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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 417 of 559 17 April 2013 at 7:13pm | IP Logged |
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The food, well, actually no, I didn't like it much. I'm sure I could find something I like but I wanted to try kimchi and it was too spicy for me. I knew it probably would be but I wanted to try it anyway.
As for the book - yes, I definitely recommend the intermediate book if you can find it. Its main strength isn't exercises but grammar usage explanations and comparisons of structures with similar meanings. 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 418 of 559 19 April 2013 at 9:54pm | IP Logged |
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A couple of weeks ago I was assigned a different desk at my office. It's quite a usual thing here because the projects are always changing so the seating is changing as well. I've been moved around already three times since I joined the company last year. Anyway, this time the desk next to me was empty for a while and now it's occupied by a payroll specialist. We got to talking about languages today (she said she'd like to learn another language because she only knows three) and I told her about Korean expecting to get the usual question "Why not Chinese or Japanese instead?" but to my surprise she said "Oh really? I've worked with many Koreans at my previous job." I was a bit shocked and I asked her what her previous job was and she said it was at LG Electronics hahaha. So that's another potential place to meet native Koreans if I ever feel like getting speaking practice.
On a different subject, I'm still not used to how Koreans use the word '어디'. In English, if you want to ask about someone's hometown you ask "What is your hometown?" but in Korean you ask "Where is your hometown?" The answer is the name of the hometown in both cases and my brain doesn't want to compute the Korean question. If I replace the word 'where' with 'which place' then it seems to work better. I've started watching a drama that's been on my list for a long time - Boys Before Flowers. I'm in episode 2 and so far I've endured it, not enjoyed it. The abuse is just too much. I hope it gets better soon. As for You're The Best, Lee Soon Shin (I'm going to call it LSS from now on), I rewatched both episodes with subtitles. I had more or less understood correctly all the major developments in all the storylines except "the room". I had no idea why they were renovating it and I had no idea the grandma went to the realtor's office to rent it out. I thought it was some kind of social service so basically I had no idea what was going on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 419 of 559 20 April 2013 at 9:05pm | IP Logged |
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If you decide to give Kimchi another try I recommend 김치전, a kind of pancake made with Kimchi, which makes the spiciness a lot more bearable :)
I'm also watching 최고다 이순신 and think it's pretty cute so far - I've only tried one other family drama before and the way people treated each other in that was unwatchable... I'm glad this one is so different and more positive (except for the Chicken restaurant owners who get on my nerves :)). Boys Before Flowers... probably kind of a must-watch, but I wouldn't want to watch it again :) The beginning is especially cruel... 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 420 of 559 21 April 2013 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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I'm on episode 6 of BBF and I've been tempted to drop it. I won't really drop it, it's a must-see show as Renate said, but I'm very disappointed with it. The biggest problem is that I don't particularly like the main female character, it's a combination of the character being pretty stupid and gullible (and bossy in an annoying way) and the actress being not very good and not very pretty. I just can't root for her and I don't feel the romance at all so what else is there? Plot? Haha, this has to be the most plot-less drama I've watched, they're always either humiliating someone else or enjoying rich kid parties. Delicious food, private jets, blablabla. I'm really baffled why it was so popular. Lee Min-ho? Sure, he's a hottie but he can't save the show alone for me.
LSS continues to be a nice family drama. Watching it first without subtitles and then with subtitles has to be one of my best decisions regarding learning Korean. The three main reasons why it is working although watching I Miss You without subtitles wasn't working are as follows: 1) My Korean level is higher now than it was in October. 2) The first episode of LSS I watched without subtitles was episode 9 so I already had a lot of background information. 3) The conversations in LSS are more "normal" everyday conversations and the plot in general seems easier to follow. Anki is going very well, I've hit the 1700 word mark. No matter what anyone else says about SRS, it's an essential tool for me. My sentence deck already has over 350 cards and I may publish it within a month if I work hard. As for my new grammar book, I haven't studied it much, I spend all my available time on the Anki sentence deck. It seems the best way to do both of these activities is to enter sentences from the grammar book into the deck so I've started doing that. One characteristic of the book is that it uses the formal style quite a lot and it's good since the TTMIK lessons use the normal polite style almost exclusively. 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 421 of 559 24 April 2013 at 9:50am | IP Logged |
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I haven't got a lot done in the last two days. On Monday I was busy with other things and yesterday I had a Skype chat with Renate. We talked in a mix of Korean, English, and German, and the Korean parts were quite demanding of me. I mean I didn't write practically any Korean, I was just reading what Renate wrote. In most cases I could figure out the meaning of the sentences, in some cases I had to look up some words, and in some cases I had to ask for a translation. It was quite useful and I should go over the Korean parts again sometime soon.
BBF continues to be totally frustrating. The main guy saw his kind-of-girlfriend kiss his friend and got very angry and wanted them both expelled from the school but now they're doing some kind of competition? Whaaat? What kind of logic is that? What's the purpose of such a competition? The winner gets the girl? Please. I don't get why the main guy is participating, he has no reason to do it at all, both his friend and his girlfriend betrayed him, what does he hope to gain? Argh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 422 of 559 24 April 2013 at 11:36am | IP Logged |
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It was nice chatting with you :) Don't forget you did type some Korean. Just a warning, it's better not to take my Korean sentences as study material... I'm not sure all of them were grammatically correct ;)
Reagarding BBF, let's just say that logic is not its strong point... 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 423 of 559 27 April 2013 at 10:34pm | IP Logged |
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I decided not to torture myself with Boys Before Flowers after all. Instead I've started watching Arang and the Magistrate. I'm not a big fan of supernatural things but so far this drama seems cute enough. The actress who played a gumiho is now playing a ghost, haha. I wonder why she picks these types of roles.
As for studying, I've kept up with Anki and added lots of new words. I also did a couple new TTMIK lessons. I also learned the -고 나서 construction from my grammar book, it was one of those that were omitted by TTMIK. I also did the usual things while commuting - listening to the radio and to Iyagi lessons. One evening I was tired and didn't want to listen to anyone speaking so I browsed the Korean radio stations for some music that I'd like and I was lucky, I found one station. As I was listening to it, one song seemed familiar but I couldn't place it. The only lyrics I remembered from the song were "괜찮아, 괜찮아" and I spent more than an hour trying to find it when I came home. I was pretty sure it must be from a drama OST but in the end it wasn't, it was 이승기 - 사랑한다는 말. 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 424 of 559 02 May 2013 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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Everything's going really well. I'm doing the same things as always so no need to repeat them.
Yesterday was a bank holiday and I spent most of it on Korean. I got up to lesson 3x04 on TTMIK for my sentence deck, it was the lesson about -ㄹ까요. This ending kept confusing me, I even abandoned the My Korean book because I couldn't understand how "돈 좀 꿔 줄까?" could possibly mean "I’ll lend you some money?" even though 꾸다 means 'to borrow', not 'to lend'. So yesterday I decided to find out what my grammar book had to say about this and it didn't disappoint me, it made things much clearer by dividing this expression into three separate chapters - "Shall we...?", "Shall I...?", and "I wonder...". It's the middle one that helped me the most because none of my other resources had mentioned this meaning specifically. Yesterday I also found out for the first time that when you negate 하다 descriptive verbs with 안 you don't have to split the verb. I can't believe I hadn't noticed it. Soon after writing my previous post I stopped watching Arang, there was too much horror and supernatural stuff for my taste. Today on my way home I listened to Korean, Finnish, German, and Spanish radio stations. I think I'd be pretty happy if my Finnish was where my Spanish is now but it's not close yet. It's not surprising given how little I study Finnish these days but I'd like to think I'll eventually get there. The bit I listened to on the German radio was pretty funny. Apparently there is a new kind of 5 euro banknote and people were telling stories about how supermarket cashiers wouldn't accept the banknote because they had never seen it or how automatic ticket machines wouldn't accept it either. I'm not sure whether I knew the word schwarzfahren before. It's pretty funny, in Latvian it's called "to ride like a rabbit". I guess this expression comes from the fact that people who didn't have a ticket jumped out of the vehicle (like rabbits) when they saw conductors coming. The trams must have been pretty slow when they first appeared in Riga. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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