Sc's goal towards Korean

[Sc27]

Now vacationing in Montreal, picked up a few phrases like "Prochain arrêt", "ouverture", and "troisième étage". My friends and I ended up watching a small documentary about asteroids in French. The visuals were amazing, but not sure why we did that.

Anyways, back to the log. I got lazy over posting it, but that doesn't mean I haven't stopped studying Korean. Before I left for my trip, I still watched 비정상회담 and listened to 컬투쇼, but now due to limited time, I now read small blogposts from an app called brunch (브런치). It helps with adding new vocabulary and reinforcing old ones, and the app is similar to the English one called Medium.

I still text a lot in Korean with other penpals, and I actually met up with one of them during my vacation. We spent about four hours talking in Korean (about 95% of the time), and the other in English. It was definitely a nice experience.

[Sc27]

I completely ditched the log for several months. Might have gotten lazy trying to post it every week.

On to updates. I deleted Hellotalk because it was becoming too much like a social network service, and it wasn't helping me too much.

I still do a little bit of grammar work, but I look it up if I don't have a serious understanding of the sentence or phrase that I'm reading.

As of now, I'm reading 김영하 '살인자의 기억법' (Kim Young Ha's Memoirs of a Murderer), and close to being finished. I study the unknown vocabulary by writing down a small phrase or sentence, and looking up the proper definition that fits in that specific context. I got this book when I briefly met up with a Korean friend and had willingly lent it to me after his vacation to Korea. Buying books in Korean on the Internet is expensive, so I was glad that he did it to me.

I spend more time with some Korean friends that I have, so I get to hear how conversation rolls in Korean, much like if I was with a group of English-speaking friends. One meeting I had at a friend's house, I probably understood about 70-80% of what they said. Although I was quiet for most of the time, I did some speaking, which was good. One question I asked, they suddenly burst out laughing and said that I sounded robotic, much like out of a language audio CD. They mentioned that while my pronunciation was pretty good, my intonation needed some work. While I'm sure they reacted out of good intentions, I was hurt from their reaction. Nonetheless, I'll take this in stride as an experience and work more on my intonation as well.

P.S If there are any methods to improve intonation, please let me know. I don't see a lot of methods on how to improve intonation in a foreign language, so I wanted to ask here instead.