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TAC 2013: Korean & Arabic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 1 of 51 30 December 2012 at 9:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've been living in Korea and studying the language for several years. I take classes at a hagwon in Seoul and also do as much self-directed study as I can manage. I've worked my way through TTMIK's Iyagi series a couple times and still have some issues with listening comprehension, but have seen a lot of improvement lately. I love to read in Korean and I also work on an Anki sentence deck that I downloaded from the internet. I'm not a fan of Korean dramas so I have to poke around online to find things to listen to and work on to improve my Korean. I'm a high-intermediate but my speaking lags.
In Arabic, I'm a complete beginner. In fact I just decided this week, during a vacation in Lebanon, that I'm going to take up Arabic, specifically focusing on conversational Levantine Arabic to be able to understand (some) household conversation while visiting my husband's family. I bought a few kids' books and am beginning to learn the letters/sounds and want to learn to read. My husband, a native speaker, can help me but I will have to figure out my own course/study method. My primary focus for language study is Korean, but I will also be learning some Arabic on the side. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4859 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 2 of 51 30 December 2012 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hello Haksaeng! Just a suggestion for some listening material I found this week that I'm pretty enthusiastic about. Do you listen to any radio shows or podcasts? Although not very easy to understand I find them very good practice. I've tried listening to FM 음악 도시 성시경입니다, 장기하의 대단한 라디오, 달을 품은 토끼 and 전진희의 음악일기, all of them can be found on itunes. I'll post some detailed reviews in my log later today.
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| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 3 of 51 01 January 2013 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thank you for the recommendation, druckfehler.
I returned today to Seoul after visiting Dubai and Beirut for the past couple of weeks. It was really nice hearing Korean again when we arrived at Incheon. While in Dubai, I visited the huge Kinokuniya bookstore at Dubai Mall. The bookstore is part of a Japanese chain which has branches in several Asian countries, the US, Australia, and Dubai. It's the best and biggest bookstore I've ever seen and has a huge selection of Japanese books and media and a very large language learning section with materials for learning practically any language you can think of. I bought A Complete Guide to Arabic Script Reading and Writing by Rym Bettaieb. This little paperback (124 pages) gives really nice tables, explanations, and practice exercises for learning the Arabic alphabet. It's very readable and you can follow it step-by-step to gradually get accustomed to the letters, and how they look and sound. I'm taking my time with this book, and also using a couple little children's workbooks intended for native speaking children. I bought them at Antoine's, a bookstore in Beirut's Hamra neighborhood that my husband used to visit more than 30 years ago when he was growing up in Lebanon. It's a charming old bookstore and anyone who visits Beirut should go and take a look. While looking through the Arabic books at Kinokuniya, I had a crisis of confidence and suddenly felt my quest was hopeless. I've spent years studying Korean and am still not comfortable with the language. How will I have the time and energy to learn Arabic too? I'm going to approach Arabic very differently than Korean. Korean was my first foreign language (other than French in high school) and I had no idea how to learn it. I bumbled around in it for years, wasting lots of time being methodical and trying to learn everything in order, the way you learn languages at school. With Arabic, I'm going to try to stay relaxed and concentrate on understanding conversational Levantine. I'm not aiming to read or speak fluently. I'll concentrate on building some everyday vocabulary so I can at least get some idea of what people are talking about. The Arabic script is much more difficult than Korean. All the diacritical marks and the fact that it's a cursive script makes it really difficult to see the individual letters. Korean letters are crystal-clear, neat little squares and you can learn the whole alphabet in a couple of days. Arabic is going to take more time. Right now, I'm reading the Complete Guide to Arabic Script, re-reading the explanations, looking over the charts and lists, and also browsing through the kids' books, getting my husband to read some of the words and explain how the sounds differ from English sounds. I'm going to give myself plenty of time in this stage. I don't want to memorize, just want to get used to the letters and start learning some simple words. I can recognize a few common words and the names of some of my relatives, so that helps me feel familiar with those letters that appear in the known words. On the Korean front, I am returning to an overwhelming backlog on Anki. It's going to take a couple of weeks to plow through it. My Korean class starts up again in a few days, I think there are a couple new Iyagi lessons awaiting me on TTMIK, and I have about 50 more pages to read to finish my current Korean children's book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5039 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 4 of 51 02 January 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Good luck for this year! Starting a new language is always fascinating. \(^_^)/
Think of it as a way of enriching your life. Up to now, you went to Korean when you wanted to learn a foreign language. Now you can go to Arabic as well.
It's nice that he can help you.
How many new sentences do you allow each day? Maybe it's backlogging because you allow too much. Just guessing. Edited by Takato on 02 January 2013 at 5:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4859 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 5 of 51 02 January 2013 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Just dropping by quickly to say that most members will probably agree that the first foreign language is generally the most difficult to learn. So I'm sure you'll have lots of knowledge about language study for your Arabic quest that you first had to gain throughout your Korean journey. Language study is still always a lot of work, but you could think of it as opening a whole new world to you - and you get to enjoy that basically as soon as you start studying. I wish you a very interesting journey!
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| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 6 of 51 07 January 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Takato: Actually, it was backlogged because I went away on vacation and didn't do any Anki at all for about 10 days. I shut off new sentences before leaving, but the backlog was from review sentences that piled up in my absence. Fortunately, I've now plowed through the backlog and am up-to-date again, allowing only 10 new sentences per day, divided between two decks. This is usually quite manageable for me, but sometimes if the reviews get to be onerous, I turn off new sentences for a few days.
druckfehler, it's very true that the first foreign language is the hardest. Korean has taken me such a long time but I floundered very badly in the early intermediate stage and quit for long periods several times. I'm kind of amazed that I have gotten this far, considering how fed up I got. I hope I'll have a better handle on Arabic once the going gets tough. For my first week of TAC 2013, it was not too hard to juggle my two languages, and as I suspected, adding Arabic has not affected my Korean study at all. They are so different and I'm at such different stages with them that it's really like apples and oranges. In KOREAN, I'm getting back into my routine after a long vacation when I barely looked at and certainly did not hear any Korean for a week and a half while traveling in the Middle East. At first, listening to a couple of TTMIK's Iyagi lessons, I really felt rusty, but I listened for four days running to # 141, 142, and 143, and I think I even notice a slight bump up in my listening comprehension. It's getting easier to find the flow of the conversation and go with it, not translating in my head. I still needed to read the transcript for a few parts, though. I also listened to a grammar lesson on TTMIK, since I noticed they were covering a grammar point I've been finding often in my reading: -고 말고. That was very helpful since I'd been seeing it quite a lot without understanding it. My Korean class resumed at my hagwon and we've begun studying our brand new Sogang 5A. Level 5 is the final level for the Sogang series, very exciting to think I will soon "graduate" from this series. I don't have a good grasp of all the vocab from Level 4, though, so I will be reviewing that level as I work through Level 5 in class. This week I also listened to a couple of TTMIK's 고급 Lessons that I had missed, and started in on the lessons I missed at Advanced Korean (advancedkorean.com), another website I've been using, which walks you through Korean newspaper articles. But what about ARABIC? I'm up to page 36 in my book, Complete Guide to Arabic Script. Still not reliably recognizing all the letters, but it's getting better. On YouTube I watched a series of lessons by Homelang1 on Arabic Pronunciation, and I watched a bunch of alphabet-teaching videos on YouTube, some of them with very nice graphics and Arabic music. These are designed for children, but I like the way they show the letters while singing the names and/or sounds. I'm practicing sounding out the words in some of my children's books, but when I say the words to my husband he usually doesn't understand what I'm saying. For a lot of the words, his colloquial pronunciation is different from the spelling of the word. I'll need to learn how to say the words his way, but for now I'm not trying to learn vocab, just trying to learn how to read the letters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| JohannaNYC Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4443 days ago 251 posts - 361 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, Italian Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 7 of 51 07 January 2013 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Have you checked FSI's Levantine Arabic course? Adding it to your studies will hopefully cut down on some of the work of bridging the MSA and colloquial. I myself have not used this course, so all disclaimers apply, but it's free so it might be worth a try. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 8 of 51 10 January 2013 at 5:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Last night I accompanied my husband to a corporate event that I was dreading, but it turned out really great. There are very few foreigners among the attendees, but for the few of us, the event provided simultaneous translation headsets. When I started listening to the presentation, though, I realized I didn't need the translation! 아주 뿌듯해요!!
It was really fun dispensing with the headset while my husband used it. He kept looking at me in amazement and asking me what they were saying, testing me (I used the translation briefly when the presenter started using lots of unfamiliar vocab, numbers, and dates when discussing the company's history). I know I missed a lot of details, but I wasn't at all lost and always knew what was going on. One woman sitting next to me quickly grabbed her husband's sleeve when I leaned over to her to comment on the delicious meal we were eating (he could speak English but she couldn't, and she wanted him to bail her out) but she seemed almost elated when I noticed her discomfort and switched over to Korean. Unfortunately, some Koreans feel self-conscious if they don't speak English well, especially at an event like this one, where most of the Koreans are fluent in English. The dinner table conversation also floored me. I understood practically every conversation. Sometimes I'd have trouble if there was too much background noise or if the volume was too low...I'm not fluent and can't "fill in" missing speech the way natives or really fluent people can. But it almost seemed like people were talking unusually slowly, which they weren't, it was just that my listening has gotten a lot better!! So exciting. (Everyone addressed me in English, but I eavesdropped on other conversations around me since they didn't realize I knew some Korean) There were several entertainment acts who performed at the event, some oldies singers and a K-Pop girl group. I could understand most of their ad-libbed comments between acts (ad-libbed comments are quite slow and halting, I realized), and of course most of the lyrics were not too hard. It was a mob scene at the coat-check counter after the event was over, but I listened through the pandemonium and when they called my number (273) I shouted "요기요," like a native, really impressing my hubby. Even though I live in Korea, I rarely get a chance like this to be in an almost completely (both culturally and linguistically) Korean environment. It was a great experience and I realized I've made a lot of progress in the last 6 months or so. Still have a long way to go, but this gave me a psychological boost, that's for sure. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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