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Advancing Korean, Year 5/6: TAC15 東亞 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 57 of 344 22 May 2012 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Last time I did 24, this time 25, so it shouldn't be an issue, apart from the normal fluctuations depending on the vocabulary that is used. But it seems like I don't have the correct information and TOPIK is only held once per year in Germany. In April. There goes goal no. 1 of this year's TAC... It's a bit upsetting, because I would've tried to get level 3 last month if I had known. Anyway, this means that the next time I take TOPIK is only in April 2013. Now it seems like I have all the time in the world to prepare for level 4. I might still do another mock test in October to see how I'm faring and whether I could have met my goal.
I think it all depends on the kind of children's book you pick up. I'm sure you can find something that interests you, it doesn't have to be fiction or fairytales. For example there's a series of books for kids called "Was ist Was?" in German that explores all kinds of historical, technological and biological topics. It's fairly difficult, but might be fun to study with. I think I'll look for something similar in Korean when I'm done with the books I already have. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 58 of 344 22 May 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
You can find all the old TOPIK tests either on the official site (a bit difficult to navigate) or on TOPIK guide, which is in English and also has some other useful information. Basically, what you get is the official tests plus answer sheets. Reading, Grammar & Expressions and Listening are entirely multiple choice, so it's easy to find out your score. For writing a little over half of the questions are multiple choice, then there are a couple of questions where you have to use the right connectors and fill in phrases. For these the answer sheets give several possibilities with differentiated points. The last question is an essay topic and it's difficult to evaluate yourself on that, although they do provide an example essay. TOPIK guide also has a section where the essay marking criteria are explained. Edited by druckfehler on 22 May 2012 at 4:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 59 of 344 10 June 2012 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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long time no update... I'm really busy with university and life at the moment, so Korean is only a leisure activity now.
When I do study I'm very concentrated, but there's no pressure to improve as fast as possible and it feels nice. Sunday, 10th of June - 20th week song: 이윤지 - 처음 사랑 (First Love) just because Lee Yoon Ji is great lessons studied: 2 G.L.O.S.S. lesson hanja studied: --- writing: 1 200-word essay reading: 1 blog post, 17 pages of 명절 이야기: 신나는 열두달 listening: 2 episodes of The King 2 Hearts, 6 episodes of Queen In Hyun's Man speaking: around 1 hour with friends, lots of talking to myself I now have studied slightly over 200 audio sentences through around 1500 repetitions on Anki. The sentences are taken from the Korean Language Adventure texts, TTMIK Iyagi and two weeks ago I started adding sentences from newscasts I've studied on G.L.O.S.S. If there's such a thing as learning styles, I'm more of an auditive learner. Things I have listened to tend to stick in my head and repeat at random times, so this method of studying is really effective. Once I've listened to a sentence a couple of times, parts of it start to repeat in my head and that's when I'm beginning to really internalise a new word. My speaking skills are still stagnating. I'm happy if I can just keep them on a level where communication is possible, but it does get frustrating when I want to talk about more complex topics. I am, however, talking to myself in Korean more often. Usually it's just bits and pieces here and there, but I'm glad that I'm getting used to doing it. new grammar: -다시피 하다 Almost -나 마나 It is all the same if you do or not In other news, I've thought about taking up Portuguese again next year. I would love to reactivate whatever is left and take it to B2. After Korean it really shouldn't be all that difficult. But I have no idea how that is going to fit in with starting Chinese and learning Persian. Ah, the woes of the wannabe polyglot... Edited by druckfehler on 10 June 2012 at 4:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 60 of 344 18 June 2012 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Monday, 18th of June - 21st week
lessons studied: lesson 8 of Korean Language Adventure hanja studied: --- writing: 1 text reading: 1 newspaper article, 18 pages of 명절 이야기: 신나는 열두달 listening: some youtube clips, 2 TTMIK 이야기 podcasts speaking: 20 minutes I finally finished my second Korean book. I looked up every unfamiliar word and it helped a lot with vocabulary acquisition. My reading speed has increased, because I now have a better understanding of the sentence structure. I wrote a detailed review on my blog, as this book also counts as my first book for the Super Challenge. I also wrote another text in Korean. This is representative of my current level, more than other texts I've written. This time I tried to look up only 3 words (여행자, 수개 국어, 모국), used one new expression (시간이 많이 걸린다고 할지라도) and no new grammar. 수개 국어를 말하는 사람이 되고 싶어요 지난 3년 동안 다양한 나라의 사람들을 만나게 됐어요. 우리 집에서 여러 나라에서 온 여행자나 유학생들을 대접했거든요. 또한 방학마다 다른 나라로 여행을 가서 흥미로운 사람들을 알게 됐어요. 그때는 수개 국어를 말하고 싶은 꿈이 생겼어요. 언어 수업 몇 개 들었는데 한국어 수업에 관심이 가장 많았어요. 한국말은 독일어와 영어와 너무 달라서 재미있고 어려워요. 지금은 2년 넘게 한국말 공부를 했지만 아직도 내 모국인 독일어와 영어만 잘 쓸 수 있어요. 한국말 공부하기 전에 포르투갈어도 배워 봤는데 본격적으로 공부하지 않았어요. 그래서 잘 사용할 수 없어요. 부지런하게 공부했더라면 좋았을 텐데요. 내년에 포르투갈어 공부를 또다시 시작하기로 했어요. 그리고 시간이 있으면 제가 조금 할 줄 아는 페르시아어하고 히브리어도 더 많이 공부하고 싶어요. 나중에는 중국어도 배우고 싶어요. 시간이 많이 걸린다고 할지라도 제 꿈을 이루도록 열심히 노력하겠어요. new grammar: -었더라면 ... -었을 텐데요 If one could have done something, one would have been Edited by druckfehler on 18 June 2012 at 6:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6437 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 344 18 June 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I like your Korean sample! :D Kudos on your hard work!
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| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 62 of 344 20 June 2012 at 5:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you, Jiwon! I guess I wrote about a topic we all like (read: obsess about) here on the forum :)
Vor einiger Zeit habe ich ein bisschen in deinem Deutsch Log gelesen. Lernst du jetzt noch Deutsch? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 63 of 344 24 June 2012 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Sunday, 24th of June - 22nd week
song: 이창선 - 다향 some Gugak for a change lessons studied: 1 G.L.O.S.S. lesson writing: a 200-word essay about soccer reading: 23 pages of 세상에서 가장 무서운 이야기 listening: some youtube videos about language students and the Korean Wave in France speaking: 15-20 minutes with friends My essays have grown longer because of the requirements of the Super Duper Challenge. I still find writing 200 words on a topic difficult, so my texts are rather uneven, but it's great practice. I was surprised how few mistakes I made in this week's essay. I had the most problems determining where to use 은/는 and where to use 이/가, where to use 의 and where to leave it out. I have started my next children's book of what are supposedly scary stories... So far they've been a little boring and it's a shame that only one of them originates in Korea. While I'm not learning much new things regarding sentence structure, I'm encountering lots of new words (I'm still looking up all of them, although sometimes I can guess the meaning from context). I'm thinking about adding the most useful ones to my SRS. I find reading children's books is a great help for learning verbs that have many different meanings. Edited by druckfehler on 25 June 2012 at 4:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 64 of 344 01 July 2012 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Half-Year Review: Time for Some Statistics and Stuff.
Vocabulary: I have learned 986 vocabulary items with Anki, 1/3 of them with my wonderful audio sentence cards. This falls short of the planned 10 words per day (I should be at 1800 now), but as I won't be able to sit TOPIK in October this is inconsequential. Besides, combined with new words from books, movies and conversations the real number may easily be a couple of hundred words higher. Lessons: I did 2 lessons from the KLEAR Beginning 2 book, but it was a little too easy. I plan to use the books again later for an 'active phase'. Passively I rarely need grammar study now. I also studied 9 lessons of Korean Language Adventure and 9 G.L.O.S.S. lessons (4 of them very thoroughly), which were very useful for reading/listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. This makes roughly 1 lesson per week, more than I had planned originally, although I used different (and partly smaller) lessons. Books: I've read a total of 2 and 1/4 books aimed at children between - I would guess - 7-12 years of age. I also read several poems for children and blog entries. My reading speed and comprehension have improved A LOT and I have a much better grasp of sentence structure, (compound) verbs and common words. I'm not at a point where I happily google things in Korean, but I can if I want to (not for very specific information, of course). Tentatively taking up books for adults (or young adults) by the end of the year seems achievable. For children's books I have almost reached my goal of relative reading fluency. Lang-8 Entries: I have written 24 entries on lang-8, so I actually did double of what I had originally planned (2 per month). It's good I did, because my output massively lags behind input (which is okay at this stage, but the discrepancy shouldn't get too big). I'm now fairly comfortable with structures I regularly need to use and writing has also benefitted my speaking skills a tiny bit. Speaking: I have met with the Koreans more or less regularly. I only missed a few weeks due to time constraints. Speaking has been and is continuing to be a struggle and it's difficult to get in much practice when German proves easier and the topics we want to talk about are often complex. But I just take that as a sign that I need a lot more relevant vocabulary and practice, practice, practice to reliably be able to produce those foreign grammatical structures. Plans: July and half of August look pretty bleak for Korean because I need to spend a lot of time on my thesis and afterwards on exam preparations. I'm just happy if I can slowly add some more audio sentences to Anki and keep reading a couple of pages per week. As soon as I have the needed brain space (not sure when that will be, to be honest) I want to send myself to Korean essay bootcamp, followed by conversation bootcamp - the goal is to talk 1 hour of Korean, 5 days a week for a month or so. I'll probably have to mobilize all my Korean friends and then some to be able to do that, but I'm optimistic. Finding a tandem and several people to Skype with should be possible. Edited by druckfehler on 01 July 2012 at 2:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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