We talked for 1 hr about martial arts and some ideas I have for a website. Totally random topics, which made me work really hard, and that's the way I've done about 90% of this spurt.

[qeadz]

I thought I'd share this comment from my Italki teacher, because it will probably be that last one from her, my favorite teacher, for a long time, depending on what I decide to do in Seoul as far as learning.
무술 같은 어려운 주제에 대한 설명 잘 해주시고 새로운 언어 배우기에 대한 아이디어도 이해하기 쉽게 설명 잘 해주셔서 감사해요!

We talked for 1 hr about martial arts and some ideas I have for a website. Totally random topics, which made me work really hard, and that's the way I've done about 90% of this spurt.

I'd love to see/hear a snippet of you conversing in Korean to compare to the old ones if you're up for uploading something

But I am very much in awe of the amount of effort you have put into learning Korean, the progress you report, and that you're able to have conversation in the language. Studying from home no less with no no formal instruction.

[leosmith]

Finished!

When I started this challenge, I wanted to read to 20,000 lingQ known words. At some point I decided that would be too easy, and increased it to the lingQ Advanced2 threshold of 24,550 (my total words wound up at 246,079; lingQs 22,047). I hit my goal today. Yesterday I finished the last of the season 2 TTMIK Iyagi, which means I’ve read all of them now.

My instinct has always told me to only read 30-60 min per day, but I decided to do more on this challenge because I’ve seen Steve Kaufmann’s excellent listening results when he spends a lot of time on listening/reading, and he often gets in over 30k lingQ known words/year. So I spent about 2hrs/day reading for the last 6 months or so of this challenge. Because I haven’t done anything exactly like this before, it’s hard to come to any definite conclusions, but my gut tells me if I’d kept it under 1 hr/day I would have seen similar results. Incidentally, everything I read had audio, which I listened to once before reading and once after reading. And I read out loud all the time.

Regarding the number of lingQs (unknown words), I don’t ever touch them after I make them. It seems like a waste of time to me. But I would guess about half of those, maybe more, are actually known words now.

[leosmith]

Time to wrap things up on the bars under my signature. Note – these are only metrics; I’m not grading my level in this post.

Reading – passed

Listening – passed. My original goal was 600hrs. Although I raised that to 800hrs, I wound up with 740hrs, so I’m going to give myself a bye.

Conversation – failed. I got busy and a bit tired over the last 6 weeks of the challenge, so I decided to back off a bit. I wound up with only 185 of the 200hrs needed. In addition, I only memorized the vocabulary, the real time consumer of the conversation component, for 165 sessions. So I have to be honest and take a fail here.