K-dramas: Here I come!

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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Wed Sep 13, 2017 6:55 pm

qeadz wrote:Have you tried to use your Korean in those kinds of off-the-cuff situations before?

Not really, it was my first time. Maybe that's one of the reasons why I felt so frustrated. I have a japanese-korean friend on Skype, but we mainly use spanish and japanese when we talk.

qeadz wrote:In my limited experience: One remembers the most words and grammar forms when talking to oneself, one recalls far less when talking to a tutor, and one recalls even less when its impromptu and off-the-cuff.

hahaha... I think I agree with your statistics XD!

qeadz wrote:I'm interested to see what changes you decide to make to your study regime :)

I'll post an update when it's ready ;)
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Wed Sep 27, 2017 7:43 pm

I'm experimenting a bit before committing to the new activities. One thing I've been doing is experimenting with ways to learn more vocabulary in less time and improve my recall in unplanned/unstructured situations.

Memrise is a great help to learn to recognize words, but it doesn't help that much with recalling of said words during unplanned/unstructured situations. That's why I decided to try wordlists in the following way:

1) I would expose myself to the most frequent nouns within the 1000 most frequent words by means of a personalized Memrise course and by reading from time to time the list on the frequency dictionary. Then, another time, I would look at the meanings of 10 words and try to recall the corresponding korean words and write them by hand. Then I would revise my answers and mark in red any mistake I found or write in red the complete word if I wasn't able to remember it when I first tried to recall it. This was a very exhausting activity, but one that beared incredibly good results in the short time span I dedicated to it (I only tried it for a total of 20 words).

A few days later I discovered, here in this forum, a guide made by Iversen which was about wordlists. I skimmed through it (it is a really long and detailed guide) and got some very interesting ideas and insights. With all of this in mind and my goal of improving recall in unplanned/unstructured situations, I designed my own attack plan. For this I made some preparations. I transcribed to an excel spreadsheet the first 376 most common nouns according to the korean frequency dictionary I've mentioned before. In one column I have the korean words and in the next one I have the respective meanings. Then I printed it and cut each word and each meaning in a separate piece of paper for a total of 752 pieces of paper which I've put into a small bag. So here is my plan:

1) Randomly take out 5 pieces of paper and read them. If they contain a korean word, I'll handwrite that korean word in a (big) sheet of paper and try to recall and write what I think it means. If the piece of paper contains a meaning, then I'll write the meaning in the big sheet of paper and then I will try to recall and write the korean word I think it refers to.

2) I'll revise my answers and mark any mistakes with red circles. If I didn't remember the korean word or its meaning, I'll look for the corresponding answer and write it down in red. I'll also write in red the right anwers for the ones I made mistakes.

3) I'll cover the first column (the one with my own initial answers) and, using the second column as a guide, I'll try to write what's missing (a korean word if I have the meaning, or a meaning if I have the korean word).

4) I'll revise my answers from step 3 and, if I made any mistakes or failed to recall something, repeat steps 2 and 3, covering as many columns as needed until I can recall all the information.

5) After I have success with recalling all the information related to all the initial 5 pieces of paper I'll put those pieces of paper in a little box I have. Then I'll go do something else.

6) At another time of the day I'll come back to the small bag and take out another 5 pieces of paper and start the whole process again.

7) Doing this for all the pieces of paper can take many days. After I finish passing all the pieces of paper from the small bag into the little box, I will put all those pieces back into the small bag and start again. I plan to do this until I can consecutively recall all the information related to each and every piece of paper.

As a way to expose myself to the information I'll be trying to recall, I'll use the personalized course I made on Memrise and I'll also skim through the excel list from time to time. I also hope that my continuous and extensive interaction with native material (listening to songs, watching TV shows, etc.) will provide me with additional random exposure to those words. And I'll also take the new Viki's Drama Vocab Quiz whenever I feel like it.

As I want to have a reference point to see if this method works for me and how effective it is, I'll be making a little test (I'll talk about it in a future entry).
Last edited by AndyMeg on Thu Sep 28, 2017 2:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Bex
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby Bex » Thu Sep 28, 2017 6:15 am

This is exactly what I am trying to fix with my Spanish now. My passive and active gap is just way to large.

At the moment I am using Glossika, Quizlet and Anki to try and fill the abyss! However I think you may have a better system...

... I'll be following with much interest :)
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:38 pm

Quick update:

Ok. I made a short test. It was going to be longer (I was going to try to write the words too), but I felt too lazy for that.

What I did was to copy the 376 korean words into a new excel spreadsheet (I organized them alphabetically —they were initially organized by frequency— so that the order wouldn't help me to remember their meanings). Then, in the next blank column, I tried to write their meanings as fast as I could. If I didn't remember the meaning of a word, I moved on (there were some meanings I felt at the tip of my tongue, but which I couldn't catch and, as I was trying to go fast, I didn't do much of an effort to remember either). The reason why I tried to go as fast as I could was because I'm trying to improve my recall in unplanned/unstructured situations, and in those kind of situations I won't have much time to think.

These are the results:

I gave answers for a total of 119 words (119/376).
I got 98 answers right.
I got 15 answers wrong (some of them were wrong because I didn't read right and I thought they were another word with a similar spelling).
I got 6 that I couldn't classify either as right or wrong because even though I didn't remember their exact meaning, I did remember a closely related concept/meaning.

Maybe, if I feel less lazy later, I'll make a test for the writing of the korean words too.

Quick update, part 2:

I decided to make the other test, but only with the words I got right from the first one. This is what I did: I read the meaning and tried to write the korean word. After I did this for all the 98 words, I revised the whole thing. These are the results:

I answered a total of 95 out of the 98 meaning/word pairs.
I got 76 answers right.
I got 19 answers wrong. The wrong answers were really similar to the actual korean word but usually had a small mistake or two. Most of the mistakes were for using 어 instead of 오, or viceversa; I also sometimes put a double consonant were the right thing to do was to write a simple/single consonant. I also mixed 에 and 애 a bit.
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Sun Oct 01, 2017 1:37 pm

Ok. I've officially started my vocabulary learning experiment. But I decided to make a small adjustment.

I've said before in this log that I want my language learning activities to feel like games, but I noticed that if I did step 7, the whole thing would feel more like a big drill and not so much like a game. So here is the adjustment: Instead of making full rounds, as step 7 indicated, I'll count streaks of right answers and start over when I get a wrong answer. So, steps 1 to 6 stay basically the same. Step 7 is the main change. With this adjustment, the "game" final goal is to be able to make a 752 right answers streak, and I'll also have some smaller goals in the meantime: to beat my current right answers longest streak.

I'm reading again parts of "The Little Book of Talent: 52 tips for improving your skills" by Daniel Coyle. One of the main ideas of the book that I'm trying to keep in mind is this one:

"The key to deep practice is to reach. This means to stretch yourself slightly beyond your current ability, spending time in the zone of difficulty called the sweet spot. It means embracing the power of repetition, so the action becomes fast and automatic. It means creating a practice space that enables you to reach and repeat, stay engaged, and improve your skills over time."

I feel that so far I've been trying some activities that are way beyond my current level and that's why I get tired of them or evade doing them. So now I'm trying to evaluate my activities according to this idea (deep practice's key). So far I feel that with the vocabulary experiment I've found this sweet spot, which is great. Time will tell me if I'm right or not.

After my first try I'm on a 2 right answers streak. My more immediate goal is to beat it.

I'll keep you updated ;)
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Wed Oct 11, 2017 10:19 pm

Quick update:

So far I've been getting 2 answers right every 5 pieces of paper. I think the 752 pieces paper are too large of a pool to draw from, so I decided to divide it into batches of about 50 pieces of paper each, but I've yet to see how this works for me.

Now I'm starting to feel tired of my korean studies, so I'll be taking a break for the rest of this week and also for the next one. Meanwhile, I'll continue to watch k-dramas and TV shows just for fun (but without actively trying to learn from them), and I'll also continue going to my korean classes (which are once a week).

For the next few days I'll be focusing on japanese. Mainly on kanji, but maybe I'll do other japanese-related things too.
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Mon Oct 23, 2017 8:42 pm

I had written a longer post, but electricity went off before I could send it, so now I'll make it shorter:

I'm back from my short japanese-focus break.

I'm starting a new year in a Creative Writing Program and this plus freelance jobs will be taking most of my energy for the next year. So I decided to make things easier for me in the "korean learning" area.

From now on most of my activities will be low-energy-level activities, such as Memrise, Viki's K-drama vocabulary quiz and interacting a lot with native material I enjoy (mainly with english subs, for TV shows; but sometimes without subs or just with korean subs. And singing along with transcriptions, for korean songs). I'll also be watching some japanese anime dubbed in korean.

The vocabulary study with the pieces of paper was a really good method, but it consumes too much energy on my part.

I'll have one high-energy-level activity which will be what I'm learning on my korean classes. We have a whatsaap group set up by our teacher who is a native korean and he encourages us to communicate in korean as much as possible through the Whatsapp group (and also through his individual Whatsapp number) and use, as much as possible, what we are seeing in class (this will be my main high-energy-level activity). In class he teach us korean mainly in korean (he speaks to us in korean for about 96% to 98% of the time, with just some ocassional intervention in spanish or english when his korean and his gestures don't seem enough for us to understand what he is trying to teach us). I think the whatsapp group is wonderful because we are not practicing korean randomly, but we are actually trying to communicate something specific to someone specific. For example, he said that we can send him messages in korean saying things like: "Yesterday I went to watch this movie and I enjoyed it a lot", or " I'm going to eact ice cream with my friends tomorrow morning", etc. Also, when I have something important to tell him or ask him, I try to write in korean and then I also write a version in english, just in case I'm not clear or precise enough (because I'm still a beginner and writing in korean takes a lot of time while I look for the right words and I put them in the right order).

I'll also have a mid-energy-level activity: copying by hand the transcription of korean TV shows while listening to my favorite korean songs. While making the transcription I won't make a conscious effort to understand, I'll just write and read aloud, while paying a lot of attention to what I'm doing. What I hope to achieve with this is to use the natural ability of the human brain to find patterns so that I get familiar with korean patterns and become more aware of them.

I think the combination of a lot of exposure to native content I enjoy, plus the grammar sentences from the TTMIK Memrise course, plus some high frequency words (also on Memrise and in the Viki's K-dramas vocabulary quiz), plus all the learning and practicing from my korean classes, can create a good language learning synergy without too much energy required. Now let's see if this works.
Last edited by AndyMeg on Thu Oct 26, 2017 5:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Wed Oct 25, 2017 4:07 pm

Quick update:

According to Wikipedia:

Sino-Korean words today make up about 60% of the Korean vocabulary, though in actual speech (especially informally) native words are vastly more common.

So far I've seen relations and similarities between some japanese words and some korean words. They are not exactly the same, but they have similar sounds or a similar construction (which is better appreciated when knowing their "chinese" characters). So I think my vocabulary could benefit from studying some hanja.

Korean Hanja and Japanese Kanji seem to be similar enough for me to benefit from using a japanese targeted app like "Kanji Study". So my plan is to learn the meanings and way of writing by using the "Kanji Study" app, and complement this with the study of a Memrise course focused on hanja.

I'll add this to my low-energy-level activities.
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AndyMeg
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby AndyMeg » Thu Oct 26, 2017 4:57 pm

Quick update:

I got my best score so far on the Viki's K-Drama Vocabulary Quiz! I got a score of 40% for the first time ever. My lowest score so far is 4%. I usually get a score around 16% with some occasional highs like 27%. Today was my first time reaching the 40% mark :D .
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Re: K-dramas: Here I come!

Postby Bex » Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:28 pm

Yay - congrats!

Always good when you score higher than expected...all that hard work is paying off :D
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