Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

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Will he make it?

Yes
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No
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Evita
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Evita » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:03 pm

leosmith wrote:
Evita wrote:Check out Click Korean

I took a look at it, because I'm thinking in my free time I might want to improve my grammar, and look up topics that weren't covered in KFZ1. You say KFZ2 & 3 have big problems, and from what I've seen I agree. How thorough would you say Click Korean is? Could someone reach an advanced level in Korean grammar by using it as a single source?

No way. It has only 20 units, and they barely cover beginners' grammar. It's good as an additional resource, it has nice exercises and audio, but it won't take you very far.

Korean doesn't have a resource that would be completely thorough. Well, maybe there is a good grammar reference book, but you can't use that as a beginner. Every textbook or online resource I tried had some grammar points missing, that's why I added them all to my Anki deck, I mean my grammar sentences deck. It has a field called "Notes", and every time I saw a new construction I would add an explanation about its usage in this field. I saw that you create your own Anki decks and that's fine, you don't have to use mine, you can just download it and read through the cards in the browser. (Search where the Notes field is not empty.) Then you'll see how many grammar points you already know and how many you still have to learn. (The deck only goes up to middle intermediate though.)

Another resource I recommend is Quick Korean. Not everyone might like their lesson style, and the grammar coverage is not thorough, but the content is solid and you can tell that professionals worked on it. It has four levels and I'd say that the last level is high intermediate/advanced grammar. It's not thorough, but it goes up high.
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qeadz
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby qeadz » Mon Dec 19, 2016 6:18 pm

How did your first conversations go? How much time have you sunk into Korean so far?
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Mon Dec 19, 2016 7:10 pm

Evita wrote:Another resource I recommend is Quick Korean.
Thanks. I watched a little of one lesson in English medium previously; the other languages available in your link are much more tolerable to me, even though I'm not a fan of laddering. I'll keep it in mind.
qeadz wrote:How did your first conversations go? How much time have you sunk into Korean so far?
It went very well, thanks. Better than expected. As for time, I think I've been averaging about 5hrs/day since I started, so about 450 hours so far.
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Evita
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Evita » Mon Dec 19, 2016 7:55 pm

leosmith wrote:
Evita wrote:Another resource I recommend is Quick Korean.
Thanks. I watched a little of one lesson in English medium previously; the other languages available in your link are much more tolerable to me, even though I'm not a fan of laddering. I'll keep it in mind.

You can also watch the Korean videos, they have English subtitles.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Nandemonai » Tue Dec 20, 2016 1:42 am

leosmith wrote:Nice resource, but I'm not into laddering. I have gotten a great deal of help from my Japanese and Chinese background though, and it seems to be growing more helpful every day.


I didn't really mean it as an additional resource, but as a main textbook for grammar as you mentioned that KFZ 2 & 3 seem to have problems.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Tue Dec 20, 2016 3:57 am

Nandemonai wrote:
leosmith wrote:Nice resource, but I'm not into laddering. I have gotten a great deal of help from my Japanese and Chinese background though, and it seems to be growing more helpful every day.
I didn't really mean it as an additional resource, but as a main textbook for grammar as you mentioned that KFZ 2 & 3 seem to have problems.

When I say I'm not into laddering, I mean I don't like to use L2 to learn L3.
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby leosmith » Tue Dec 20, 2016 4:02 am

Step 2 cont’d: start reading on lingq
Again, this step is called conversation, and we use two skills to converse – speaking and listening. As I said here, I now find it useful to consider all skills to be in support of listening, because it’s the hardest (most time consuming) skill to develop. So anything I can do to make it go more smoothly and efficiently is appreciated. Other than pure listening, if I could do just one thing to improve it, I would read. I think reading is the single biggest facilitator of listening, so I want to do a lot of it. It’s not the only facilitator, and I’m not advocating a pure listening/reading method, but right now I’m going to talk a little bit about reading.

I actually don’t care to be a really good reader. I have no interest in reading Korean novels, newspapers, etc. I do want to be able to read signs, menus, texts from friends, news tickers and subtitles, for example, so I need to have some reading skill, just not very advanced. I admit that in the past I haven’t read much in foreign languages; it just didn’t interest me, even though I’m a pretty big reader in English. In fact, the biggest, most consistent effort I made was in Russian, where I wound up getting to the 20k level in lingq over the course of about 2 years. For me, that was a big deal, but for people who mostly do listening/reading to learn languages, like Steve Kaufmann, 20k isn’t impressive for even one year. Incidentally, although Steve Kaufmann takes a relatively long time to learn a new language, he only spends about an hour a day doing it, and after 5 years or so he claims to understand just about everything he hears. Now this is pretty impressive, regardless of age, when you consider the number of hours he spends. 1500 hours to develop advanced listening is really good, and imo one of the main reasons he can pull it off is that he reads a lot, and most of what he reads he also listens too. He has said that he listens to a lot of additional stuff that he doesn’t have text for, but I think if he didn’t do so much reading, his results would pale in comparison.

So bottom line, I’m going to read more this time. I want to get to 20k before the end of the year. Kaufmann is also learning Korean right now, and last time I checked he was at 47k. He said he felt he had quite a ways to go to get to the point where he understood just about everything. This is in contrast to other languages, where he said he felt the magic number was around 40k. So I was postulating with some other members that for Korean it might be 60k. Either way, I think for me, hitting 20k this year is enough. When I come back after this year, and I want to go on another long spurt, I’ll probably try to come closer to whatever number Kaufmann says put him over the top.

Now I want to describe to you exactly what I do on lingq. First, lingq is a site that has a tool which is basically a mouse-over dictionary. Fly over a Korean word you don’t know, and it will give you a definition. This tool has more bells and whistles than most mouse-over dictionaries; it keeps track of the words that you know already, and uses this information for the next time you try to read something. It shades known words differently than others, which I find helpful. The site also has a big library of articles you can read, which can save you from spending a lot of time searching. The site more convenient for me than most, because I use it to read 6 different languages, so I’m going to keep using it for the time being.

Right now my reading is pretty weak, so I read fairly easy articles. I did a few dozen beginner lessons that I got from the library before I got sick of the beginner material available. I’d open a lesson, read it, select(create lingqs for) the words I don’t know so they won’t be counted towards my “known word” count, then tell the program to count all the new known words for that lesson. It typically took about 10 lessons to get 100 known words, my daily goal, added to my total, since the lessons were small.

As I said, I got sick of the beginner material, so now I’m loading lessons from koreanpod101 into lingq. That huge download I made probably contains at least a month’s worth of beginner and intermediate material. After that, I hope to finally get to the wonderful intermediate podcasts from TTMIK. There are about 150 of them, and they are about 10min each, so that will definitely last me several months. Although that might be enough material to reach my goal, I’m looking for other good sources of native material, which has text and audio, to give me some variety. Your suggestions are appreciated :ugeek:
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Wurstmann
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Wurstmann » Tue Dec 20, 2016 5:55 am

Evita wrote:
leosmith wrote:
Evita wrote:Korean doesn't have a resource that would be completely thorough. Well, maybe there is a good grammar reference book, but you can't use that as a beginner. Every textbook or online resource I tried had some grammar points missing, that's why I added them all to my Anki deck, I mean my grammar sentences deck. It has a field called "Notes", and every time I saw a new construction I would add an explanation about its usage in this field. I saw that you create your own Anki decks and that's fine, you don't have to use mine, you can just download it and read through the cards in the browser. (Search where the Notes field is not empty.) Then you'll see how many grammar points you already know and how many you still have to learn. (The deck only goes up to middle intermediate though.)


What about the Korean Grammar in Use series? Isn't that quite complete?
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Evita
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Evita » Tue Dec 20, 2016 6:30 am

Wurstmann wrote:What about the Korean Grammar in Use series? Isn't that quite complete?

I love those books and I have all three of them, but they are reference books, not textbooks. They are also not as complete as you might think. Here are some of the missing grammar points:

1) -나요? and -ㄴ가요? endings
2) -나 보다, -ㄴ가 보다
3) intermediate level particles like 끼리 and 로서
4) -에 비해서, -에 대해서 and similar
5) -서 그런지
6) -야겠다
(This list is by no means complete, it's just what I've come across, and it doesn't include the advanced book.)

There are also many constructions in Korean that some resources think are grammar, and some other resources think they are just words or fall under a different, broader grammar topic. 야겠다 might be one of them. Also, 덕분에, 아무리, -ㄹ 필요하다, etc. None of the books can cover everything, it's simply too much.
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Nandemonai
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Re: Korean - from scratch to B2 in one year

Postby Nandemonai » Tue Dec 20, 2016 6:55 am

leosmith wrote:When I say I'm not into laddering, I mean I don't like to use L2 to learn L3.


Right, my bad, I had the wrong concept in mind.
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