More Korean than Japanese in 2022 - 2023

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kraemder
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Sat May 23, 2020 11:50 pm

They say that thanks to Google, these days, if you think a certain way or want to find evidence supporting your opinion or idea, no matter how silly or ridiculous, you can find it. I finally found an article supporting my dilemma not on how much sleep to get but how long to stay in bed per night. Certainly 8 hours of sleep is the standard, but who falls asleep right away when they go to bed and stays asleep until the alarm goes off? Well, not me anyway. https://qz.com/1301123/why-eight-hours-a-night-isnt-enough-according-to-a-leading-sleep-scientist/ This guy says that 8.5 hours a night is the new 8 hours. Finally, I found an expert who thinks like I do telling me how long to stay in bed. Will this finally get me to go to bed on time?? Will my Korean studies now progress exponentially?

Anyway, as it's the weekend and I'm trying to think how to motivate myself to do what needs to be done to get Korean moving along.. I did have an idea to write about. It's not a really new one but still.

I keep wanting to engage native material and well do the Steve Kaufmann thing of just tadoku or extensive reading but well it just hasn't worked for me so far. My vocabulary and grammar (especially my vocabulary) is just too small that reading it's too panful, slow, and even if I look up everything sometimes I am still left scratching my head. I wish I had a Korean Core deck similar to the Japanese Core deck but it doesn't exist. If you don't know what the Japanese Core deck is, you can Google it. However, there is Evita's vocabulary deck which is also quite nice, just no example sentences. According to many language learners this is a fatal flaw. This has prevented me from really getting motivated and applying myself to do this deck and I keep flip flopping between it and other Anki decks and making my own decks usually from https://www.howtostudykorean.com. But making decks is hard and those sentences on that site are generally good but not always good - they're sometimes weird. It's not a Core deck.

Yesterday I was watching YouTube and saw a medical student raving about Anki and in particular an add on that helps him to do 1000 reviews per day. I don't know if I've ever done 1000 reviews in a day and I've had some crazy all day study days. The add on is called Speed Focus Mode https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1046608507 and it simply forces you to answer a card within a set time frame. IE, you can set it to show the answer after 4 seconds or whatever you want. It has a couple other options like it plays this horrible sounding bell that warns you that 4 seconds are almost up. That last bit is what turned me off the add on when I had heard about it and tried it before. This med student YouTuber likes the bell it seems but he shows you that you can turn it off and also turn off the option for the add on to auto mark a card wrong after that time period if you had done nothing.

I'm finding that just having the card turn over in 3.5 seconds or so is a great way to keep me moving at a good pace through a deck and most importantly it really does help me relax and focus and keep studying longer. So this has thankfully gotten me more motivated and positive about Korean studying. My goal is still to get into Native material but right now that just isn't a very enjoyable way to learn. I'm thinking that I can hit up Evita's vocabulary deck really hard and also her Grammar deck and then go back and see if reading Harry Potter goes better. To be honest, reading Harry Potter on LingQ right now isn't the worst. It's doable even if I'm looking up almost every word. But it really doesn't feel like I'm learning anything from it. Aside from a few vocab words like 'magic' or 'wizard' in Korean I don't think much has stuck. Certainly nothing of use for having a conversation with a tutor or a language exchange. But I digress. I was thinking of trying for some concrete goals. They say concrete goals help you focus and stay motivated when studying a language. I haven't found them at all useful for me but I think I might have been doing it wrong. (or it's hopeless, we'll see). I would try a goal like learning 20 words per day in Anki or studying Korean grammar every day for 15 minutes even.. please God.. just if I could only study the stupid stuff for 15 measly minutes a day. I thought they were ok goals because they seemed specific enough but it occurred to me to try to make a goal for a month. A month is a long enough goal where you can see some real results but it's not so long (like a year) where you are likely to lose focus. This month I could try to learn X amount of words in Evita's vocabulary deck. Well, by learn I mean get them into the review rotation and be more or less on top of my reviews. And I would like to work on my grammar too. So I could look to add X amount of grammar cards in Evita's grammar deck. I have other decks I'm interested in but I think I'm going to jut focus on those to for this one month challenge. I don't plan to make other goals at this time like read for X amount of minutes or watch k-drama or do tutoring with I-talki tutors. I probably will do that stuff but it will be the same as before - just when I feel like it.

My goal is to add 1000 new Korean vocabulary cards this month. I currently have about 1400 cards mostly young at the moment. I actually exported Evita's vocabulary deck to Flash Cards Deluxe and it doesn't have the same add on but it has a similar count down timer feature to keep you moving along. Yesterday and Today I already added a lot of new cards. But if I increased my daily review to anywhere near the amount Anki Med Student YouTuber Prerak Juthani then I can add tons more cards very aggressively and be ok. When I think about it it's a little bit shameful. Look at a typical med student's Anki Flashcard. It has tons of information including detailed diagrams, pictures, and explanations etc. My vocabulary cards are stupid simple in comparison. 공 (ko-ng) means ball. Wait I forgot already :x

I've started and given up doing Evita's Grammar deck many times. Grammar flash cards are a lot more difficult for me but as my Korean gets better, so does my tolerance for grammar flash cards. Per Anki I have 310 young cards and zero mature cards in this deck. As I said, I have started and stopped it several times so I think I restarted it from scratch again recently. It's a little arbitrary but I will make my month goal for this deck to add 400 more cards.

So there it is. My goal for the next month is to learn 1000 new vocabulary cards and 400 new grammar cards. If I could really review 1000 cards per day then this would be too easy. But it's also more new material than I've done in a while if ever. I can get pumped up but the reviews usually slow me down a lot. I'm counting on this Speed Focus Mode to bring my studying to a new level. :geek:
Last edited by kraemder on Mon May 25, 2020 3:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Christi
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby Christi » Sun May 24, 2020 8:51 am

1000 reviews per day and reviews in 3 second sounds crazy to me :shock: I've tried speed reviewing before, but it didn't seem like I was actually processing what I was doing. I need more time.

And how on earth would you learn 1000 words per month? If I could do that I'd be a pro at Korean in no time. Maybe I should start reading more :oops:

Btw, I've also been reading Harry Potter in Korean, but if you're adding almost every word you see then the level is probably too high for you right now. Maybe it's a different experience since you're reading it digitally and I'm using the paper version, but it just seems very brutal to me.
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2020 resolution words learned: 472 / 1000
Pages read at end of 2020: 220 / 1500

kraemder
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Sun May 24, 2020 6:18 pm

Christi wrote:1000 reviews per day and reviews in 3 second sounds crazy to me :shock: I've tried speed reviewing before, but it didn't seem like I was actually processing what I was doing. I need more time.

And how on earth would you learn 1000 words per month? If I could do that I'd be a pro at Korean in no time. Maybe I should start reading more :oops:

Btw, I've also been reading Harry Potter in Korean, but if you're adding almost every word you see then the level is probably too high for you right now. Maybe it's a different experience since you're reading it digitally and I'm using the paper version, but it just seems very brutal to me.


For this month my focus is the pre-made deck Korean Vocabulary by Evita. I'm not using vocabulary from Harry Potter. I might read some Harry Potter and look up some words but I am not studying them aside from looking up unknown words as I encounter them.

Yeah, I was thinking that setting a really high goal would motivate me and then if I didn't make it at least I'd have learned a lot of words. But I was reconsidering that last night. I think setting a good goal that is very realistic and that I can and should achieve would be better. But I'm going to try to stick to the 1000 word goal for this month. It's one month and not a each month kind of thing. And it's based on the fact that I haven't added many new words to my SRS routine in a while so my reviews were like 10 to 15 minutes per day. If I were already doing nearly two hours of reviews a day clearly adding 1000 more new words would be more difficult. And I don't have to really know said words just have them as active in my SRS app.

What makes this worse though is that I've also decided to test myself not just on recognition but on active recall (English/picture on side 1 instead of Korean) which in effect adds at least 1000 more cards to review (same words though but still) to this challenge of mine. Actually it adds more because I haven't done -any- recall cards so I'm having to start from card 1 on the recall cards. But I did 2 hours of reviewing yesterday of just Evita's vocabulary and it was ok. A lot of that was going through recall cards for words I mostly know already though but just hadn't tested myself that way.

So far so good but as anyone who's got experience with stuff like this knows it's easy to over perform at first when you feel motivated and something is new and fresh but it's another thing to maintain it. I'll keep posting here.
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Mon May 25, 2020 7:08 pm

Back in the day on the old language forums I posted tons and tons about studying Japanese. I think that showed how interested and motivated I was to learn if also how slow and frustrating it was :cry:. It seems I'm posting a lot again about Korean which is good. Maybe a few too many posts for people who want to keep up but aren't so interested they want to read a book about it.

As noted in a previous post I got pretty motivated when I watched a video about how a talented med student was using Anki to review 1000 cards a day for med school. His cards were mostly question/answer so basically production so I thought I should do production cards too. Well, I changed my mind after doing a lot. My cards aren't question/answer but English/Korean and that's not quite the same. To make good production cards I would have to put real time and effort into making the cards and even then I might not be happy with them for language learning purposes since I'm not cramming for a test.

And another thing I ignored was that he suggested using the Speed Focus add on to facilitate reviews not for learning new material. I am ok with using SRS flash cards to learn new vocabulary without spending tons of time on each new word just trusting that once I see it in the app I will likely see it outside the app somewhere else. Sure with my current level of Korean I barely understand anything but these are really useful words I'm focusing on so I think it's ok. But I don't have a lot of 'learned' cards per say so doing 1000 cards a day would mean doing 500+ newish cards and that's well too much. I think I have added about 200 to 400 new cards in the past week or so and my study time has gone up from 5-15 minutes per day to two hours on this deck. Even with the timer making me move along I'm failing a lot of cards over and over which is tiring. I'm hoping it gets better.

I saw another inspiring video on YouTube this morning :geek: MIA Matt's friend Yoda talks about studying for JLPT N1 in Japan. His videos are a lot less polished than Matt's and more like mine so I like that and since he passed the N1 in a relatively short period of time I was interested in what he had to say. He had three tips. They were probably all good tips but I already forgot two (maybe I'll rewatch the video) I think I already do them or can't realistically do them because I'm not in Korea. But he said he literally made himself think in Japanese all day except for 1 hour or so. This thinking in another language is something I've certainly heard is good but I have never heard of anyone going so far as to try to do it all day. He definitely got results and I think this may have been key. I know that with German which was my first foreign language and one that sunk itself pretty deeply into my brain, more deeply to me then Japanese although Japanese is definitely permanently there too, I probably thought in that language the most. I did this in part to improve my German but mostly because I was really into that language and wanted to think in German. It sounded cool to me at the time. I have tried thinking in other languages since then but it was not nearly as much. When I was in Japan I did think in Japanese some but I definitely didn't before going to Japan. I didn't really force it too much though. It was more like Japanese would naturally come to mind as a result of my studying it 6+ hours a day. Anyway, it makes sense to me that deliberately making yourself think in the target language is going to improve it. And you check yourself constantly when you do. I know in German I had a pocket paper dictionary with me and I was looking up words etc., and in Japanese I had my iPhone with Midori (a great Japanese dictionary) and some other dictionaries too.

The only Korean that I've thought to myself has been echoing the Rosetta Stone sentences in my mind. I haven't really forced myself to think or converse with myself in Korean. I think Yoda went cold turkey literally going from not really forcing himself to think in Japanese to doing almost all the time at once. Being in America I don't think it's realistic to think in Korean all day - only when I'm alone. Ok that's most of my day actually but still. I'm going to try to work gradually on this without a set goal except to think in Korean at least -some- each day.
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Mon May 25, 2020 8:58 pm

I just stumbled on something I posted recently on YouTube when someone liked it. It summarizes my thoughts on thinking in a foreign language pretty much until now. Basically, it came naturally to me for German because I was young and loved the language so much. As an older guy who is interested in a language but not necessarily infatuated with it, can I get myself to do it? I am convinced that it is quite helpful at least for improving speaking (maybe comprehension too?). Can I make my old brain do some new tricks and think in Korean?

I really liked this interview and pretty much agree with all the comments. I've heard the advice that you should practice or learn to think in your target language to become more fluent. Of course logically this makes sense. Way back when I was 21 and in Germany and a beginner at German but completely in love with the language, I was walking around Berlin thinking to myself in bad German. I did it constantly. I guess I probably put a bit of effort into it but really not too much because it was something I wanted to do. I also found myself dreaming in German pretty often and that's not something you have any control over for sure. Since then I've studied and made some real progress eventually in Spanish and French but never really thought in those languages or dreamt in them. At the young age of 34 I started learning Japanese spending 3+ hours a day doing something in those languages be it flashcards, an app, watching anime (yes a lot of that), or reading a textbook. After about 5 years of studying Japanese I moved to Japan for 2 years and taught English. I never really thought in Japanese the way I did German or dreamed in Japanese (maybe a little when I was in Japan but not much). I think I spent more time with Japanese than German overall even but it didn't happen. So I think it's great to think a target language but if you're not really young maybe it's just not going to happen like that. Just my thoughts from my experience.
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kraemder
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Re: Kraemders lazy Korean log

Postby kraemder » Tue Jun 02, 2020 4:22 am

I tried thinking in Korean a little bit for a couple of days but haven't really kept it up. I think it would be a good habit to do just like Anki and I'm very sure it would help me become more fluent at the very least. It seems good. But a bit tiring and not something I'm going to try too aggressively right now. Just a little bit every day I think is plenty. A couple minutes even.

I've been pretty motivated about Korean in general all week. After posting here I of course did some flashcard cramming but also continued looking on YouTube mostly for videos on how to study Korean better. I watched a video by Yoga MIA . Actually, I watched several of his videos as well as some others. Sometimes you read about someone else's experience studying Japanese and you think... this must be an exaggeration of what really happened.. he went from basically zero to N1 in 3 years. Possibly less than 3 years but he didn't take the test until 3 years later. If he were Chinese that would be one thing but he's not. Well, I know I went about learning Japanese the hard way so maybe that's why it took me so long. But I digress, the video I linked above discusses his thoughts on SRS sentence cards. He's very much in favor of them and it's a good listen. I say listen because he chose not to video himself reading his short essay on it. I will say that was probably a good idea because his delivery was must stronger than his other videos. After watching his video I pretty much decided to go back to sentence cards, using howtostudykorean.com for most of the sentence mining as it's the only resource I know of with tons of sentences for beginner/intermediate learners.

I'm still very intrigued with the speed review method I was trying out but I'm finding it's really not good for newly learned material and not if you're not ready to really focus. It's particularly not so good for sentences that aren't i+1. It's inevitable that you will need more time to puzzle over those cards.

In Matt's video he discussed why he was so much against pure vocabulary flashcards as opposed to sentence cards too. However, neither of them really discussed the option of doing both. I'm choosing not to do Evita's deck at the moment (another flip flop :cry: ) but I am experimenting with another deck based on the book Essential Korean Vocabulary published by Tuttle. It has 8000 words per the description. I have it in PDF form and I'm using that to make flash cards. It's organized by topic and I'm trying out putting the topic/chapter on the card as well to give me a little hint as to what the word means. Just a little but maybe it will make doing reviews a little more easier and less tiring.

I still think Anki is a really good tool for learning but as I watched Matt's video going over MIA, it discussed the importance of immersion and how that is where the real learning takes place and Anki or SRS is just a small supplement to speed learning up a bit. From my experience, when I changed or improved how I immersed in a foreign language is when I made better progress. Changing up my flash cards really didn't matter. I've done both sentence and vocabulary flash cards, probably more vocabulary than anything, but both, and I don't think it truly mattered which one I did. With sentence flash cards, in effect, it's like studying off a graded reader in a lot of ways. You're only reading sentences that have one new word per sentence and the grammar isn't too much above you - if you get proper sentences. Matt said by using Anki you can forego having to do the graded reader method - but to me you're just substituting one for the other. That said, aside from English, most languages do not have many graded readers available so that makes a tool like Anki so nice I think.

Oh, I stumbled on this crazy log about an Australian guy I think learning Swedish. He had experience with German and had done all the Pimsleur courses for Swedish and wanted to strengthen his vocabulary before moving on to the rest of the language and basically doing native material I guess. Anyway, he got a frequency list of sorts from a vocabulary book. It started with the first 3000 cards. He made all production cards with English on side 1 and Swedish on side 2. He went through the deck adding 200 cards per day. His study time varied but it was roughly about 2 hours a day. Sometimes 3 hours or so but 2 hours seemed standard. He would post brief statistical entries like Study Time 192 minutes, reviews etc. He said he used mnemonics to create a hook for each card and then it stuck generally. Basically he related the word to a German or English word or maybe another Swedish word he knew, or maybe used another mnemonic but it didn't see he had to try too hard. He did the 3000 words and then moved onto the next 3000 and then the next 3000. I believe he took about 2 weeks between the sets to get his daily reviews down a bit before going back to adding 200 new cards a day. A few other people following his log tried to duplicate what he was doing but nobody could. It made me think of the doctor I saw spending about 2 hours a day on Anki doing 1000 reviews. Some people are just really good at remembering things. I don't think that's going to work for me unfortunately.

Yeah, so as I was mentioning before getting totally sidetracked, the real learning is in engaging native material. There's the option of learning where someone will just go at native material or maybe a textbook before taking on native material, not doing any rote learning really, but just using a dictionary to look up stuff as he encounters unknown words. He doesn't save the words for later study, just moves on, absorbing more and more native material. This is how I studied German, Spanish, and French. Rote learning just didn't stick for me but if I read a book and or listened to radio/internet programs then somehow, things would slowly start to stick. It's not that I didn't try rote learning but that it failed me so horribly that I eventually gave it up. I would make word lists and study them for a few days, maybe even a week, but then go back to them later a month later and only remembered a few words. It seemed to me I would have remembered those particular words without writing them down and making an effort to try to remember them by rote. I thought I had a great learning method but then I tried learning Japanese and that didn't work for me. I just couldn't engage native material. Well, I could watched subbed anime. That was it. And take classes and do Anki. And be very patient. Very very patient. I think maybe I should have really engaged the native material more despite the difficulties instead of relying on Anki. Anki kept me moving forward though when nothing else seemed it would at least.

Studying Japanese I think made me a too reliant on SRS. I think I need to make it the supplemental tool and force myself to engage Korean head on. I've given this some thought. When I watched Japanese anime with English subs, I of course tried some to hear the Japanese while reading the English to understand what was happening. I was very bad at connecting the English to the Japanese I listened to I think mostly because the word order is so different. I'm used to Subject, Object, Verb, post positions languages now so that's less of an issue but I still think that my Korean would be better served if I just turned off the subs. I'll be very reliant on the visuals to understand the plot and this is going to be hard for me. Thankfully there are English summaries of most k-dramas online so if I watch something and I feel like I'm just lost and need to get back on track I'll head over to the summaries to catch myself up. This is how I hope to keep myself from turning the subs back on. I am not one to watch a show twice. I am also not one to read the summaries and then watch the shows. I need the uncertainty of not knowing what happens next to keep me interested in the plot and motivated to try to understand. I know kids, and even some adults, enjoy re-watching or re-reading books etc., and many language coaches or people on YouTube champion this as a great way to properly learn the language. It seems so logical. But it's not for me (for most things). When I studied German I felt like such a terrible language learner in that I went from book to book and rarely re-read anything. There were a few exceptions but I never re-read something directly after finishing it. More like a year later or so. I think this is the way I like to study and despite being such a terrible student at German (in my mind), I learned tons of words and a lot of grammar.

So I'm going to embrace that philosophy and try not to think about reviewing too much. I am certainly not going to mine sentences from native material. I think that distracts from engaging the material if you're constantly thinking of how to get it into a flash card in Anki. I know I had that mindset in Japanese constantly and I want to get rid of it for Korean. Korean shouldn't be as difficult of a language for me as Japanese was. Even if I am 10 years older :cry:
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eido
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby eido » Tue Jun 02, 2020 11:12 am

What if the sentences from non-native sources have errors in it?

I know a lot of sentences of HTSK are a bit unnatural. The grammar they cover isn’t—the concepts are sound—but the native qualities are missing.

Just curious as to your opinion. I could see why you might choose to do things differently, but I want to hear it straight from you.
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kraemder
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Tue Jun 02, 2020 11:58 pm

eido wrote:What if the sentences from non-native sources have errors in it?

I know a lot of sentences of HTSK are a bit unnatural. The grammar they cover isn’t—the concepts are sound—but the native qualities are missing.

Just curious as to your opinion. I could see why you might choose to do things differently, but I want to hear it straight from you.



As you said the grammar on the site is sound. I don't think there's errors aside from a typo or two in the Korean. I haven't found any typos really although I changed a couple English translations but there too I am happy with 99% of them. I think the sentences are ok and really natural Korean sentences would be too hard right now. But I really want to practice with simple patterns that I can absorb. Textbook style examples are where it's at for me right now. It wouldn't hurt to add a few cards with natural Korean that is above my level but just a few. I think it's something I might want to add later. I'm only on lesson 30 out of 150 on that site and I think he's still adding lessons. I have a ways to go. I really don't know if he'll add more natural sounding sentences in later units but it would make sense to me that he might. If he doesn't, after I'm more confident in my grasp of textbook grammar, I could add some sentences myself. But I might not. It depends how much natural Korean I pickup on my own just from reading, listening etc. I really want to try to 'immerse' more, earlier with Korean than I did with Japanese. Even with Japanese, I picked up a lot of casual speech patterns from watching English subbed anime.
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kraemder
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Sun Jun 07, 2020 5:29 am

*edit* Me Reading this on YouTube
Weekend update. It's been a good week I think as I'm still motivated and enjoying studying Korean. I stumbled on MIA Matt's old video about him talking about his AJATT experience.



He literally sat down and decided to just go over and sum up everything in one video, in one go, and just started talking. 3 hours later he was done sort of. I'm working from home and it was kind of slow so I just watched it while I worked mostly and finished it up after work. It's not the first stupid long video about language learning I've watched - I am a sucker for this stuff. (Seabolt Speaks is one of my new favorite channels). As is typical, I was influenced by some of what he said. First of all, AJATT, or all Japanese all the time, may have put a few personal spins on language learning, but he's not the first person by any means do try to learn a language by well doing everything in that language as much as possible. I did that with German way back in the day and I know many other learners did similar things. Everyone's approach of course was a bit different and AJATT incorporated Anki into his method and got very good results. And I think he might be the first one to start an online cult for language learning. Anyway.

So Matt talked about what he did and his experiences with Japan. I think his experiences had a lot in common with many other westerners trying to assimilate into the culture and well not having it be quite what they hoped for despite a lot of hard work. But that's not Japan's fault and Matt later said that he was depressed when he made the video so it emphasizes the bad more than it should. But I didn't think it was all bad even if he was dwelling on the bad a bit more than people usually would especially if they care about offending people and a culture etc. I was super impressed with what he achieved and of course curious about his routine.

I should have written down exactly what he did but essentially it was Japanese all the time as much as possible. And he was a high school student and then a college student so he had a lot of control over how he spent his time - it was a lot of Japanese. He says he started his day waking up early to do Anki reps. It was about 2 hours. This 2 hours of Anki seems to be a magic number of sorts with people that really push Anki to the limit. He focused on immersion right away even as a beginner, turning off the subs and watching anime without really understanding a thing at first. He went to Japanese High School but was barely conversational it seems and didn't enjoy socializing at all as a result and spent as much time alone as possible studying Japanese - reading light novels even though they were very hard and making Anki cards etc. The most enjoyable time he had in Japan at that time was teaching English. He was a sort of teachers assistant in the high school English class and dropped all his other subjects to do that as he couldn't understand the other classes anyway. And then he worked as a counselor at a camp for a couple weeks teaching English and really enjoyed it. His host family thought he was weird just studying all the time instead of spending time with them - they thought he would learn Japanese better being with them but Matt didn't think so. I don't know who was right. I do know that when I was in Germany and later Japan and sucked at the languages, or at least couldn't keep up with natives, I wanted to study by myself too in order to get better. He left Japan ahead of schedule as he wasn't happy in Japan and thought he could just self immerse at home anyway and be happier (and he was right).

Anyway, his story is pretty interesting and if you're into Japanese his video is a very good watch. I wonder how he got so many views. (Just because it's interesting maybe? haha who knows how YouTube works). Well, back to his method. He really felt that I+1 was very important and suggested making 10 to 15 new sentence cards a day and no more. He says that towards the end of his studying he started breaking the I+1 rule and regretted it as it made doing anki reviews a lot more difficult. He talked about how the idea is to get a hook for a word in your head and then adding a definition for a word was much easier. I guess that's where Anki helps out. I tend to agree that getting a hook in your head or a word in your dictionary in your head is the hard part, so that your brain stops tuning this word out when it hears it, and then once it stops filtering the word out then you will start to learn what the heck it means afterwards.

So I'm kind of playing with the idea of waking up early to do Anki reviews. I wouldn't want to wake up a full two hours earlier. I think I've talked about my sleep difficulties already and so this might not be a good idea but I'm curious and want to try it out. Today I have done about two hours of Anki. It's Saturday so that's not a big deal for me. Actually, I adjusted how Anki counts time. It was set to stop counting at 60 seconds before but I sometimes spend a few minutes on a card particularly if I am looking up words in a sentence on Papago or Naver. I fixed that so hopefully it counts correctly. I guess if I put it too high and then accidentally fall asleep while doing Anki it won't stop or something. I don't really know why that setting is there. When I was learning German through immersion, I focused mostly on reading. It's natural to look up words while you're reading but weird if you're listening to a podcast or audio book even. I did listen to tons of German but only while I was doing something else - mostly playing Everquest (an online MMO) or working at my job where I did data entry. Or doing anything really - cleaning, exercising, commuting. I'm working from home so there's no commute. I don't clean enough - I might try to work that into my study routine but this would not be reliable. So I'm going to have to make myself do some listening - I watched 1 hour of Goblin (the k-drama) without subs tonight. I know the characters already since I've been watching it with subs so it wasn't too terrible. I am going to say I understood about 5% of the Korean but it might have been less. Thankfully, they didn't just sit on their butts talking to each other but actually did stuff so I could watch them and get the gist of things. The hour went by pretty quickly - I hope this continues.

I got back into LingQ again and I'm continuing Harry Potter book 1. I'm about 1/3 of the way through now. I will probably be doing a lot of reading with LingQ in the near future so I may complain about the app. It has its shortcomings. But I'm happy to see that after clicking many many words a lot of pages are mostly white instead of all blue/yellow words like before. That's a nice effect I think of the app. I can sort of see the progress by looking at the lack of colors on the page. One shortcoming is that you can't copy and paste text from the website. Really. What the heck? I changed my mind about native material and I want to copy 10 sentences a day from Harry Potter into Anki. I am not so big on I+1 but there's another rule Matt had that I might break but really don't want to. He says you need to understand the sentence (well after looking up the words). Sometimes you don't. That's actually pretty often for me but it seems to be noticeably improving. It helps that I know Harry Potter already for sure.

He's also pretty big on the whole monolingual thing. I am for it if I can get a good language learner's dictionary. I did reach a point with Japanese where I usually understood the definition of a word after looking it up in a Japanese dictionary - but sometimes I only partly understood and maybe didn't even realize my understanding was vague or off a little until after I'd reviewed the card a few times. Matt really liked his ability to remember actual Japanese definitions. I don't think my memory is so good that I would be quoting the dictionary very much so I don't see that as a plus. I'm probably going to stick with bilingual dictionaries at least for the rest of this year. Since I'm using sentences I also like having an English sentence translation on side 2. It really gives a nice context in my head to associate with the target vocabulary (and sentence). Of course, I know Matt had a lot of success so I may reconsider this later. It would be nice to duplicate his success. Then again, he only studied 1 language (although dabbling in Chinese a little but didn't get too far from what I understand). I think that helps a lot. I find having so many languages in my head does wear me out and make it a bit less sharper than it otherwise could be.

Oh, I started another K-Pop song deck again. The last time I just grabbed sentences and mixed them right into my main sentence deck. That sentence deck basically got too many leeches, not just from K-pop but also from me getting excited about the example sentences in Naver a while back. But songs have crazy grammar, spellings, and are probably a terrible way to really learn the language. They are good to have fun with though but I think you need to be careful. So I'm keeping the deck separate so as not to contaminate my real deck. And I'm using the real audio from the songs and importing it into Anki. It's a little time consuming but so worth it. Then lastly I'm not doing sentences. Songs don't really have sentences anyway as there's not much grammar. It's more like stanzas in a poem or a paragraph maybe? Anyway, when they sing a bit, before stopping to rest or whatever, there's breaks and it's usually about 4 'lines' of script in the lyrics. With the actual music on the card, not chopped up into sentences but in the stanzas so that it flows properly, the cards really come to life. Definitly not i+1 though. They are truly begging to be leeches but they literally sing to me :D .
Last edited by kraemder on Sun Jun 07, 2020 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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kraemder
Green Belt
Posts: 323
Joined: Fri Aug 28, 2015 12:10 am
Location: Tucson, Arizona
Languages: English (N)
Japanese (JLPT N2)
German (read several books)
Spanish (read a couple books)
Korean (studying for about a year semi seriously)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1204
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Re: Learning Korean the hard way

Postby kraemder » Tue Jun 09, 2020 10:47 pm

Ever read someone's log and think... yeah.. they have ADD.

I am switching up my Anki routine some and made a YouTube video talking about it: https://youtu.be/NVfvlzbolXo

Instead of watching the 15 minute video you can also just read this entry.

I'm really excited recently with how I am noticing my Korean reading ability getting better. Actually, my listening ability is too but that's not so exciting because my vocabulary and grammar still stink so I don't see how better listening is going to get me very far. As I've probably mentioned, I'm reading on LingQ and it's pretty easy to look up unknown words. Even if I have to look up a lot of words in a sentence, it's not a deal breaker basically. I would put my vocabulary at about 1000 words or so although I'm starting to retain some of the Harry Potter world words too. My grammar is my weak point. I am at least partially familiar with most of the Korean Grammar in Use Beginner book but not all of it and could use a refresher. But I know none of the intermediate grammar concepts or very very few of them. I think they actually get used a lot. They just aren't as vital for regular conversation but especially in writing they are used constantly. So it would really behoove me to well hit that intermediate grammar book. I was totally intimidated by it because learning grammar was so slow and painful for Japanese. Really slow. Because I didn't immerse beyond doing the Core deck on Anki. If I learned a grammar concept, it didn't get reinforced unless I sat down and studied it again basically. I didn't really think about that so much at the time (damnit!) but as I'm reading Harry Potter, and thinking "Hey, this reading thing is actually gonna work! There's no kanji!" I'm reflecting and realizing just how and why reading is SO important to learning. I could literally sit down and cram that intermediate book and if I then go read Harry Potter then it's going to be reinforcing those grammar points really quickly. So it wouldn't be all gone in a couple days. Well, some of it would but some would stick. Quickly.

So that's what I'm going to do. I made another deck using Korean Grammar in Use but this time both Beginner and Intermediate. I made it a sentence deck. No closed delete production nonsense or even audio cards. This will make it easier to cram. I've been doing very well with my other sentence cards even when they're not i+1 since a few words in the sentence card will help give a context helping me to remember. Previously, I didn't want to study with sentence cards because I was thinking this was a crutch and if I couldn't recognize it out of context then it was useless. I don't think like that at all anymore. If I can get it from context on my card well I might get it from context in a book too. And that's plenty good enough for immersing and if I am immersing properly I'll see it more and more and it will get stronger so that I won't need a context to understand it. Well, for some words anyway. You could say I'm finally totally convinced that sentence cards are the way to go. But I would hate to be a new Japanese learner staring at 10 unknown kanji on a sentence card. Eww. There's a reason why I fell back to doing vocabulary flash cards when studying Japanese but I think I should have made it work somehow like putting furigana on all but one word or something.

The Beginner book typically has 3 example sentences for each concept and the Intermediate book 2 (but longer examples). the deck has a total of about 530 cards. I think I can cram a couple hundred right away and that should get me familiar with a lot of grammar fast. I'm hopeful that this will work well and I will see quick results.
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