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The Awesome Difficulty of Korean, Finnish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 97 of 559 22 June 2012 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My Korean dictionaries came today. I expect they will be of great help to me.
I finished unit 4 of My Korean and already started a bit on unit 5. These units are fairly easy with just a few grammar points in each one - or maybe they just seem easy to me because I have covered the grammar before. In any case, the most useful thing for me in unit 4 was the listening comprehension exercise where various people were saying where they were going. I could understand everything by the second listening and then I listened a couple times more just because it was nice to listen to something I understood (in contrast to the TTMIK sample sentences). Actually, I did learn something new from unit 4 - how to say 'Let's do something': 같이 갑시다. Unit 5 introduces the present tense of verbs so things will finally get serious. For Finnish, I keep adding food-related vocabulary to Anki. There are many new words in the lesson so it will take me a while to finish it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 98 of 559 24 June 2012 at 12:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Finnish
I had more time to study today since it was Saturday, and I wanted to work on listening comprehension for a change. I didn't want to use the Linguaphone audio or the radio so I turned to the Supisuomea internet course. I had tried to look at it before but I was always put off by the Finnish-only text. Well, this time I managed to finish the first video (it's 25 min long). It would have been a fine video if not for the Serbian girls, I don't want to learn Finnish with a Serbian accent. And to top it off, one of them was constantly moving her head and body while speaking and I found it really irritating. The good news is that I understood a lot in the video, maybe 60-70%. I have done very little listening in Finnish (compared to Korean) so the results are encouraging. I also found a transcript on their site and I read about a third of it. It's quite long, I'll read the rest of it tomorrow. I noticed that lots of the Finnish vegetable names, like tomato, cucumber, onion, carrot, are really similar to their Latvian names. It's nice to get a semi-free vocabulary like that. Korean I really liked TTMIK's lesson 17, it was about introducing oneself. Actually the title is misleading because they didn't mention the 'imnida' expression that they always use at the start of the lessons, the point of the lesson was to show how all the sentence constructions we have learned so far can be used to say something about ourselves. This lesson gave me a good feeling because I could follow everything and I understood all the examples (except one) at once. Now, I'm not sure if it was because I knew the vocabulary or because I knew the grammar or because I was following along with the PDF (I usually don't do that the first time around). Whatever the reason, I had never before understood that much on my first listening. So let me just practice for a bit. Corrections are welcome although I should really be able to get everything right in these simple sentences. 저는 에비타예요. 학생 아니에요. 저 여동생 세 명이 있어요. 라트비아에 살아요. 가게에서 안 일아요. I was not sure whether to put the 이 after the noun or after the counter so I'm guessing there. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| asdafy Newbie United States Joined 4534 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* | Message 99 of 559 24 June 2012 at 12:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hello,
to answer your question, yes you put the 이 after the counter but 세 명 있어요 is also perfectly understandable and correct. as for 가게에서 안 일아요 maybe you meant to type 가게에서 안 일해요. a typo maybe? anyways if that is the case 가게에서 일 안 해요 would be more correct (가게에서 안 일해요 is used a lot in colloquial speech though). I'm sure your teaching material will cover that soon. Anyways, I recently found your log and wanted to ask you whether a native Korean speaker such as myself will have an advantage in taking Finnish? I got interested in Finnish but I am still afraid that I will lose motivation once i hit a wall. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 100 of 559 24 June 2012 at 1:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It wasn't a typo, it was just a mistake. I know it should have been 해요.
My materials did cover this so it's another mistake. Damn. Oh well, I'll make sure to pay more attention to the special 하다 verbs.
I don't think either Korean or English are particularly helpful for learning Finnish, they are in no way related to each other. Finnish has a very complicated grammar so you need to be prepared to tackle it. The case system is just one aspect of it, another frustrating aspect is the consonant gradation because you need to remember to take it into account all the time because it applies to verbs too, not just nouns and adjectives, and numerals. Latvian also has a case system so I was prepared for that but my attitude nowadays is that I'm not trying to produce 100% correct sentences in Finnish because it's very hard to remember all the rules. I'm focusing on learning the grammar enough to recognize it and on building vocabulary. Then I'll start reading and that will reinforce all the grammar in a non-painful way (I'm counting on that). To sum it up, you'll probably need a rather strong motivation if you don't want to lose it. If you do decide to go for it, good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 101 of 559 24 June 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I spent a lot of time on languages today, maybe 6 hours of active studying. I'm happy I still have motivation to keep learning both of my languages. Admittedly, I spent just an hour and a half on Finnish, the rest was spent on Korean.
Finnish I think I spend more time adding new cards to Anki than reviewing them. It's because I use online dictionaries and Wiktionary to find the best English translations for a word and then I have to translate them to Latvian too (because my Anki deck is Latvian -> Finnish). Often it's straightforward but sometimes it gives me a headache. Just today, I looked up 'ranta' and I couldn't enter it into Anki because 'rannikko' was already there and they have the same translation in Latvian. In the end I decided to add 'beach' (in Latvian) to the translation of 'ranta'. I kept working with the TV text from Supisuomea that I started yesterday. I didn't finish it yet because it already gave me enough new words for Monday and Tuesday. I'm still working with my 7 words-per-day limit and it's doable so far, my review count rarely goes over 50. My Anki card count is 630 and that includes the new cards I haven't studied yet. Korean I'm using one of the dictionaries I bought so I have to learn the Korean alphabet. It's not too difficult fortunately. When I mentioned the TTMIK lesson about introductions yesterday, that was actually lesson 11, I don't know why I wrote lesson 17. Today I studied three more lessons. It sounds like a lot but lessons 12 and 13 were easy. Lesson 12 was about months and days so basically it had only two new words (not that I'm comfortable with numbers, I'm not but I don't want to study them now), and lesson 13 was about -도 after nouns. It was their easiest lesson ever, I even knew all the words they used in the examples. Then, lesson 14 described how to use -도 after verbs and that was finally a new concept. By the way, I'm glad they seem to have dropped the 'sample sentences by our friends' routine and that the last few lessons have been shorter again. I also studied unit 5 from My Korean. It was about the present tense of verbs and it threw a lot of verbs at once at the reader, maybe 20 of them. I was happy that I had already learned almost all of them so I had no trouble doing the listening exercise where I had to translate short sentences like 'I'm eating an apple'. It would have been pretty impossible to do if I had seen the verbs for the first time. One thing My Korean does that TTMIK doesn't is teaching the casual politeness level right from the start. I didn't like it at first because I thought it would be too difficult to study several styles at once but I've come to appreciate it. I also watched some of You're Beautiful today. I'm in episode 14 so I'll be finishing it soon. I haven't decided on my next drama yet. I've downloaded My Girlfriend is a Gumiho but I'm thinking maybe I should leave that for later when I can understand more. I also want to watch City Hunter but I'm leaving it for later. Today I found this list of recommendations and I'm very excited there are so many shows I could watch. The choice is overwhelming. My work with Anki is going well. Just like with Finnish, I added lots more cards today because I know I'll have less time during the week. A Look Back I started learning Korean about 3 months ago having had no prior exposure to the language through media. I don't know if what I've learned in the three months is a lot or not. Overall I think my methods are working but if I could go back I would start with My Korean sooner because it teaches Hangul very well, it even has letter writing exercises. As it was, I learned Hangul from various internet resources but I didn't practice writing it (I mean letter by letter) and so it took me a long time to memorize it. On the other hand, I'm happy I found My Korean at all. I had tried a couple other textbooks before it but they seemed too difficult for me. My Korean was much less intimidating. It doesn't cover as much grammar as the other books but it gives a nice foundation. I'm also happy I started to use Anki for Korean. I remember thinking that it would be a headache to type in Korean so I was going to learn words without it at first but my total lack of reading skills forced me to start using Anki earlier than I had planned. And it led to a dramatic improvement in my reading and typing skills. Reading is still one of the most difficult things though, my brain doesn't recognize the Hangul characters as letters yet so I have to translate them (think about them) every time. More reading practice would be good but I don't want to read texts where I don't understand anything so for now it's limited to Anki and my textbook. Oh, and I also should have started watching dramas earlier. I thought the TTMIK lessons would give me enough exposure to listening in Korean but it obviously wasn't enough to get a feel for the language. I've been toying with the idea of setting some goals in Korean for this year but I realize I have no idea how much there is to learn and how difficult it might be so I can't make any estimations. I'll just see how it goes and maybe by the end of the year I'll have a better idea of it all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 102 of 559 26 June 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My language studies came second place to watching tennis (Wimbledon) yesterday. I'm not sorry at all about that, I'm super happy that Latvian Ernests Gulbis managed to get a big win. I could have studied after the match was finished but I couldn't concentrate on anything, I was checking the internet all the time for interviews and stuff. So, I just did the Anki reviews (and missed many cards).
Today was slightly better language-wise. I repeated TTMIK lesson 14 and listened to lesson 15 of level 2. I was surprised the hosts couldn't pronounce the English word "only" properly, they had trouble with the 'l' sound, they said the word was similar to the Korean word 언니 but I can't say that I agree. Anyway, the lesson about -만 was interesting and I'm getting better at understanding their example sentences quickly, and I know I'm repeating myself but I'm just glad they don't have sentences by their friends anymore. I'm really happy about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 103 of 559 27 June 2012 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In Korean a ㄴ and ㄹ side-by-side results in the ㄴ sound being "absorbed" by the ㄹ sound. For example:. 일년 (one year) is pronounced [일련] instead. As such they don't really have the NL sound pattern in Korean, so I can see why they would have difficulty trying to pronounce that combo in English. Edited by Warp3 on 27 June 2012 at 1:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 104 of 559 28 June 2012 at 11:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, yeah, I know this rule but I don't think there's anything difficult about this sound combination. Maybe I just can't imagine it.
My daily Korean Anki review count is now steadily higher than the Finnish review count. In total I studied 183 cards in 52 minutes today, and those were just today's cards. It's a lot of time to spend on Anki, and it's difficult because it requires a high level of concentration. Today was actually the first day I stopped in the middle of my Korean reviews just to take a break. I wonder how long I will be able to sustain this. There are two things I can do to have less reviews in Korean - either add less cards or learn them better before adding (so I don't miss them so often). I'm willing to try the second option before I have to resort to the first. The problem is - I don't have a convenient way of doing the initial word memorization. I'll think about it some more. (The third option would be removing either the passive or the active cards but I'm not considering that at the moment.) Speaking of other things, I would have liked to do one of the verb exercises in unit 5 of my Korean textbook tonight but I didn't have the energy for that after doing Anki so I decided to get a new TTMIK lesson instead. Their lessons are really good for me right now. They are easier than level one lessons because I already know many words they use in their examples so it's more rewarding to listen to them (because I can understand more). And the grammar patterns start feeling familiar to me now - you either add something after a noun or a verb. But the grammar is a bit tricky for me because I don't add it to Anki. The only times I review it are when I repeat the TTMIK lessons and I think that's not enough anymore, I need to practice more. I've been thinking I need to make a spreadsheet with all the grammar points I've learned so far but I haven't gotten around to it yet. My Finnish studies are going reasonably well, too, I think I've added more than half of lesson 8's words to Anki already, and I finally finished the text and dialogs that are before the grammar explanation. My next task will be to reread these explanations and maybe do some exercises. The final two exercises are always more texts and dialogs so that will be more stuff to read. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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