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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 41 of 51 04 May 2013 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||
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I usually try to update my log once a week, but I've had some distractions in RL and have not posted for a couple weeks.
In some sense, my studying has been disrupted. I haven't maintained my study routines, and I even missed an entire week of my Korean class (three class meetings, 6 hours of instruction). However, maybe a little shake-up is not such a bad thing. I went back to class and noticed immediately that it seemed easier to understand. I was wondering if this might happen, because I've heard of it happening to some people after a break. I also noticed that it's easier to read. Unfortunately, there was no miraculous improvement in my speaking. It's still bad. But the improvement in my listening does make me feel more relaxed and comfortable, so maybe that will help my speaking over time. This week, I had a couple good opportunities to use Korean. I went to lunch with a Korean friend. All we did was gossip, but she spoke in Korean. I would just interrupt if there was something I didn't understand and she'd clear it up and keep going in Korean. Good practice. Also, yesterday, my cleaning ladies showed up early and I had an extended conversation with them. Usually I'm not at home when they come to clean, so I don't talk with them much. They don't speak English at all, so it was all in Korean. I noticed my comprehension was better and this helped me feel more relaxed about speaking in Korean (I'm usually pretty self-conscious). After talking with them, I went to a different room but I overheard them talking and one was explaining what I said to the other one, haha! Apparently one of them didn't understand me. I thought that was pretty funny. At least one of them understood me! I checked in with TTMIK and they have a new type of lesson. KyungEun Choi delivered a little monologue about "instant food" (rameon). This is different than the popular Iyagi series, because it's scripted, but I really loved this lesson and I hope they keep doing it. I pretty much understood it the first time, but going over it carefully afterwards I was able to identify several short passages with some really interesting phrasing or some great vocabulary that I didn't know about. The Iyagi lessons, I've listened to all of them many times and as good as they are, I feel I've done as much as I can with them. They are very casual and just sort of ... limited. This new lesson, though scripted and somewhat less natural, has some really useful grammar and vocab in it. I want more, more, more like this. It also had a Korean transcript and an English translation which were very helpful. ARABIC: I'm not learning Arabic the way I learn Korean. With Korean, from the beginning, I've always learned it in a very structured and school-like way. Sometimes I regret this, because it took me forever to be able to relate to Korean as a language. I didn't listen enough early on. When I look at how Evita, for example, is learning Korean, with a heavy focus on listening from the very beginning, I can see the mistakes I made with Korean and why I had so many problems with it in the high beginner/ early intermediate phase. With Arabic, I'm not studying it at all. I did learn the alphabet but haven't continued to practice reading. I just want to learn to understand and listen to the language. It's a bit of a struggle to get my husband to speak any Arabic to me, and I need to be more consistent about reminding him, but I just want to continue with this low-intensity method. I want to get used to hearing it and want to understand "household" Arabic so that when I visit my in-laws I will have a sense of what the conversation is about. I'm not going to work on production at all. I don't care about reading. My goals with Arabic are very different than with Korean, so it's hard to report on what I'm doing with Arabic. I only want to build up some passive understanding and I'm taking it slow. Very very slow. Later, when I get my Korean at a better level, I may ramp up the Arabic, but not for now. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4642 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 42 of 51 04 May 2013 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Good for you! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 43 of 51 13 May 2013 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I was able to resume watching the drama 무자식 상팔자 since Druckfehler sent me a link for it. Thank you Druckfehler!! The drama disappeared from the internet a few weeks ago, taken down by the broadcaster for copyright violation, but I have acccess again for the time being. I watched Episodes 24-29.
I also watched a few episodes of 세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분. Whenever I feel like listening to a bit of Korean, I just go to YouTube and watch for a while. Usually the topics are fairly general, self-help type of topics without too much specialized vocabulary. It's good to be able to listen to so many different voices/speakers. In my Korean class, we're still on Sogang 5B. We have slowed down and are taking 3 months to finish this book (it usually takes us 2 months per book). I like the slower pace because it leaves us more time for discussion and we can also bring in questions and the teacher will prepare a lesson on any requested topic. The teacher is also preparing supplementary lessons on important grammar that we've already covered before but haven't yet mastered. Our teacher is so helpful and always gives us extra time and instruction. Sometimes we go out for coffee or lunch with her and it's like a free conversation class. She's a gem. Every evening, while preparing the evening meal, I turn on the TV in the kitchen and watch whatever's on. Usually I catch parts of the news and a family drama. This week I will try to make some progress on the Monthly Challenge for May. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 44 of 51 26 May 2013 at 3:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Though I didn't post on my progress last week, I'm still going strong with my Korean.
One of the things I worked on was an intermediate TOPIK study guide. I'm not planning to take the TOPIK but I thought it would be helpful to see where I'm most deficient. The book includes sample questions with explanations to the answers, and there are a couple practice tests. There's also a CD for the listening segments. I was surprised that the listening problems were easier than expected because they speak so slowly. The area where I'm making most of my mistakes is vocab. I thought my vocab was adequate for the level I'm at, but I've been surprised by a lot of vocab I've never seen before. It makes me a bit skeptical of the TOPIK, actually. I know it's a test that's written with a specific purpose, to certify foreign students before they enroll in Korean universities, and also to certify foreigners before they function in a professional capacity using Korean. So that is going to skew the vocab in a certain direction. It just seems pretty strange to me that I've been studying Korean using a major university curriculum (Sogang) and I also do a significant amount of independent reading, yet the intermediate TOPIK questions are presenting me with a LOT of vocab that I have never even seen before. Makes me glad I don't need to take the TOPIK. Also, why is the spoken Korean so slow and unnatural? I'm not impressed with the test. I've not been watching as much of my drama lately. I watched one episode this week and am getting close to the end of the series, but one of the mothers is being such an unreasonable shrew because she doesn't like her sons' marriage plans that it's a bit hard to watch. I want to soldier on, will try to put in more time on the remaining episodes in the coming week. I've watched several of the 세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분 broadcasts this week. Last week I worked extensively with my Yonsei Korean Reading book, Level 4. It contains essays, articles, speeches, and excerpts from Korean publications and broadcasts, along with a CD recording of each lesson. These give me a lot of new vocab and also a chance to listen while reading. I work extensively with each passage, working out all the vocab, grammar, etc., and I listen repeatedly until I'm able to understand them completely. This is a good way for me to learn vocabulary, since I'm not using Anki these days and I use paper flashcards only sparingly. In the past couple of weeks I've posted some sentences on Lang-8 and I've also had to do quite a bit of writing for my class, so I've tried to tailor this to the May Challenge that's going on right now. Since my reading and listening are improving, I'm now using them on the internet more, doing google searches for topics I'm interested in and reading or listening on YouTube. I was curious about teaching foreigners Korean and searched it and read some interesting Korean blogs and found some YouTube videos by Hyunwoo Sun (TTMIK guy). He has a lot of stuff online where he's talking about language learning to Koreans in Korean and it's good natural listening practice because it's a limited topic with no specialized vocabulary. My favorite recent achievement in Korean is that I read my second adult short story this weekend. It was a bilingual edition (Hollym's Modern Korean Short Stories) of 서울 1965년 겨울 (Seoul - 1965 - Winter) by Kim Sung-ok. I liked this story and it was not too hard. I've tried reading numerous Korean stories that I've had to set aside because of antiquated language that I couldn't get a grip on. This story is quite accessible and I noticed very little vocab that seems outdated. Tomorrow is my last class meeting for the month of May and I'm not re-enrolling for now because I'm planning to leave Korea next month for my annual summer sojourn to more temperate summer climes in good ol' USA. While I'm in the USA for two months, I will be following my own whims, not enrolled in a class. I'm planning to spend a lot of time reading and listening, and I want to find a way to work on speaking. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5526 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 45 of 51 26 May 2013 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
If you haven't already found them, TTMIK and 최경은 have their own Youtube channels as well: http://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean http://www.youtube.com/user/kyeongeunchoi 2 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 46 of 51 03 June 2013 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
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Time for another weekly update:
For listening, I watched one episode (#31) of the drama 무자식 상팔자 (Childless Comfort), but when I tried to watch another one a few days later, I had trouble with the streaming, it wouldn't play for more than a few seconds at a time. Then the next time I checked, it had been taken down! Ugh! I'm never going to get through this drama, so frustrating. I continued to work with my Yonsei Reading Level 4 book, still listening to the CD for the first few passages in the book. I don't really get tired of them, I guess because they have so much new vocab and grammar, so every time I listen I can hear something I missed before. I also made several trips to LingQ to listen to selections there. I think it's a good resource, but I only use it intermittently. When I don't feel like doing any of my regular things, I just pop in there and spend a few hours listening and looking over some of my old LingQs. Since I have a free account, I can only save 100 words at a time, but I don't like memorizing vocab so it doesn't matter. I just delete some old words that I've learned or that seem hopeless, and then add some new ones. There are always more words waiting for me, so I don't worry if old ones haven't been learned; I can always learn them later. I think it's more important for me to keep new words cycling through. My other fun listening exercise this week was an address by best-selling novelist 김영하, author of I Have the Right to Destroy Myself and Your Republic Is Calling You. I haven't read these books but they're very popular here and they've also been translated and have sold pretty well in English, so I have them in mind for some future reading in Korean. His speech was part of the series that I often watch on YouTube, 세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분 (#275) and I could understand most of it. I really recommend this lecture series to anyone who wants the next step after TTMIK's Iyagi series. Obviously, these lectures are a lot harder than Iyagi lessons (and there's no reliable transcript) but even though I can't understand them completely, I can understand enough to make them interesting and they are helping to train my ear. Sometimes I go back to an old one that I listened to weeks earlier and I find my comprehension of it improved. OK, so I think I had a pretty good week for listening. The other things I worked on his week were writing and reading. I posted twice on Lang-8 to fulfill the May Challenge. I got such great feedback and every time I post there I think I should do it more often. Somehow I don't have the discipline to do it on a regular basis, but I will try to post again in the coming week. I hope I will do it! I started reading for the June Challenge. Last year, I read Please Look After Mom, a novel by author 신경숙 that had been translated into English. Well, now I'm trying to read it in Korean, with the English translation close at hand. It's 300 pages, so if I want to read it this month, I'll have to read 10 pages a day. Hopefully I will get faster at reading, because right now it's taking me a couple hours to read that much. I have to read some passages three or four times because they're hard. Especially hard is reported speech, because in novels it's not done in the official grammar-book-approved way. Sometimes it's hard to even spot that it's dialogue and it makes the passages very confusing. I'm about 30 pages into the book and hoping for the best at this point. My other big news for the week is that I finally started a language exchange with a woman I met through Lang-8. We spoke twice last week and we're meeting again tomorrow. I'll write more about that later, since this is getting so long. I like doing the language exchange and I feel comfortable with my partner, but I'm not sure if I'm helping her as much as I'd like to and I'm wondering how I should use my language exchange time to my greatest benefit. My speaking lags behind everything else, so I want to take full advantage of this exchange, and if I can figure out how best to use this resource, I will add more Skype time to my week, possibly by hiring a low-priced tutor through italki. Forgot to mention, my class ended on Monday. I'm going to be traveling this month to US for the summer. I'm sure the travel will mess with my Korean study, but I hope it will be a brief interruption. I'll be bringing some of my study materials with me when I go and trust any break in my study momentum will be temporary. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 47 of 51 09 June 2013 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||
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This week I spent a lot of time reading. I'm up to page 90. I'm trying to read about ten pages per day of 엄마를 부탁해, which still takes me a long time every day. Some passages are starting to flow a little easier, but where I tend to have a lot of trouble are long passages where two characters are interacting and talking about someone else, with lots of indirect reported speech. I have trouble tracking who is saying what and if someone is talking about what somebody else did or said, I get all jumbled up.
In one passage, a stranger on the sidewalk addresses a main character, talking about the character's missing mother. I read the passage over and over and couldn't get it straight in my mind. In another passage, a brother goes to his sister's apartment and she doesn't answer her door, but one of her friends arrives and talks with the brother, telling him that he (the friend) hasn't heard from the sister in over a week and is also looking for her. Well, now that I wrote that, it's hard to describe clearly even in English. In Korean, I was totally lost, especially with all the reported speech and other complications. I'm so glad I have the English translation to check. When I just can't untangle a paragraph, I go through it line by line with the translation and it is helping me to see where I'm messing up. I think this is better for me than just pushing through it at this stage, when I still need a lot of support to get through my first novel. This week I also listened and read a few more times through the first chapter of my Yonsei Level 4 reading book. Getting a little tired of those essays but it's making me more familiar with the vocab. I watched several talks on 세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분. Did some lessons on LingQ and KoreanClass101.com. Met with my language exchange partner on Skype twice during the week. Some comments about LingQ and Koreanclass101.com: Both of these sites have options for using them without paying. I feel slightly guilty for not paying, but I tend to use them very intermittently--visiting for a couple weeks and then staying away for months at a time. Recently, LingQ changed their rules about free memberships, restricting use more. I'm considering getting a paid membership, it's very cheap and I don't mind paying. I just have a feeling though that I won't stick with it. I spent a lot of time there today, trying to figure out how the site works. I find it sort of confusing and overwhelming every time I go there, hard to navigate. To me, it always looks messy and the whole LingQ-ing process seems buggy to me. Since I've only had a free membership, I just ignored what didn't appeal to me, but if I become a paying member, I don't want to miss out on something that might be beneficial. Same issue with Koreanclass101.com. I use their free lessons, but if I joined I think it might be beneficial if I could just get myself to use it regularly. I lose interest fast, which is why I have dozens of Korean study websites bookmarked and probably 50 Korean study books in my house. I prefer jumping around, back and forth, whenever something starts dragging. Right now I'm just using KC101 now and then for listening, but if I joined then I would have access to their study guides and word lists for each lesson. Also, their Advanced Lessons sound slightly slow compared to normal speech, so that might be good for learning new vocab. Well, I'm thinking of paying for one or both of them. This month I'll be traveling and won't have much time for studying, so now might not be the time, but I will probably poke around both sites to see if I think they'd be worthwhile. Talk To Me In Korean also seems to be trending towards more paid content. I can't believe they offer that entire Iyagi series for free. The new Audio Blog lesson that I enjoyed so much a couple weeks ago is going to pay-for-use. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6189 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 48 of 51 19 July 2013 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't updated in a long time. It's because I'm in the US now, visiting family and traveling. I've been doing some Korean, but not as much as usual.
I met with my Skype language partner a few times in June but that soon fell to pieces because of my unpredictable schedule, plus I fell asleep and slept through one appointment due to jet lag. I'm continuing to read my first adult Korean novel, 엄마를 부탁해 (Please Look After Mom). Progress is slower than I had hoped. I wanted to read the whole thing in one month, but here I am half-way through the second month and only about 2/3 of the way through. Oh well, slow and steady. I'm reviewing the Sogang Korean 5A book that I studied in class last winter, just working through it, re-reading and looking over the vocab again. I watched my (so-far) favorite Korean movie, Poetry (시) with English subtitles (available on Netflix), which helped clear up some plot points I didn't get from the Korean version on YouTube. I've done some reading and listening on LingQ (but not as much as I usually do) and renewed my subscription for another month. I paid $2.99 for a TTMIK Audio Blog lesson, "Umbrellas." It's the first one I've purchased and I wanted to see what they're like. Before I left Korea, I picked up the latest issue of the monthly magazine 좋은 생각. It's a magazine of short, reader-submitted personal essays. I read one of those now and then. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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