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Sayonaroo
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Re: Advice, tips or tricks for learning Korean

Postby Sayonaroo » Sat Dec 08, 2018 6:54 pm

ironfist wrote:Korean is the only language I've studied where I can watch a show and not pick up a single word.

Elementary Korean is one of the few books that doesn't suck.

I've written about my difficulties learning Korean a lot on the previous forum.

For some reason everyone on this forum thinks it's easy. I dunno, man. Look, I'm learning Russian now. Russian is hard. It does stuff English doesn't. Russian is the only language I've studied where I can know all the words I want to say but not know the correct form to use so I have no idea how to say it. However, Russian is easier, because at least I can understand words I know, and the words aren't all 2 syllable homonyms of each other.

Furthermore, I started Korean at 16 and Russian at 36 and Russian is still easier.

Like I don't know, other than watching dramas, which is fun but other than learning a heap about culture, someone won't learn much. I watched them every day for years. Nothing.

Listening to kpop and reading the lyrics for hours a day for years. Nothing. Trying to look up the words in a dictionary (worthless).

Because I listened to them so much I memorized the songs phonetically, yet wrong. I have beautiful kpop songs I still remember from 16 years ago in my brain. No idea what any of the words are besides sarang and yeongwon. And hangsang. But I still remember the singer from JuJu Club pronounces P as F (hago shifu). But I remember being enamored with Korean stuff at that point in my youth.

Essentially, I have no point.


I don't think that's unique to Korean. It's just a bad method or unrealistic expectation to expect yourself to learn stuff just from passively watching stuff with english subs or no subs. I would even describe that as entitlement ie anime fans who watch 1000 hours watching anime with fansubs then watch an episode raw and realize how they actually aren't that good at understanding Japanese without English subtitles. I get the impression it was your method rather than your incompatibility with Korean or the challenges of learning Korean. I agree that the 2 syllables words are a pain and take a while to get used to but that's 60-70% of the language and the other remaining percentage is composed of the korean korean words that have no chinese character basis and tend to be more memorable in some ways.

I don't use korean textbooks but these past 10? 5? years there seems to be a huge influx of material ie TTMIK ( I don't use it it's too basic or too much English but a lot of people seem to love it) and luke park's grammar guide and other guides. There's just been a rise in popularity in Korean and there seems to be much more resources. I feel your pain for the lack of study material 20+ years ago.
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