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The Awesome Difficulty of Korean, Finnish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 9 of 559 27 April 2012 at 1:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, the lesson on the syllables was quite important. Frankly speaking I never bothered to truly understand this, but I think this depends on whether the syllable is open or closed. Basically depends on how many letters you add and which ones (consonants or vowels). I mean for example the illative is formed differently from other locative cases, so it makes sense that the stem would be different.
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 10 of 559 27 April 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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My studying habits are pretty chaotic. That's probably a bad thing but I don't think I want to change it, at least not yet. I need to keep it fun for me or I won't be studying at all.
In the last few weeks I've realized that it's difficult for me to study both Korean and Finnish on the same day. On some days I want to study one language, and on other days I want to study the other one. (Let's not speak of the days where I want to be lazy.) I've been trying to get at least a little of both languages done in each day but I think it's not that productive. When I start on Finnish I don't want to switch to Korean because I'm making much faster progress in Finnish. And when I start on Korean I don't want to switch to Finnish because Korean is more mysterious and exciting to learn. I've been thinking about officially doing one language each day but that won't work because I have to do the Finnish Anki reviews every day. And once I learn how to read and type properly in Korean I'm going to start using Anki for that too. Anyway, today was a Finnish day because I needed new vocabulary for Anki (I had had no new words to learn in the last two days). I reread two texts from the 5th unit of my book and reviewed grammar about the three inside location cases. I'm trying to commit the examples to my memory as much as possible. I also checked out the link for Suomea ole hyvä (by the way, Serpent, the first link in your big list in your log doesn't work anymore, and the DDG link too). It's a very valuable resource, no doubt, but I think I'm going to wait a couple of months before I start perusing it because it's all in Finnish. Speaking of "all in Finnish", the instructions for exercises in my book in the first four units were both in Finnish and in Russian but in the fifth unit they suddenly dropped the Russian translation. So I'm looking up those words in a dictionary and adding them to Anki too. Familiarity with grammar terms never hurt anyone. Before I forget, here's a funny story for Finnish speakers. One of the texts I read today was about a woman and what she did every day (getting up, eating, going to work etc.) There was one sentence about how she listens to the news on the radio and the next sentence was: "Pidän musiikistakin." I thought it meant something about liking music but I couldn't figure out the "stakin" part. It sounded a bit like a "station" but the dictionary didn't list such a word. Then I figured maybe I'm wrong about the meaning. I looked up pitää and I saw it has about a hundred more meanings so I decided it was hopeless, I would never figure it out without help. And then, out of nowhere I suddenly realized that -sta and -kin each have a meaning on their own and it all fell in place. It was both a moment of triumph and of humbleness. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 559 27 April 2012 at 8:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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The first link was the old address of Suomea ole hyvä :)
Here's the list of the exercises in the first part: http://www04.edu.fi/suomeaolehyva/soh1/kappale.htm#kpl1 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 12 of 559 28 April 2012 at 7:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Those exercises are good indeed, I will use them to assess my progress when I learn new grammar stuff.
Finnish I did the "Minä olen" and "minä en ole" exercises from Serpent's link. Got 100%. Good. I didn't do the Anki reviews today yet but I'll do them later. Korean I decided to do my reading practice from my word list (the one from the TTMIK lessons), not from the dialogs in the book. It was less frustrating because I actually knew the words so I didn't forget them right after reading. I spent maybe 10 or 20 minutes doing it. I also listened to lesson 21 again (it was about negating verbs). I had listened to it once before but hadn't checked out the PDF. They had three very short dialogs at the end and I still didn't understand anything while listening to them for the second time although I did pick up the word "eat". I'll definitely have to return to this lesson again. I went ahead and also listened to lesson 22, twice. Lots of new verbs there. Then I decided to do an experiment - to try to write down the 15 new nouns without looking at the PDF first. Basically I tried to see how well I could spell the words after hearing them. (The PDF is here if you want to check it out.) The result - 6 words were correct, 9 were incorrect. My biggest problem was that every time there was a ㅗ in the first syllable of a word I heard it as ㅜ and typed accordingly. Is that normal? I just can't seem to tell these two sounds apart. 2 persons have 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 13 of 559 29 April 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some vowels are tricky to tell apart at first until your ears get attuned to them and some are still tricky later due to colloquial pronunciations. Hearing 오 as 우 is one of those that seems to happen for both reasons (especially when someone is using a "cute" pronunciation for a word with 오 in it).
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6544 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 14 of 559 30 April 2012 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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This post contains mostly Anki-related information for both Finnish and Korean.
I think one of the main reasons I failed to stick with Finnish four years ago was that I hadn't used Anki from the beginning. My textbook had a lot of vocabulary in each lesson, maybe around 100 words, and I couldn't learn them all. I hate making word lists and I hate studying them. Maybe not so much hate as I just find it very boring and I can't keep my attention on the list so it's not productive for me. I didn't want to spend huge amounts of time to learn this vocabulary so I decided to just focus on grammar, I thought it was more important anyway. Now I know better. Having sufficient vocabulary is the main requirement in order to start using 'native' materials. And acquiring this vocabulary is the most difficult part for me so I'm immensely grateful for the existence of Anki. Here's how I use it. I encounter a new word and enter it into Anki. I don't review it right away, I let some time pass, maybe some hours (or even some days in some cases). As I've mentioned before, I use Anki for Finnish only in production mode so when I finally want to review the word it gives me the Latvian word and asks me for the Finnish translation. Usually I have forgotten it because it's a new word so I press the "Again" button. I've set for at least 10 minutes to pass before showing the same failed card again. So a while later I review the card again and more often than not, I've forgotten it again. So I review the card several times a day until I remember it. Sometimes I still remember it the next day, sometimes I don't. The point is that I have to use the "Again" button a lot when I learn a word for the first time but I don't let it affect me in a negative way. I don't look at the stats. I know that this is a much better way for me to learn new words than using word lists. I started thinking about all this because of the TTMIK lesson with the 15 new words. I realized I better start using Anki for Korean, too, otherwise it may not end well. I also realized I would need to use Anki differently in this case because one way Latvian-to-Korean cards would be too much to ask for. So I studied the Anki documentation to find the most suitable settings for this situation, and I think I found them. I created a new deck and enabled both the Forward and Reverse cards. But I don't want Anki to show me the reverse card until I'm comfortable with the recognition card so I went to Deck Properties - Advanced and found the field called "Sibling delay (new cards)" and changed the value to 14000. It means I'll get the reverse card only when about 10 days have passed since the last time I answered the forward card. I think 10 days should be a good number but I may adjust it later if needed. I ran into a technical problem with the Korean letters - everything was showing up fine in the Deck Browser window but in the actual review window, the right sides of all the Korean syllables seemed cut. I thought maybe it's a font issue, I tried all the major fonts and a few random ones but nothing helped. Couldn't find anything about it on Google either. Long story short, I finally found out I had to set a Korean font for the whole syllable to be visible. I don't know why it didn't occur to me sooner. I set the maximum new cards per day for Korean at 6. It may seem like a small number but Korean words are more difficult for me to learn than Finnish words. Besides, my main concern is not to let Anki overwhelm me so I'll try to keep the review count low. Maybe I'll set the limit higher once the reverse cards start to come in and if I see I can handle it. That's it for Anki, I think. On an unrelated note, I've been looking at some of the Korean online resources and I noticed here under Key Expressions that 'this' is 이게 but other resources say it's 이거. Is it a mistake? 2 persons have 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 15 of 559 30 April 2012 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
Unfortunately many learning materials don't explain the contracted pronouns very well. 이거 is a contraction of 이것 (which is the full, proper form of the word). 이게 is a contraction of 이것이 (이것 + the subject marker). So if the word is the subject of the sentence, they could be used somewhat interchangeably, but 이게 cannot be a direct object, indirect object, etc. as it already has a subject particle built into it. 4 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 16 of 559 01 May 2012 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks Warp3, it's good to have someone answer my questions in such a timely manner. And I know about the basic particles so your answer makes sense.
I didn't write much about my progress in my last post so here's what I've been up to. Finnish I've been flirting a little with some websites but my main source is still my textbook. The last few days I've been reviewing the three location cases, especially Illatiivi since it can have three different endings and it seems there are no hard rules as to which ending applies to which word. But I think I've got a pretty good hang of it now. I took some random words and entered them into Wiktionary to see if my guesses were correct, and they mostly were. The most difficult part is probably to remember when to use the strong stem and when to use the weak one. But I'm confident that'll get easier with more exposure. So I've been keeping up with Anki (310 words now) and studying the dialogs and texts of lesson 5, and even doing a little of the exercises. I want to finish this lesson tomorrow, and that mostly means entering the vocabulary into Anki. Most of it is already there but not everything. (Some words I intentionally don't add, like 'to sew' or some adjectives, because I don't feel the need to learn them at this stage.) It's hard to say how much time I've spent on Finnish. I take a lot of breaks when I study, like almost every 5 minutes. I'm usually at a computer during studying so it's easy to get distracted. Maybe it's not the most effective method of studying but that's just how it is. Korean As I've mentioned before, my methods of study are quite chaotic, especially for Korean since I'm still at the very beginner stage. A few days ago I realized I needed to improve my reading skills and I hope using Anki for Korean will do that. It should also improve my typing skills since I'll be making the deck myself and I've decided to type the words, not copy them. (I am not concerned with handwriting because I don't think I'll need it in the foreseeable future. And even if I do need it, I'm sure I'll be able to write the letters like they are typed. I know the general stroke order.) I have a Korean keyboard picture printed out and I put it before my own keyboard when I'm typing Korean so I can see which key corresponds to which letter. I also finished Unit 1 and part of Unit 2 of the Seoul National University (SNU) Korean course for beginners. It's just the alphabet for now and even though I already know it, it helps me to go over it again from a slightly different perspective. And I like their drills, they give me both listening and reading practice. Diphthongs were/are my weak spot but I'm getting better at recognizing them and pronouncing them correctly. I read a log here today that mentioned the horrors of a thousand Anki reviews piling up, how it can break a person's spirit and discourage from studying the language at all, and it just reinforced my belief that my approach to Anki (just a little every day) is a good long term solution. I'll try to stick to it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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