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Evita’s Mix of Languages

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Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6542 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 65 of 236
01 March 2014 at 10:54pm | IP Logged 
This week I was in the mood to watch dramas so this post is going to be mostly about that.

Today I finished watching You From Another Star. I had abandoned it before I went to Germany but this week I caught up. And what can I say... Maybe it's because I watched the episodes relatively close together but I thought the episodes were well done and interesting. I also liked the ending, it was miles better than that of PM&I. I find that the ending is very important for my overall enjoyment of a show so now I'm not sure whether to rank YFAS above or below PM&I. YFAS was somehow a strange show with many genres mixed into one - fantasy, comedy, melodrama, parody and even suspense thriller (one of the main characters was a psychopathic killer who was trying to hurt the heroine). One of my favorite characters was the heroine's brother (still in high school). That one scene where he went to have a man-to-man talk with the hero (you know, that talk, "what are your plans regarding my sister?") and the hero gave him chocolate milk and showed him a telescope and the brother was like "you're cool, you can have my sister", I was laughing so hard.

I also watched the first episode of SG without subtitles but it's one of the harder shows to understand, I was lost a lot of the time even though I knew what was going on. I just didn't know the necessary vocabulary so I couldn't follow the conversation. The fact that they speak quite fast didn't help.

Dramabeans posted a sort-of-recap for the first two episodes of Wonderful Season (WS) so I read it and then started watching the first episode again. I'm fascinated by the Gyeongsang dialect. I understand much less than in the standard dialect but I like the sound of it and it reminds me of the time when standard Korean was just gibberish to my ears. It also reminds me of Answer Me, 1997, the other drama I've watched in this dialect. TTMIK has 10 short lessons about this dialect and I studied 5 of them today. Apparently the intonation and stress are very important. And the -잖아 ending turns into 아이가. Very interesting. But back to SW, I think I will wait for subtitles after all because this drama seems good and I don't want to go through it missing most of the dialog.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6542 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 66 of 236
03 March 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged 
It is so good to be back on track with Anki. I feel like I was playing catch-up for several months and now I'm finally making progress again. I have to review 65-70 cards daily but it's easier to do now than during those months because the cards appear as scheduled and I remember them better.

I have actually spent a lot of time on Korean recently but very little of that has been textbook studying. I've read some song lyrics, about half a page of a drama script, and listened to some Iyagis and other podcasts. It's getting easier to understand the Iyagis, at least when I know the vocabulary. For example, I listened to the one about kitchen and I could understand almost 80% of the beginning where they said where they were and who invited them and who wasn't invited and who was making food, I even caught the word 냄새. But then they started talking about various kitchen utensils and the details of how to make a soup or something and I was almost totally lost. But that's to be expected. When I think back to a year ago when I could understand very little of natural speech, I see that my improvement has been huge. I'm going to keep listening a lot and read more and more Iyagi transcripts (because it's getting easier and easier) and learn more words and... Well, that's my plan and I'm very excited because I feel like it will help me a lot. I'll also study the textbooks according to my previous plan but I'm not so excited about that.

I have been distracted though by the events in Ukraine. When I think about the fact that the pretext for Russians invading Crimea was "to protect ethnic Russians" and the fact that more than 30% of people in Latvia are ethnic Russians, I simply get scared. Putin is crazy and you can expect anything from him. I wanted to find out the German take on these events so I listened to Deutschlandfunk for half an hour today. I'm considering dropping my German word list for now. The idea of making it into an Anki deck is a good one but it's slowing me down rather than helping me and I'm thinking maybe I should focus on my own interests first. I don't know.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6542 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 67 of 236
08 March 2014 at 10:24pm | IP Logged 
Apparently it's not really news anymore but I found out only a couple of days ago that yes, there is going to be a "Korean Grammar in Use - Advanced" book. I'm still far from the advanced level but I was very happy to read this because I'm sure the book will be very useful to me in due time.

Another bit of good news is that my company will organize a German class this year again. I wasn't there last year but I'm definitely going to sign up this year, it should finally give me some decent speaking practice. The classes might not start until fall but that's okay, I can wait. They will also organize an English class but I'm sure it will be below my level so there's no point in going.

Another bit of good news is that I got back to studying German this week. I decided to drop the word list so I could do my activities faster. I finished level 2 of Warum Nicht and got a good part done of chapter 5 of my textbook. I also read some more of Little Prince but that went rather slowly since I was looking up a lot of words in a paper dictionary. I guess I'll keep reading it semi-intensively.

As for Korean, everything is going well. I'm keeping up with Anki and 6 new words a day, I'm almost done with chapter 18 of my textbook, and I'm almost done with Intermediate Lesson 5. It introduced one grammar point I hadn't seen before, I think it was 하게요 as in "I intend to do" or "in order to do". I also kept listening a lot. I also added my first Anki card from my phone. I think this needs a little background information. Since I started using my old phone to listen to TTMIK lessons during commute, I always downloaded them to my computer first and then transferred them to my phone. Now I've realized that I can just go to the TTMIK homepage with my phone and find whatever I want. That gives me a lot of freedom and I love it. So one day I was standing in line and I decided I should read an Iyagi transcript. I didn't care which one so I just typed randomly "Iyagi 72" or something and just started reading. And when I encountered a word I didn't know, I went to the Naver dictionary and looked it up. And then I decided it was a word I should know so I added it to Anki. It's a process I normally do in front of a computer so it was very novel to do it on the phone.
3 persons have voted this message useful



druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4858 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 68 of 236
09 March 2014 at 11:21am | IP Logged 
Congratulations on your improved understanding of the Iyagi lessons! Understanding those is really a big step towards understanding natural conversation. The vocabulary they use is a very useful selection, so I think that specifically learning words from Iyagi lessons is a really good use of your study time.

Evita wrote:
Apparently it's not really news anymore but I found out only a couple of days ago that yes, there is going to be a "Korean Grammar in Use - Advanced" book. I'm still far from the advanced level but I was very happy to read this because I'm sure the book will be very useful to me in due time.

That sounds great! I very much like the format. I wonder which patterns they will include.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6542 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 69 of 236
09 March 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged 
Right now only about 20% of my new vocabulary comes from Iyagi's but that can change (and does change) at a moment's notice. It depends on whether I feel like learning a song or analyzing a drama scene or whatever. But yes, Iyagi's are a great source for vocabulary and the most accessible as well.

As for the advanced grammar book, I read about it here. Apparently the Japanese version is out already and it's awesome. I know at least one grammar pattern that should be there - 길래.
1 person has voted this message useful



druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4858 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 70 of 236
09 March 2014 at 12:52pm | IP Logged 
I did some research and it looks like it's already being sold: English version on heyeonni. I'm considering to order it from there now, the German site for ordering Korean books doesn't have it yet and might even make me pay more.
3 persons have voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6542 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 71 of 236
09 March 2014 at 1:30pm | IP Logged 
druckfehler wrote:
I did some research and it looks like it's already being sold: English version on heyeonni. I'm considering to order it from there now, the German site for ordering Korean books doesn't have it yet and might even make me pay more.


Nice find! Good to know it's out there. I'm not in a hurry to get it since I haven't gotten very far with the intermediate book yet but I will probably order it sometime next year. This is more like a reference/review book anyway so I'd prefer to go through some other books first. I don't think many textbooks get as far as the advanced grammar but I found one in Russian that looks pretty advanced.
1 person has voted this message useful



druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4858 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 72 of 236
09 March 2014 at 2:28pm | IP Logged 
I'm thinking of learning the intermediate and advanced patterns for similar purposes alongside each other. That way I can work through all the patterns for something like expressing conjecture at once and maybe that will make it easier to differentiate when to use what. I hope. :)


1 person has voted this message useful



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