K-dramas: Here I come!

[AndyMeg]

Yay - congrats!

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

Thanks!

[AndyMeg]

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.

I think I found a good example of what I meant by that:

How to Expand Your Korean Vocabulary with Hanja

And I also found a resource I think will be useful when looking for hanja of sino-korean words:

Hanja Explorer

[AndyMeg]

For this month I won't be able to go to my korean classes, so I've been thinking on activities to replace them. I considered many different options, but I know I'll be really busy for the whole month, so I decided to take a somehow laid back approach:

- The only Memrise course I'll be working on will be the Hanja one and I'll complement it with the "Kanji Study" Android app.
- I'll continue to take the Viki's Drama Vocabulary Quiz.
- I'll continue transcribing Healer (힐러) episode 1.
- I'll continue enjoying lots of native content (mainly TV-Shows with or without subs, and songs).
- And, finally, I'll add a new activity: I'll start making "speaking imitation practice" using the TTMIK Iyagi series and their audio transcripts. Eventually, I would like to work with k-dramas, but for now I think it'll be easier to start with the Iyagi series from episode one on move up.

[AndyMeg]

My usual score on the Viki's K-drama Vocabulary Quiz has moved up from around 16% to between 20% and 30% . The quiz always asks the meaning of 30 words: 10 from the highest frequency pool, 10 from the medium frequency pool and 10 from the low frequency pool. The quiz and the pools are based on the 4000 (or so) most frequent words from the dramas sample they used (I don't think they used ALL the k-dramas in Viki because, as far as I've seen, there doesn't seem to be complete korean subs/transcripts for ALL their dramas). This is what they say about the difficulty levels:

We rank the words from the most frequent to least frequent, and split the words into three difficulty levels using the percentiles of the word frequencies. We use words’ frequency as a proxy for difficulty level; that is, we assume that the words appearing most frequently in dialogues are generally considered “easier” than the words that are rarely used. The hard level includes words with the lowest frequencies from the 1st to 24th percentile. The intermediate level is made up of words in the 25th to 74th percentile. The easy level constitutes the 75th to 100th percentile.

So far I've noticed that the hardest words seem to have more weight on the final score. So, for example, if you correctly answer 5 "easy" and 10 "hard" words (15 words in total) you will have a higher score than if you correctly answer 10 "easy" and 5 "hard" (15 words in total). Also, if you answer wrong, you get penalized and your final score goes down. Good thing is the let you skip any question you are unsure of, so it doesn't negatively impact your final score.

Lately, I've been getting right all the "easy" words, but I still struggle with many lower frequency words.

Now, on another matter, I've decided to start reading the Talk To Me In Korean lessons. I've used a Memrise course before to get familiar with sentences used as examples in some of their lessons, but this is the first time I plan to actually read the lessons from beginning to end. I won't try to consciously memorize anything from the lessons, I'll just focus on reading and understanding and then I'll move on.

For my "speaking imitation practice" I've been listening a lot to the first Iyagi episode because I want to get familiar with the flow, rhythm and pronunciation. I'm noticing that (without using a dictionary or anything else, not even the transcript because I'm just listening to the audio and paying attention), with each new round of listening, I'm slowly starting to understand more and more of what they are saying. It feels great!

[AndyMeg]

Quick update:

I've set a new personal record for the Viki's K-Drama Vocabulary Quiz! I got a score of 61%!

[Bex]

Quick update:

I've set a new personal record for the Viki's K-Drama Vocabulary Quiz! I got a score of 61%!

Well done you

[AndyMeg]

Quick update:

I've set a new personal record for the Viki's K-Drama Vocabulary Quiz! I got a score of 61%!

Well done you

Thanks!

[AndyMeg]

I'm slowly catching up to the speed, intonation and rhythm of the first transcript page of the first episode of the Iyagi series. I'm not there yet, but now I can easily find in which part they are now (transcript/audio) when I stop reading the transcript (while the audio keeps running) in order to focus on a word or sentence and practice its pronunciation/rhythm/intonation.

I'm on the halfway point of the "write by hand" of the second page of Healer K-drama episode 1 transcript. I notice a lot of things by doing this activity but I get really tired after just a few lines and then I have to stop for the day (and I haven't been doing this activity every day).

The two activities above are activities I enjoy, but they are very intense and I get really tired after a short while. I love doing this activities because I feel they are in the sweet spot I've talked about before:

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 believe these two activities will be really helpful in the long term but, in the short term, the progress is so slow that I want to have other activities where I can feel faster progress. For now the main activities that somehow show a faster (and more precise/measurable) progress are the Viki's K-drama Vocabulary Quiz, the "read, understand, move on" approach to the TTMIK lessons and the korean-dubbed japanese-anime I'm watching; but I don't feel that's enough (and they are somehow too passive and I really feel the need of something more active). So I've been thinking hard on another activity that could make me feel a sense of "steady" (or at least more "short-term-visible") measurable progress. Taking into account that because of the rather chaotic approach I've taken to learning korean my "level" is very uneven (I don't know some very basic things but I do know or get the gist of somehow more "advanced" aspects), I need something that helps me fill in the gaps. In this sense, I think a series of textbooks would be a good tool I could make use of.

For the last few days I had been pondering about what series of textbooks to choose. I have the Sejong books, but they are all in korean and I don't feel confident enough to tackle them yet. Then, a few days ago, I discovered two amazing series of textbooks for kids and I fell in love with them. I want to take things easy and slowly move up. I don't want to try to bite textbooks for which I'm not prepared yet. In this context, one of the textbook series for kids stood out for many reasons: 1) It feels to be right on my current sweet spot, as it is geared towards primary-education korean kids living abroad, so it has exactly the right balance between amount of korean and their respective spanish translations (I prefer this more direct approach to the one where you get loads of explanations in english/spanish and just a bit of korean text) . I like that it doesn't include loads of foreign text (english, spanish, etc.) but is mostly in korean with just the right amount of foreign text (in this case spanish, because it is specifically localized for children in spanish speaking countries, which is also a BIG PLUS for me) for me to be able to understand the examples, vocabulary and the instructions (really, it is more like a parallel-bilingual-text texbook, which opens a lot of learning possibilities!!!); and, as it is geared towards primary-school-kids, it is easy enough for me to tackle at the moment. 2) It has lots of beautiful ilustrations, practice activities and games (I like to have as much fun as possible while learning languages ). 3) It comes with audio. 4) I already mentioned it, but it is worth saying again: it is localized for spanish speaking countries!!! (it is so hard to come by spanish-based material to learn korean!). 5) It skips the hangul teaching part, which I already know (this series is localized in many languages. In some languages, like english and korean, most of the first book is full of lessons and activities teaching hangeul, but the spanish version skips it and goes directly to other matters, with the result that its first book covers more "korean"; plus the spanish version almost doubles the number of pages of other versions, which I think gives it more space for activities and a better distribution/organization of the material covered, and it makes it more visual and "approachable"). 6) At the end the book has three wonderful sections: one with transcripts of some of the the audio tracks; one with additional explanations both in korean and spanish (I really love this parallel text feature!); and one which lists the main vocabulary seen in the book and their respective translations to spanish (while also telling which lesson each word belongs to). In summary: I reallly, really like the spanish-localized version of this series of books!!!

Which book series am I talking about? It is called 맞춤 스페인어권 한국어: Coreano para la Comunidad Coreana Hispanohablante.

As I'm not too much into making a textbook my main/only focus, I'll consider working on the textbook to be on the same priority level as my other activities. But I'll add a progress bar to my signature because I really appreciate to have a more short-term-visible-progress measurable activity!

[AndyMeg]

For the last few days I had been pondering about what series of textbooks to choose. I have the Sejong books, but they are all in korean and I don't feel confident enough to tackle them yet. Then, a few days ago, I discovered two amazing series of textbooks for kids and I fell in love with them.

Which book series am I talking about? It is called 맞춤 스페인어권 한국어: Coreano para la Comunidad Coreana Hispanohablante.

As I'm not too much into making a textbook my main/only focus, I'll consider working on the textbook to be on the same priority level as my other activities. But I'll add a progress bar to my signature because I really appreciate to have a more short-term-visible-progress measurable activity!

The first two Sejong have ENG versions and that website has a program that go through all the rest of the books with English guides and subtitles. I picked 재외동포를 위한 한국어 KR version to start reading. I dont use textbooks for the exercises and this one had more reading passages than the other. Also the topics in the later books seem really interesting and cant wait to begin reading them. I also like the little mini test after a few chapter and the last main test at the end. Something that is not in the Sejong textbooks outside of their workbook pdfs.

Thanks! I didn't know they had english guides and subtitles for the rest of the Sejong series! I haven't explored the whole website yet. What I did know, is that they have a lot of multimedia resources, but I was looking for something that could take me away from the computer and my tablet (I already printed in full color the PDF of the first book of "맞춤 스페인어권 한국어: Coreano para la Comunidad Coreana Hispanohablante").

Yeah, I did skim through the PDfs of 재외동포를 위한 한국어 and I do plan to use them in the future, but I prefer to start with "맞춤 스페인어권 한국어: Coreano para la Comunidad Coreana Hispanohablante" (the spanish localized version is really different to the english and korean versions of "Customized Korean" and it has a lot of graded parallel bilingual texts I can learn from. For me the spanish series looks more approachable and funnier to start working with ). Actually, my plan is to first complete the "맞춤 스페인어권 한국어: Coreano para la Comunidad Coreana Hispanohablante" series (6 books), then move on to the 재외동포를 위한 한국어 series, and finally tackle the Sejong series (I actually want to see if, by following this path, I can tackle the Sejong series without the aid of the english/spanish version of the first two books: learning korean directly in korean would be so cool!). I think this path can help me not only to fill in the gaps in my knowledge but also to reinforce already known/seen information. And the Sejong series doesn't have as many drawings/pictures and as much color as the other two series (I'm like a little kid when it comes to this XD!), so it contributes to making it more intimidating and less atractive for me at the moment.

[AndyMeg]

Link to the programs that goes along with the Sejong textbooks:
http://www.sejonghakdang.org/opencourse ... re/list.do

Thanks!!!