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Evita’s Mix of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4799 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes  Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 185 of 236 28 December 2014 at 7:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm very interested in following your progress in 2015, Evita. I'm so interested in
Korean, but I'm trying to avoid adding too much on plate, since I'll be working intensively with Japanese, and to some extent, Russian. But who knows, I may end up doing it anyways. It will be exciting seeing what you're up to! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 186 of 236 29 December 2014 at 11:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am all about spreading the love for Korean :) It's like the little brother of Chinese and Japanese on this forum but somehow it has charmed me so completely that I don't think I will ever recover. Not that I want to :) Korean has changed my life (or perhaps given it a new direction) and I'm happy about it.
Speaking of spreading the love, a week ago I started translating the subtitles for Secret Garden to Latvian. I've done about 10 minutes so far and it's going very slowly, but it's also making me read the original script so it's a worthwhile activity. I am not sure yet how long I will keep doing it. I'd like to translate a few episodes at least but it may take up too much time. Edited by Evita on 29 December 2014 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 187 of 236 30 December 2014 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's finally my summary of 2014 and plans for 2015.
Korean I made good progress in Korean this year, and I intend to continue on the same way. My learning strategy is based on two things: 1) I don't like studying Korean if it requires too much effort. If I read a text, I want to know 95% of grammar and 85% of vocabulary already. Something like that. 2) I want to keep updating and publishing my Anki decks and make them more complete. Requirement no.1 is simply something I have discovered about myself. It took me two years to get through a beginner's textbook because of this. This is why I liked TTMIK's grammar lessons so much - I could listen to them and I didn't have to read anything. Of course, I could make myself do more difficult stuff but I wouldn't enjoy it so why should I? I have no deadline for Korean. Requirement no.2 is something that I do because I want to help others learn Korean and because I'm good at it. It is a big part of my motivation to continue to use Anki, but it also constrains my study activities a lot. So how good is my Korean actually? Let's look at the various components. Vocabulary All the words that I know (except numbers) are in my Anki deck. That doesn't mean that I know all the words that are in the deck, though. Here are the stats: Total cards: 4330 Unseen: 297 Young+Learn: 193 Mature: 3840 I had approx. 3200 cards on March 25th this year and I made the goal to have 4500 active cards by March 25th, 2015 (it will be exactly 3 years since I started studying Korean). I think I'm on track with this goal but I can't afford any laziness and breaks. I've already mentioned before that I often press "Good" even when I didn't quite remember the word. I do this to keep the review count manageable and because I'm counting on reading (when it eventually happens) to solidify all my vocabulary very quickly. Grammar Since I had no Korean teacher and no tutor either, and didn't like going through textbooks because it seemed too difficult, getting the hang of grammar took some time. But that was in 2012. In 2013 I started my Anki sentence deck and I quickly realized that it was a great way to internalize my grammar knowledge and work through all the grammar points systematically. When I added a grammar point to the deck, I went through several textbooks and other sources and read everything available about that particular construction so it was very useful. I've continued to work on the deck in 2014 and it has over 1600 sentences at the moment. This deck is what drives my grammar studies and slows me down at the same time in the sense that I have spent many hundreds of hours working on it and I could have spent them learning something new instead. Still, I consider it time well spent. I have a spreadsheet where I note down everything related to this deck - which grammar points are already covered, which ones should be added soon, which TTMIK lessons are covered and so on. It ensures that nothing is forgotten. In the beginning of the year I expected that I would be more familiar with the intermediate level grammar but I can't say I know a lot of it, mostly just what TTMIK teaches in levels 5-8 and not even all of that. What I have done though is glanced through all of Korean Grammar In Use, Intermediate and at least looked at the grammar constructions so that I would be ready to internalize them by the time I add them to Anki. I hope I will be able to add most of them in 2015 and therefore I expect my knowledge of grammar to be considerably higher in a year. KGIU is more of a grammar reference book, though, not a textbook, so I had planned to work through Elementary Korean and Continuing Korean this year, but I didn't really like them so I abandoned them for the Russian textbooks. It's a series of three textbooks so it covers a lot of grammar, and the books contain lots of example sentences (audio included) that are very well suited for my Anki deck. I have only two chapters left in the first book (it was mostly review anyway), and I want to work through both the second and third books next year. This + TTMIK + KGIU should give me a nice coverage of the intermediate grammar. I will no doubt try some of the other e-books I have, but this is the main plan. I also ordered the Ewha textbooks 2-1 and 2-2 from Korea a while ago. They've been sitting on the shelf mostly unused. I guess I should work through them... I ordered them mainly because I like the idea of following the series of textbooks of a Korean university because they go high up to level 6 (advanced) and I think I will need a textbook once I get that far. Sure, there's KGIU Advanced but it's not a textbook. But the university textbooks are meant to be used in a classroom setting so I don't like them as much as the books meant for self-studying. And since the grammar points covered in level 2 are also covered elsewhere, I haven't found a need to use these books (yet). Listening This is my favorite Korean activity. I'm sure you can guess why - because it's the easiest to do, of course :) I used to listen to the TTMIK Iyagi lessons and the radio in 2013 and it was sort of fine, but the radio reception was not always good, the content not always interesting, and the Iyagis, well, they were good and interesting but there are only 140 of them, 7 minutes each... You can see how that could get boring quickly. Then I found Yoo Inna's radio show and it was exactly what I had been looking for - relatively light content and a new episode every day. I estimate that I have listened to her show for about 400-500 hours in 2014 (and that doesn't include music). Most of it has been passive listening but still useful. It's difficult to say how much of it I understand. Definitely a lot more than a year ago. If they talk about friends or dating or food or what happened at school when they were young, I understand a lot, sometimes enough to follow a long. But if they talk about a subject where my vocabulary is lacking (which is most of the time) then my level of understanding drops accordingly. Every now and then I try watching a drama without subtitles, and every time I invariably put the subtitles back on because I don't want to watch something not understanding what's going on. 2015 will probably be more of the same. Reading I didn't do much reading this year. What little I did was from textbooks and about five or six Iyagi transcripts and a little bit of drama transcripts. I will probably continue with those in 2015, more with Iyagis than with dramas. Dramas simply contain too much unknown grammar and vocabulary, Iyagis are closer to my 85% and 95% rule. Mostly I read when I need some new vocabulary to add to Anki. I have a couple of books that I could start reading but they are probably still too difficult. I wouldn't want to add all the new words I come across into Anki, but I also don't want to learn new words without adding them to Anki because I want Anki to contain all the words I know. It's a bit of a dilemma... which I will solve easily by not reading :) Except easy stuff. Writing I have two Korean penpals and I write the occasional sentence in Korean to them, but otherwise we communicate in English. I don't practice writing anywhere else. I have a Lang-8 account but so far I haven't written anything there. Maybe that will change in 2015, I don't know. I have no specific goals for this. Speaking My speaking skills are very low. I will need to get them up if I go to Korea next year. My plan is to do more shadowing with my Anki sentence deck and maybe try shadowing some Iyagi lessons. If I start writing more in Korean to my penpals then that will definitely improve my speaking, too. Summary In 2015, I will work mainly on improving my vocabulary and grammar, just like I did this year. German I'd say that German was a moderate success for me this year. I had a German class for 3 months and I went through a grammar book to review everything. My speaking and writing are also definitely in a better shape than they were at the start of the year but I haven't had to use them much at work lately. Next year I will try to continue to improve my German by reading, and I will also try to finish translating my word list to Latvian, but German won't be a TAC language for me in 2015. Finnish My level in Finnish must be somewhere between A1 and A2. I will try to do something in order to not let it slide further but I have no definite plans yet. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 188 of 236 01 January 2015 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A few weeks ago I was going through some stuff at my old home and I discovered tons of video tapes with episodes of Muñeca Brava, the Argentinian telenovela. I recorded them thinking I'd want to watch it again but I never got around to it. That was around year 2000. Now all the episodes are available on youtube so I can throw out the cassettes. Shouldn't have bothered with them at all... But who could imagine 15 years ago that everything would be on youtube? Anyway, I got nostalgic and watched the first two episodes. The first time I saw them was in Russian but now I found videos with the original Spanish audio and English subtitles. It's the best combination. It's been a while since I did anything with my Spanish so maybe I'll keep watching it (well honestly it's more because I simply want to watch it again but Spanish would be a nice bonus). The Italian experiment seems to have finished for now.
The Darakwon Books website offers free mp3 downloads of all their Korean book accompanying CDs. You have to install an ActiveX control for the download to work but it's easy and it's safe. So... Well, the audios for intermediate books are not of much use to me without the books themselves, but I can use the beginner audio files to practice listening comprehension. This is not like Yoo Inna's shows, they are extensive listening but this is intensive listening. I started with "Korean Listening Skills_Practical Tasks for Beginners" and went through all of CD 1. I'm happy to report that my understanding was close to 100%. Sometimes I had to rewind and pause to figure out a word (like 베이지색, which I had never heard before) but it wasn't often. Only the last two dialogues were more difficult, I only understood about 80% even after several listenings. Ah, I forgot to mention Hanja in my previous post. I haven't exactly abandoned my hanja deck, it has 102 characters and I review them now and then (and promptly forget them again) and I still plan to add more, I just haven't felt like doing it recently. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 189 of 236 04 January 2015 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's funny how the start of the year has been all about Spanish, totally unexpectedly. I even found my old Spanish grammar books. It's basically this book but an older edition where it was printed as two books (two parts). I'm not going through the grammar, I'm using the books and the telenovela to make a word list, similar as I did for German. You've probably noticed that I have a thing for word lists. It's easier for me to make a list in a language I'm a total beginner in because I can simply look at a word and think "Yes, I know this word so it's already on the list" or "I haven't seen this word, it's not on the list yet, I should add it". That's not the case for German and Spanish but I'm not letting that stop me. I will try to publish nice Anki vocabulary decks this year in both of these languages.
On a slightly different note, do you know what the biggest difference is between Korean dramas and telenovelas? All the passionate kissing LOL. Korean dramas have very little of that so I had almost forgotten that it can also be otherwise. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3673 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 190 of 236 04 January 2015 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am going to follow your log throughout this year. With you good luck with your
Korean and other languages!
I am still unsure whether Anki is going to work with me for Korean, but we will still appreciate your great effort spending hours to make a decent deck.
That was so fun to read! LOL. That's true. In Korean dramas they have very little passionate kissing, indeed. LOL... 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Woodsei Bilingual Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Woodsei Joined 4799 days ago 614 posts - 782 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Egyptian)* Studies: Russian, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 191 of 236 12 January 2015 at 12:51am | IP Logged | |||||
LOL. It's the same with Japanese drama. To the point that it would be unexpected to even see one kiss, and many of them look like the actors were really uncomfortable doing them :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 192 of 236 12 January 2015 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Nice to see you stopping by, Nieng Zhonghan and Woodsei!
So what did I do last week? To put it simply, I was being lazy and didn't do anything much, only my absolute minimum for Korean, which is keeping up with Anki and listening. I had planned to add all the Spanish vocabulary from my textbooks to my list but I kept postponing it and I still haven't done it. I think maybe I needed a break from the intense studying I did at the end of last year. It doesn't help that I've become addicted to Mahjong Master. I hope it wears off soon. If you go to Dramabeans now and then, you will undoubtedly have noticed the Healer craziness that is going on there. The last recap has more than 2000 comments. I'm not participating in that but I do love the series. I wish I could marathon it. There are plenty of secrets and secret identities and action and delicious cliffhangers, I just want to know what happens next. No doubt I will go home tonight and watch part of the new episode unsubbed. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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