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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 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 193 of 559 12 September 2012 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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I've been evaluating my methods and my goals again. I think it's time to admit I won't be studying as intensively as I was in the first couple of months. I'm simply getting tired of the studying, and I suspect it's in a large part because I'm studying two languages at once. And the Anki reviews require 30-60 minutes each day. 30 minutes is okay but 60 minutes is too much. But I can't drop Anki, that would be the beginning of the end.
So I thought about it and the sensible thing to do seems to be to lower my goals in both languages so that I don't feel like I failed when I don't reach my higher goals. I considered dropping Finnish altogether but I don't want to do that because it would be very hard to pick it up again later and also because Finnish has a greater likelihood than Korean of actually being useful to me at work. As for dropping Korean, well, that's not an option, I love studying it. Even if I dropped Anki and the textbooks, I'd still keep using TTMIK, it's that much fun. Speaking of TTMIK, I listened to the lesson about how to use 밖에 to say "only". It's an interesting concept that wasn't too difficult for me fortunately. I also repeated some other TTMIK lessons and finished reviewing unit 3 of My Korean. I didn't do any studying for Finnish except the Anki reviews. The reason I studied more Korean than Finnish is that the TTMIK lessons are easier than any of my Finnish materials. You don't have to read anything, you can just listen to the hosts explaining everything in English and giving examples in Korean. It's easy to follow so that's what I tend to do when I'm tired after work. I almost forgot to mention that I started unit 7 of SNU. These units are quite a lot shorter than the units in my textbook so I'm thinking maybe I'll finish those before I finish my textbook even though the book has only 10 units and SNU has 20 units. I really want to finish at least one of them because I've been studying Korean for almost half a year now and I still have to finish anything, I seem to just be jumping around from one material to the next. So finishing something would be good. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 194 of 559 15 September 2012 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I have nothing major to report, just slow and steady progress. I want to finish unit 7 of SNU and lesson 5 of TYF this week.
I realized that I hadn't listened to a Finnish radio in a long time so I tried that again. I noticed that I could pick out more words than 2 months ago but not enough to understand even the basic idea of the sentence. After listening to the program for a while, I understood that it was about WW2 but that was mostly because I heard words like "Hitler" and "Japan". Still, I'm going to try to turn listening to the radio into a habit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5536 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 195 of 559 16 September 2012 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Assuming you haven't already learned 밖에 on its own, keep in mind the literal meaning is more like "outside of" or "beyond". So 밖에 can also refer to "outside (of the room, house, etc.)" in some contexts (as in "밖에 비가 오는 것 같아요." = "It seems to be raining outside."). With negative verbs it takes on more of an "except for, excluding" meaning, which is why it works like "only" (but sort of in reverse). The English phrase "outside of" can actually be used similarly as an "except for" meaning, but that usage isn't particularly common in modern English, so it sounds a bit dated (though you'll still hear/read it on occasion). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 196 of 559 17 September 2012 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Warp3, sorry to say that your entire assumption was wrong. I mean, I hadn't learned 밖 or 밖에 before the lesson but the lesson itself explained everything about the expression in about the same way that you did. I think they even used the example "it's raining outside" LOL.
I still have a lot of trouble with sentences like "밖에 비가 오는 것 같아요." though, specifically with verbs turned into nouns and their usage. I have learned all this, I know it theoretically but somehow it refuses to click in my brain. I don't know or can't decide when to use this construction. --------------------------------------------- Speaking of what I did during the weekend, well, mostly it was other stuff, not language learning. I did have time for it, I just didn't want to do it. I had a cold (still have actually) so maybe I can use that as an excuse. But it's more likely that I simply wanted to rest. Another problem is that I've been neglecting Anki again. When I had caught up with everything last week, I was so happy that unconsciously I relaxed again and started to leave some cards for the next day. I really don't know what to do about Anki. I don't like the way I seem to be working it now - being lazy one week, catching up the next week, but it has to be better than stopping using it completely, right? But despite all this, I'm glad I stopped regarding Anki more important than sleep because clearly sleep is more important to me. I did do a little studying over the weekend - I listened to the Finnish radio and I did TTMIK lesson 3x20. It's crazy how one word in Korean, "바빠도", can stand for a whole subclause in English, like "even though I am busy". It will take time to get used to conjunctions being turned into verb endings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 197 of 559 19 September 2012 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
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The next TTMIK lesson, 3x21, was about the -는데 ending. Finally! I've noticed this ending tons of times in dramas, and even the dialogues in My Korean featured it a lot (without explaining it). The lesson mentioned 6 main uses for this ending. The next time I watch Gumiho, I'll pause when I hear it and I'll try to figure out which usage it is supposed to be (based on the English translation, of course).
I'm feeling almost completely healthy today so maybe I'll have the energy to tackle the Anki backlog tonight, which has grown to 500 cards again. But this is just a short term solution. In the long term, I can't review 100-150 cards every day so yesterday I seriously considered dropping Anki completely but then I figured out a better way to try to deal with the high card count. Most of my reviews come from the Korean deck so I will start to drop active cards. I haven't started doing it yet but my idea is that when I add a new Korean word to Anki, I won't always add both the passive and the active card like I've been doing up until now. I will try to limit the active cards to 30-50% of all the words. I don't want to get rid of them completely because they are still useful. I'm hoping this will be a good compromise between what I'd like to do and what I can do realistically. My Finnish deck will remain as is for now. It doesn't have both directions so removing cards has bigger consequences. I considered flipping the cards from active to passive (which would make it much easier for me to review them) but decided not to do it yet. It's more important for me to have an active vocabulary in Finnish than in Korean. If I ever learn Finnish to an acceptable level, I'll probably have a chance to use it at work in communication with colleagues or clients from Finland so I must be able to speak it. For Korean, speaking is not an important goal for me, I'm concentrating more on listening and reading comprehension. And finally, I'm starting to encounter some Swedish at work (because my current project has a Swedish client). I've never had a particular desire to learn Swedish and I don't have one now but the fact is that Swedish would be very useful for me right now if I knew it. If I see that the situation in my project won't change in the foreseeable future I may start seriously considering learning it. I hope it doesn't come to that though, it would probably put a stop to my Finnish studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 198 of 559 19 September 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Swedish will present a minor difficulty given you speak English and German. You'll do
just fine with it I presume 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 199 of 559 20 September 2012 at 11:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm afraid I wouldn't do fine with Swedish even though I know related languages. I simply don't have any enthusiasm for it and honestly I can't imagine getting it one day. I've been to Sweden twice, and the second time (more than 5 years ago) I even had a book about Swedish teaching some basic things. I didn't get very far in the book though. Somehow Swedish seems boring to me although I know it's a perfectly nice language.
It's been a while since the last time I updated my log in the evening. I decided to do it now because my thinking about everything has totally changed since my last post from yesterday morning. Sometimes I wish I didn't updated my log so often, I wouldn't come across so foolish then changing my learning strategy every couple of days. But then I think - who cares how I come across, the important thing is to learn the languages and have fun. So, what I have realized is that my Anki strategy was fine as it was, the problem was my commitment to studying in general. I tried removing or not adding some active cards in Korean and I just couldn't do it, it didn't feel right. If I spend at least an hour (preferably two hours) every day on studying, I'll have time to do all the Anki reviews as well as other kinds of studying. At the moment I feel like that's what I'll try to do, I'm optimistic about it. Who knows, maybe I'll change my strategy again when I see that this is not working. I want to mention sleep again. Lately I've been sleeping 7-7.5 hours every night and I thought that was enough but maybe it wasn't. Last night I slept 9 hours and today I felt so full of energy that I studied 250 Anki cards, worked on SNU lesson 7, and listened to one new and four old TTMIK lessons. So I'll try to pay even more attention to sleep in the future. Of the 4 TTMIK lessons that I repeated, 3 were from level 2, and I was happy to realize how much easier it was for me to understand the sample sentences. I also understand more and more of the short comments the hosts sometimes make to each other in Korean. For example, today I think I caught one of them saying 거짓말 마지 마세요 (don't lie). Perhaps I'm remembering the phrase wrong but I'm pretty sure the translation is correct. I understand many other things too, like when they say that something is difficult or different or that the listeners should pay attention or leave comments, many things like that. And it's very nice, it gives a sense of satisfaction. On the other hand, their example sentences are getting more and more difficult, or maybe it's just that it's new grammar and all sentences with new grammar are difficult for me at first. I don't want to make this post too long so let me just add that even though I haven't studied Finnish actively this week, I'm keeping it alive by listening to the radio and doing Anki reviews, and I'll definitely get back to Teach Yourself Finnish soon. I've noticed that I can tell apart words a lot better when listening to the radio than before so I think I could try to learn actively by trying to look up some of the words I hear in the dictionary. I'm not sure how helpful or effective that would be but I'm sure it would be fun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6553 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 200 of 559 22 September 2012 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been studying Korean for half a year now and I'm happy that the hardest part is behind me. At least I hope so. The initial hurdles for Korean are huge - the alphabet, the sound system, the sentence structure, the verb ending patterns. I think I've got a pretty good grasp of the basics now so the rest of it should come easier. One thing that helps a lot is that I've got used to the sound shifts that occur when you attach a particle or an ending. For example, 'mokta' (to eat) sometimes changes to 'mogeul' or 'mongneunde', and it was difficult for me to get used to the different ways the last consonant of the syllable might be pronounced. I learned the rules but I couldn't recognize the words when I heard them. Now that I've spent many months listening to TTMIK lessons attaching various endings to various verbs, these sound shifts come to me more naturally.
My reading has improved too. I can't read as fast as people speak yet but I think I'm getting close. I also don't have to concentrate so hard anymore on the letters. Before I started learning Korean, I think I expected my progress to be faster. When I think about my current level of Korean it still seems very low, too low for 6 months of studying. Then again, some things took me completely by surprise, like their two counting systems, the concept of counters, the omission of pronouns, the attachment of conjunctions to verbs, and the multiple-verb-endings like 'can do' or 'want to do' or 'will do'. I've said it before and I'll say it again - Korean is fascinating. I'm so glad this forum exists because without it I would never have got the idea to study Korean. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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