leosmith wrote:I actually don’t care to be a really good reader. I have no interest in reading Korean novels, newspapers, etc. I do want to be able to read signs, menus, texts from friends, news tickers and subtitles, for example, so I need to have some reading skill, just not very advanced. I admit that in the past I haven’t read much in foreign languages; it just didn’t interest me, even though I’m a pretty big reader in English. In fact, the biggest, most consistent effort I made was in Russian, where I wound up getting to the 20k level in lingq over the course of about 2 years. For me, that was a big deal, but for people who mostly do listening/reading to learn languages, like Steve Kaufmann, 20k isn’t impressive for even one year. Incidentally, although Steve Kaufmann takes a relatively long time to learn a new language, he only spends about an hour a day doing it, and after 5 years or so he claims to understand just about everything he hears. Now this is pretty impressive, regardless of age, when you consider the number of hours he spends. 1500 hours to develop advanced listening is really good, and imo one of the main reasons he can pull it off is that he reads a lot, and most of what he reads he also listens too. He has said that he listens to a lot of additional stuff that he doesn’t have text for, but I think if he didn’t do so much reading, his results would pale in comparison.
So bottom line, I’m going to read more this time. I want to get to 20k before the end of the year. Kaufmann is also learning Korean right now, and last time I checked he was at 47k. He said he felt he had quite a ways to go to get to the point where he understood just about everything. This is in contrast to other languages, where he said he felt the magic number was around 40k. So I was postulating with some other members that for Korean it might be 60k. Either way, I think for me, hitting 20k this year is enough. When I come back after this year, and I want to go on another long spurt, I’ll probably try to come closer to whatever number Kaufmann says put him over the top.
I'm reposting what I wrote a while back to give some background for today's post. I wanted to say that, at least in the context of my method, LingQ is working really well so far. More specifically, reading stuff that's way over my head, mousing over and quickly glancing at unknown word definitions but not using flashcards and such to memorize them, has been sufficient to internalize the words. Now there are lots of caveats, for example the fact that I use flashcards to review words from my conversations and many of those same words are encountered in LingQ, but I'm very pleased it's working.
When I started reading TTMIK iyagi lingq was showing about 40 unknown words, and I was reading at about 10 minutes, per minute of audio. Now there are about 15 unknown words and I'm reading about 4 min per min of audio. So the technique is clearly working for me, and I'll continue.
I was going to only read iyagi, then I realized I'd run out before the end of the year, so I added news with video which was a great find. Then after reading emk's post about spending more time with less material, I realized I sort of did this with Russian, where I used a TV series after a lot of intermediate podcasts to boost my reading and listening. So I decided to get the script for at least one drama. The good news is the scripts are pretty easy to get. The bad news is they are complete scripts, you have to dig out the dialogs, and the dialogs don't match the audio from the actual show. So I hired someone to do the series mentioned in a previous post.
I have some stats to compare after putting the first episode in lingq. These are unknown words in LingQ per minute of audio.
iyagi - 15
drama - 20
news - 60
So news is pretty tough. I'll keep doing some news articles though; can't hurt.
In about 10 days I'm going to vacation in the Philippines for 2 weeks. I'm not going to study at all in that time; hoping to catch a
bow wave.