cjareck wrote:You have chosen quite complicated toys, but I hope you will enjoy them!
True!
After only a few days of Korean study, I have come to believe that it will be significantly easier than Chinese. I've only been using Free YT videos and the DLI SOLT course. I believe it is easier than Chinese because I think I can get up to speed reading fairly quickly since Korean uses an alphabet rather than characters and there are only 40 parts of the alphabet, only 14 more than English! Rather than thousands of characters which must be memorized by brute force if you want to read Chinese. I'm diligently trying to make sure that I can reproduce the sounds of the alphabet before even bothering to learn any words.
Obviously this doesn't mean I'll understand what I'm "sounding out" since I still have to learn vocabulary, but learning vocabulary should be quicker since the sounds and the written form are closely associated. Or at least a lot more closely associated than the sounds in Chinese and the Hanzi. In addition, I don't need to worry about tones (although I've seen some discussion of there being a "pitch-accent" in parts of Korea).
A little mini review of the DLI & FSI courses for Korean. I have found the SOLT course the most useful. It starts with the Hangul and pronunciation. The DLI head start uses Romanised spellings and doesn't get to the Hangul until the end of the course. So I stopped using that after the 2nd unit. The SOLT seemed to have the most beginner-friendly manual and audio, so I've decided to work through that one first.
I might be wrong, since I haven't done an exhaustive study of all the materials, but I'm just starting on this one, and I might come back to the others later. I managed to find some free Children's books in Korean. So after learning Hangul I plan to try and read a page a day of one of these books. Most estimates say people can learn Hangul in about 90 minutes. I figure this means I can probably master it within the next 6-12 weeks.
I got resources for reading, childrens books, comics, the bible, lots of online newspapers and some other stuff for free. Korean newspapers don't seem to all be behind paywalls like they are in the UK, so that makes reading a little more assessable. So compared to doing the FLC in Setswana, Korean should be a doddle. At least it is a very "resource rich environment".
As for Polish... well, I got a big box of audiobooks from my friend, so being super smart I thought to myself. "I'll put that up and out of the way so that when I want it I'll be able to go straight too it and pull out the stuff I want." If you're a regular reader of my log you're probably thinking. "I bet he lost the bloody box." and you would be correct! I can't find that box for love nor money. I have searched the whole house twice and cannot find it. But it is here somewhere, so I'll eventually stumble over it while looking for something else that I misplaced. I did find a Harry Potter book in Chinese and a bunch of printer cartridges I thought I'd thrown out.