MIBG's Korean Log, or A Cry for Help

[Notorious MIBG]

I've decided to more or less adhere to the JALUP structure for now, with tweaks where appropriate. This is my current stage:

Task
1. Complete 1,000 Kanji Chain Sentences (Stages 1-4) Finish Pimsleur Korean | Level 1 Complete
2. Complete 1,000 Japanese Korean-English sentences
3. Read about the process behind the Jalup decks | Complete
4. Read/understand 5 short stories and listen to/comprehend 11 life situations | I will be using Reading In Korean: a "Story Time" collection and TTMIK Iyagi (Beginner)

Average Completion Time
Combined: 4-6 months

[Notorious MIBG]

Slight alteration to the KOLUP deck building strategy. Plan is still to slowly add ~10-20 K-E sentence cards each day from the TTMIK grammar books via the Memrise deck. As I mentioned earlier, however, even with this it's hard to keep to the i + 1 principle adhered to by JALUP. After perusing the My Weekly Korean Vocabulary (Henceforth MWKV) ebooks, however, I realized they are almost exactly this, complete with grammar points. Here's an image of one of one page as an example:

Screenshot 2018-04-07 20.40.19.png

In addition, the ebook pdfs come with easy ability to copy + paste both English and Korean text and the audio can be spliced quite soundly with a minimum duration of silence between sounds setting of 0.400 in Audacity. So, in an effort to build my deck faster I'm incorporating these sentences into my deck on the weekends and will stick to adding from the grammar books during the week. I was averaging about 5 sentences or so from each grammar lesson and with this vocabulary book I can get closer to 15 in the same amount of time.

Just to give some idea, if made into a sentence deck MWKV alone would account for ~5,000 sentences (48 weeks * 7 days * 15 sentences/day, not accounting for any conflicts with the i + 1 strategy, which I assume will diminish this number sizably as time goes on). Assuming all the grammar points covered in the TTMIK grammar books are covered in MWKV at some point, this could end up even being a complete resource unto itself.

I can very easily imagine a strategy of a KOLUP sentence deck based solely on MWKV sentences while using the Korean Grammar In Use books as a reference for the beginner/pre-native content phase of Korean language learning.

EDIT: I've finished adding the first week of sentences and my suspicion of diminishing return due to i + 1 adherence was correct. I have a total of 50 sentences from the first week, which if this trend keeps up would leave me with on the order of ~2,400 sentences from all 48 weeks of material, not the ~5,000 originally calculated.

[Notorious MIBG]

I'm now 500 cards into the deck. A decent portion (110 cards) are from the MWKV ebook and I've only added the second of fourty-two weeks. I've seen 366/500 cards thus far, seeing 10 new cards per day, and while I do feel like I'm making some progress I'm wondering whether transitioning to K-K cards after 1000 will be doable. In any case, I'll continue on with the JOLUP plan until I feel like I need to diverge for some good reason.

Pimsleur is coming along slowly. I'm finding the second level much harder than the first. I'm also only doing one session a day (30 minutes) and not letting myself move on until I'm at least at > 80% perfectly correct response without any pausing. I really like how it balances out my day, but as I add more and more sentences I might reconsider whether doing the level 3 audio when it comes out (It should be any day now) is worth it. The plan right now is one I'm done with Pimsleur 2 I'll start doing iTalki lessons on a regular basis.

Otherwise, I've been watching a little Korean TV and film, but not in any amount to write home about. I'm watching in Korean without any subtitles the first time through, then re-watching with English subtitles, then ripping the audio and putting it onto my phone to play when I'm doing mindless tasks. I haven't committed much time to this, though, as I started doing it with a television show and I'm beginning to think that repeating the same audio over and over again (ala JALUP recs) might be more suited to a movie. I also happen to enjoy Korean film much more than Korean TV, so this could just be a convenient excuse.

Edit: Just to add, quickly, I've completely changed my grading strategy in Anki to reflect what I presume most people do. I used to do all-or-nothing (Green or Red) and never the middle two, but I've come up with a more nuanced approach based on pronunciation accuracy, general gist of what the sentence means, etc... The only time I give myself the red is when I don't know the definition of the word the card is testing me on at all. This has lead to a much more tolerable Anki schedule and I haven't found myself doing any of the banging-my-head-against the wall I did in the past. I'm glad I figured this out.

[Bunnychu]

Interesting approach. I also have My Weekly Korean Vocabulary but I haven't given it a chance. If I get bored of my current setting, I might give this a try.

[Notorious MIBG]

Still making progress. A long way off from 1000 sentences. I've been doing a lot more MWKV instead of the base level TTMIK lessons because it's just so much easier to add sentences from the former (see prior screenshot for illustration of copy + paste ease). Once I hit 1000 I'm going to force myself to transition to K-K as the KOLUP method suggests. I purchased a physical Korean-Korean dictionary, even though I'll probably be using mostly Naver. In addition, I purchased a set of Korean-Korean grammar books that seem quite nice, in particular the second volume.

The plan is still as stated before. Not much has changed. I have been cheating w/r the JOLUP method in that I have been checking English sentence translations every once in a while when I have literally no idea what the sentence is getting at (Usually when it is brand new). I'm trying to cut that out completely over time and become more comfortable with not knowing every detail so as to avoid the trap of always translating sentences in my head.

Edit: Forgot to add another Korean-language-acquisition related purchase - I had been wanting to replace my wireless Apple keyboard with one that has a numpad. Thankfully, Apple sells a Korean + English version (In sexy Space Gray)! Now I just need to find some Korean typing tests like the ones I had to do in middle school typing class...

[Dak]

You should really try out Lingq. If you have a base of even 500 words you can start to progress your vocabulary level incredibly fast from beginner up to intermediate. I’m now at a lower intermediate level, just grinding my way through long excerpts of books and different news articles etc, but it’s much more engaging than Anki could ever be imo.

[Notorious MIBG]

Unfortunately, my streak of daily Anki completion came to an end. Ironically, this occurred during my trip to Korea (More on that later). I am at 725 cards total now, and stopped adding them for a few weeks due to more pressing life events eating up most of my time. That I'm so close to 1000 K-E cards without feeling like I grasp the language enough to move forward to K-K cards is, as I've stated before, scary.

I haven't worked on the other elements of my beginner plan (Stories + Conversations) because I had planned on not starting those until after Pimsleur 2 was finished. Unfortunately, I am making terribly slow progress on these. If I don't get done with these by the start of August I might consider throwing them aside for the moment and coming back to them later on, when I'm in iTalki mode.

[devilyoudont]

Not learning Korean, but my basic strategy for switching to monolingual dictionaries has been to use both a monolingual and a bilingual dictionary at the same time. I check the monolingual dictionary first. When I understand it, I use that as the definition. When I don't, I use the definition from a bilingual dictionary. Started out never ever using the monolingual dictionary's definition, now use the monolingual dictionary about 15-20% of the time.

[Notorious MIBG]

Have been in the throes of grant writing recently and all my daily habits, language-learning and not, fell by the wayside (Some for the first time in years - daily journal entries as an example). The fear of not meeting a deadline when I had put so much work into the project scared me into working around the clock.

In any case, I'm easing back in now. I'm still well short of my flashcard and Pimsleur goal. I should've been done with Pimsleur months ago, for instance. I will start intentionally speeding up, though, (1) because I'm not sure how helpful it is in comparison to flashcards or other strategies, and (2) I have my schedule set as Pimsleur -> iTalki and I just think the latter would be much more useful (Of course, I could just stop Pimsleur now but I'm so close to finishing I'd rather just do it even if I could spend my time more profitably - I know this doesn't make any sense...).

In other news, I purchased the Aesop's/Korean folk tails book from TTMIK because I think I finally found a resource that I can create a good Arguelles-style shadowing method since Assimil is not available in English <-> Korean. That'll be on the back burner until I'm done with 1000 KOLUP cards and Pimsleur 2. I think I could make a lot of progression using his method. Here are the detailed notes I took from one of his videos regarding the steps:

1. Start by just shadowing audiobook

2. Shadow audio while reading English text (May want to slow audio speed down a bit at first, and speed up as time goes on)

3. Read with two thumbs. Look at native language, just like step 2, but anytime you think you know what a sentence means then jump over to the target language.

4. Reverse of 3. Anchor in target language, but jump to English when you need to.

5. Listen to audio and look at target language, even if confused. (You can do, say, a chapter of a book over and over and over again on step 1 before moving on if you like. No prescription for number of times at each step.)

6. Sit down and do a comparative analysis of the two texts without audio. Maybe reference grammatical analyses of the two texts. Learn vocab you don’t quite understand.

7. Read the target language aloud without audio.

8. Write the text out by hand (Scriptorium).

Add a short lesson each day. 2-5 minutes. Go through this series of steps for each lesson.

----
How to manage time during shadowing

- 15 to 20 minutes of audio shadowing, how ever many lessons that is
- First few of the lessons would be at the last step. The last lesson of a block of learning will be at step 1. Grade between.
- The last 10-15 mins can be lessons with comparative analysis, reading target language without audio, and writing text out by hand.
----

9. After all of this, work at typing out the text. Print (double spaced) and then compare to original text. Write in lines things you don’t understand. When done, print out again and write in things you still don’t know. Ad infinitum until you know everything.

10. Finally, audio only playing in the background while you’re doing other things can be profitable.

I also stumbled across a typing game from Go Billy, here. It's exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to recreate the program I used to type with in sixth grade. It wasn't nearly as fun as this game, but all I need now is a cut-out cardboard box to cover my hands and go at it.

[Christi]

What do you think of the Aesop/Korean stories so far? I've also bought it but am not that far along yet.