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Concerning Korean (part of Team 龍) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| EmersoninKorea Newbie United States emersoninkorea. Joined 4772 days ago 25 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 10 30 December 2011 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Emerson in Korea
^ Here I am blogging in English about some different cultural things, in pictures and sarcastic/comical (well, almost comical), I find in Korea. Planning on adding daily ~2 lines posts on my Korean (what I did that day, what I need to do). So, if you want to face-palm at my attempts to be funny or follow the short posts, feel free to do so. This will become my TAC log for Korean and is part of TAC Team 龍. This is mostly for myself, but feel free to read through if you so desire. My goal is to keep these posts short (much shorter than this post). This is due to having tried to do this before and stopping do to it being cumbersome . I will be in Korea this entire next year and also taking formal Korean language course during this time. I may or may not included these courses in the log. Currently, I am seven months into Korean study. Simple conversations on topics I have studied are possible (if I know the vocab - that sounds obvious, but... yeah). Goal: By the end of the year, the goal is to be able to hold everyday conversations with Koreans without major difficulties for either party. "Major difficulties" being defined as being unable to convey the desired idea more or less. Reading and writing at an equivalent level. To achieve this I need to greatly increase my vocabulary and continue attempting despite failure at conversing with Koreans. Also in that same vein, continuing to email, text, etc to my Korean friends is also a must. Don't be a perfectionist yet. Main method for new vocabulary is learning them inside of sentences that suggest the meaning of the new word. Thanks for checking in. Good luck to all TAC 2012 participators. Edited by EmersoninKorea on 08 January 2012 at 12:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| EmersoninKorea Newbie United States emersoninkorea. Joined 4772 days ago 25 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 2 of 10 08 January 2012 at 12:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, I guess that it has been a week so I should update this.
(Note: Being in Korea with nearly no English speakers around me, I apparently miss using the English language. Thus, I wrote almost nearly too much.) Korean: Formal Classes - Probably 3 hours of the 4-hour-a-day class are very helpful. Two hours of the class are the learning and drilling of new grammar points and vocab. The other 2 hours are speaking and writing practice, but these second 2 hours just seem to be not as time effective as the drilling in terms of achieving what it aims to teach. Take home writing assignments are amazingly helpful after the corrections from the teachers. Also the best way I have found to learn new vocabulary. Overall, the class is very helpful. Other learners are a huge motivation (especially that cute girl who doesn't speak your native language) and unlike my experience in the United States, the teachers (I have 2 here) are more active with their students outside of class - on Facebook, meeting up for dinner with students, joining them ice skating, etc (all which are great way to practice Korean). On my own: I am staying with the a family whose daughter often brings her two year old son to the house. Consequentially, the grandparents have a large shelf of children's books. These are great to read, because, well, I can actually get through some of them. Furthermore, for some reason the vocab I pick up this way sticks well. Still writing in Korean with people through email, having to use Korean with most of the friends I have met, when buying things, when lost, etc. All very helpful. Realizations: -I need to hit the vocabulary stronger. I am learning that even if I don't catch the nuances of the grammar, if I know the majority of the words, I can make pretty good guesses - which keeps the conversation from degenerating into hand gestures and frustrated laughter. -Need more listening practice besides "almost conversations" with friends and store owners. These are good for solidifying some areas in which I am confident, but for really targeting a subject to study, pinpointing it through some kind of recording seems necessary. Oh, and it seems that a good portion of the people I meet and get along really well with (here in Korea and back in the United States) tend, for whatever reason, to be Chinese. Consequentially, I have been toying with the idea of starting Chinese language study but constantly telling myself that I did not have time due to Korean being difficult enough. Well, two days ago I started learning some beginner Chinese phrases and I cannot tell you how much I actually like the Chinese characters because you don't have to spell them. You just have to remember a picture, which is how my brain decided it liked to memorize things, and tie it to sound. Not memorizing how its spelled, the exceptions, how the letters interact to change the pronunciation, or flipping the letters backwards (for me). So, if I start to also add Chinese into my daily routine, then I will include it here and change the name of this topic. Wow... If you read that all, you get bonus points or something. Thanks, Emerson 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sundance Newbie United States Joined 4712 days ago 20 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 10 08 January 2012 at 2:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi, Emerson! This is sundance (I guess that's obvious!), one of your fellow teammates, stopping by to say hello. Your Korean studies seem to be quite successful so far and you seem to be in the ideal place (interesting classes with students who don't speak English and living with a Korean-speaking host family) to meet your goals.
How did you learn Korean before you got to Korea? Self-study or university courses? I think you did a good job either way since you can already read some children's books! It made me smile when you wrote about your Chinese wanderlust! I'm studying Japanese right now and am in a much earlier stage than you are with Korean, but Vietnamese keeps haunting me. I'll be following your log to see if you take the plunge with Chinese. Out of curiosity, are you learning Chinese through English-language resources or Korean-language ones? Either way continued good luck with your studies! I'm hoping my experience with kanji will be like yours with Chinese characters, and my brain will embrace the pictorial method... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 4 of 10 08 January 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't forget that those Chinese characters have Korean readings (한자) as well (though Korean 한자 is based on the traditional characters, so some will differ). This can be very useful when you learn a new Sino-Korean word and can immediately visualize the characters which would make up that word. For example, if you already know "대(大) = large" and "문(門) = door, portal", then seeing "대문 = gate" clicks right into place as making perfect sense (大門). It also helps when you look up a word on Naver's English dictionary, see the Chinese characters that appear beside the word and realize you don't even need the English definition now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| EmersoninKorea Newbie United States emersoninkorea. Joined 4772 days ago 25 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 5 of 10 09 January 2012 at 2:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sundance: (props for the name)
Trying out working on Chinese this week. If it severely hurts my progress in Korean, I will drop it for at least until March. I studied Korean at a university for 6 months before coming to Korea. I just got an opportunity to come to Korea, started to learn the language, liked it a lot, and here I am, trying to get better at it. Also, self-study outside of the class. I think the classes are good if you realize that they only introduce you to new concepts, but don't really teach you them. You have to learn them yourself. Currently, I am using an English->Chinese for learning some basic phrases... I am only working with "Hi," "Good morning," "Where are you from," etc right now. However, I take the Chinese and translate it into Korean . Just trying this out, but this is what I am doing: Write phrase in Chinese. Write phrase in Korean. Write phrase in pinyin. Write phrase in with English vocabulary and Chinese grammar LISTEN TO THE RECORDINGS A LOT Considering I can barely get through books for 2-year-olds, I do not know if I could work through a Korean-Chinese book... but I am going to look into it in the future if I stick with Chinese because I have heard that compared to English->Chinese, Korean->Chinese materials are better. Warp3: I will definitely be trying to tie the Chinese to Korean whenever I can. Currently trying to see if I can find a Korean hanja dictionary. To both, thanks for the kind words and motivation. Good luck on your blog as well! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 6 of 10 09 January 2012 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||
This is the book I'm using for learning Hanja, which contains the 1800 school taught Hanja: http://www.amazon.com/Guide-Korean-Characters-Reading-Dictio nary/dp/0930878132/ It is sorted by stroke count, but also has indices in the back for lookup by radical or by phonetic reading. Most of the time I use the phonetic lookup if I already know the reading for the character since it is the easiest for me. I've heard most Chinese dictionaries sort by radical, so that index should be useful as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| EmersoninKorea Newbie United States emersoninkorea. Joined 4772 days ago 25 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 10 24 January 2012 at 6:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Ok... I am still here - midterms for the winter semester kept me silent. Sorry about that.
Realizations: I am getting more comfortable using what I already know, but I am failing to use what is new to me and not focusing enough on vocab. I used to be able to focus on vocabulary - since I came to Korea its gotten harder for some reason - working on fixing that. New goals: -Setting weekly goals for vocabulary - not daily. I have found that my brain will just not absorb new words in a days time. So I am trying out working with all the words/grammar I want to understand by the end of the week from the beginning of the week. -I am spend time using the language with friends, shopping, eating, etc - but this is not really helping me get much further other than picking up some new words. Realize this and focus when I am supposed to be studying. O, really want to work on Mandarin - but that will wait at least a few months while I get my Korean somewhere almost respectable for the time I have been studying Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4866 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 8 of 10 25 January 2012 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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안녕하세요 에메르손 씨?
잘 지냈어요? 당신도 TAC 2012에 참가하는군요! 저도요. 잘해 봅시다! ^^
talktomeinkorean.com의 이야기 팟캐스트를 추천하고 싶어요. 이 팟캐스트에서 두 분이 일상생활으로 얘기하시는데 자연스러운 대화보다 더 천천히 말하세요. 그리고 적어놓은 본문도 있거든요. 그래서 듣기도 연습하고 읽기도 향상시키고 새 단어도 잘 배울 수 있어요. 팟캐스트가 일주일에 한 번 나오고 한 과는 보통 10분 정도 걸려요. (I want to recommend the Iyagi podcast by talktomekorean.com. In this podcast two people talk about everyday life, but they speak more slowly than in normal conversation. The text is also written down, so you can practice listening, improve reading and study new words well. The podcast comes out once a week and usually lasts for about 10 minutes.) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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