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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 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 89 of 559 15 June 2012 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||
This is all so interesting and new to me. I had read about the connection to Chinese and Hanja but not in any detail. Having to learn two basic roots for many words should be fun, haha. Or not. In any case, it's fascinating.
This is great. It still has too much Korean for my comfort but maybe that's not a bad thing. Too bad it's aimed at Koreans who are learning English and not the other way around. Speaking of what I studied yesterday, well, not much. I'm looking forward to the weekend when I'll have more time and energy to spend on languages. I definitely want to finish the 7th lesson of my Finnish textbook, the majority of vocabulary is already in Anki. I don't think I'll do the exercises though, they are no fun. My daily review count for Korean is already above 40 and it'll keep on growing. However, though reviewing the Korean deck takes more time (because of the typing) it's not as frustrating as the Finnish deck because I learn the words gradually - first recognition, then production. With the Finnish deck, I forget words much more often (especially new words) because I'm going straight for production. I didn't listen to a new TTMIK lesson, just repeated lesson 6. The quiz at the end was difficult. I understood some of it but I didn't recognize the word 내일 because the first letter was pronounced like a 'd' and because it had some kind of particle at the end that turned the 'l' into 'r'. I'll try to keep these things in mind in the future when trying listening comprehension. One last thing - this log has been great so far in providing me with useful information and motivation to study. Thank you to everyone who participates and reads! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5534 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 90 of 559 15 June 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
You already did it once for English, whether you realize it or not. ;) The dual root system in Korean is really very similar to how English has dual roots for many words (Germanic origin and French origin). In fact, it is so similar that they even share the attribute where the "foreign roots" are typically used for more formal terms than the "native roots" are. If there is a Germanic-derived (i.e. native English) word for something and a French-derived word for something, the French-derived word is usually the more formal of the two. You run into this a lot when learning Spanish (since French and Spanish obviously share tons of word roots being in the same language family). For example the Spanish word "obtener" means "to get, to obtain". It shares word roots with the English word "obtain" which is the more formal of the two meanings. Similarly, words built from Sino-Korean roots tend to be more formal than their pure Korean counterparts. The words may mean roughly the same thing, but it may be awkward to use one or the other in certain contexts (the same way "obtain" could sound odd in very casual contexts in English). A good example of this is body parts. The Sino-Korean words for the various body parts are usually the "formal medical terms" for those body parts and thus aren't necessarily the same words that would be used in casual conversation. Edited by Warp3 on 16 June 2012 at 4:16am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 91 of 559 16 June 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I had no idea about this, I'm almost astonished. This is encouraging news - if I've done it once I can surely do it again. Coincidentally, I plan to employ the same methods that I used when learning English - reading and watching TV shows. I can't wait to get to this point with Korean. Today was Saturday so I studied a lot, and by "a lot" I mean at least 3-4 hours, possibly more, plus I watched some of episodes 4 and 5 of "You're Beautiful". It's starting to get a bit better now that the heroine has decided not to be so useless. Still, I have to roll my eyes many times during an episode. Korean TTMIK lesson 8 explains how to tell the time, and I was very excited to discover the second connection (purely coincidental, of course) from Korean to Latvian. 세 시 (3 o'clock) sounds practically the same as the Latvian word "seši", which means "six". This is just a fun fact. Speaking of telling the time, it's rather complicated in Korean. You have to use the native Korean numbers to tell the hour and the Sino-Korean numbers to tell the minutes. I didn't bother learning the native Korean numbers properly when they were introduced in level one so I have some work ahead of me. I did learn the Sino-Korean numbers better but I've already forgotten much of that because I didn't enter them into Anki. I read the second part of the TTMIK level 1 test dialog today and then I listened to it all again. It's amazing how much more I understood this time around. I also finished unit 3 of My Korean. Since I already knew most of the grammar points it covered, the most useful stuff for me was the vocabulary (and the dialogs). I added about 10 food-related words to Anki and I also learned the word 괜찮아. I've heard it several times on TTMIK and dramas since then. My reading speed of the Korean alphabet is still not good. I think my typing speed might be better (or it just feels that way). I haven't used the Korean keyboard picture I printed out in weeks, I think it's time I threw it out. I'm not a fan of TTMIK's "sample sentences by our friends" project because these sentences often use grammar that hasn't been introduced yet. I hope they go back to the old format, I liked it better. Finnish I finished lesson 7 of my textbook today. Yay! Lesson 8 was where I stopped four years ago so I will have completely new material from now on. Good. I can't say that I've drilled the grammar of lesson 7 very well (because I haven't) but at least I know all the vocabulary. I think I mentioned in one of the first pages of this log that I prefer to solidify grammar through exposure to the language and I hope that will happen with Finnish. I think I might be getting close to the A1 level in Finnish, at least in understanding it. Speaking might still be too difficult. Korean and Finnish Korean and Finnish do interfere with each other on occasion, they have some similar-sounding words that mean different things. For example, the Finnish "ottaa" means "to take" and the Korean "얻다" means "to get". Also, I keep thinking that the Finnish "saada" means "to buy" because of Korean. These little things are annoying but there's nothing I can do about it. I've read on this forum that you shouldn't start two new languages at the same time and I agree, it's really difficult, but I'm still glad I did it, I didn't want to wait with either language. The Anki reviews are going well. 576 cards for Finnish, 398 for Korean, 95 of them delayed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 92 of 559 18 June 2012 at 12:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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Finnish
Today was the best Finnish day in the last couple of weeks. I studied lesson 8 from my textbook and I scoured the internet for Finnish subtitles for various TV shows. I tried several season packs for Friends but the subtitles weren't synchronized with my rips (I have the 'Uncut' versions which are a couple of minutes longer) so those are good only for reading. Finally I found Finnish subtitles for the first season of Castle (which is one of my favorite TV shows ever) and I watched about 5 minutes of one episode. It was fun but it took a lot of time because I had to pause all the time to look up words. I think I should wait some months before I attempt this exercise again, it'll be more useful then. Lesson 8 introduces the differences between countable and non-countable nouns and explains when to use the Nominative, the Accusative, or the Partitive case. It's all so complicated... I remember I couldn't make any sense of it four years ago so I abandoned it but now it's better because I've studied the previous chapters more thoroughly. One thing that holds me back from reading real Finnish texts is the fact that I don't know any verb forms except the present and the imperative. It's ridiculous that I'm in lesson 8 already and I still don't know how to form the simple past. Okay, I've seen it here and there, I know you have to add an 'i' somewhere but I hope the book introduces it officially soon. I've come across many Finnish words that sound like a Latvian word but mean something completely different so I've stopped mentioning them here. There are a couple more words though that are somewhat similar and mean the same thing, like olut - alus (beer) and seinä - siena (wall). Korean I wanted to review the Korean numbers today but I avoided it. I really must not like the subject. I did other things though - I watched dramas, studied unit 4 of 'My Korean' and also unit 4 of the SNU website. There was one thing there which left me quite perplexed. It's from the dialog. 저기는 어디예요? Translation: What is that (building) over there? What I don't understand is the use of 어디 here. Shouldn't it have been 뭐? As it is, it seems to me that it means "There where is?" and it doesn't make any sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5534 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 93 of 559 18 June 2012 at 1:46am | IP Logged | |||||
I can't recall seeing 어디 being used that way either. My first instinct was that it was a misprint (as I too would have gone with 뭐예요/무엇습니까 or something similar), but the audio in the flash movie says it as well, so perhaps you can actually word it that way in Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ojorolla Diglot Groupie France Joined 4964 days ago 90 posts - 130 votes Speaks: French*, English | Message 94 of 559 18 June 2012 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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어디 means 'what kind of place' in this context: Is it a resturant? an office room? and whatnot. Personally I would avoid saying that specific sentence because what it means doesn't seem very clear to me. (But it could be totally okay for some other native speakers) I would rephrase it as follows:
저기는 뭐하는 데에요? which literally means: that is a place where (people) do what? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 95 of 559 19 June 2012 at 11:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Finnish
My progress is slow but steady, thanks to Anki. If lesson 7 was about numbers and time, this one is about food. The word for 'ham' is 'kinkku' which is easy to remember because it's 'šķiņķis' in Latvian. This similarity is through a German - Swedish connection so it's not very surprising. (As an aside, the Latvian word šķiņķis is considered one of the hardest words for foreigners to pronounce, it's funny to listen to them attempting it.) Korean I've spent more time in the last two days looking up stuff that's too advanced for me and watching dramas than actually learning Korean. I'm in episode 9 of 'You're Beautiful' and I'm finally getting into it, which is both a good and a bad thing. It's good because it's more entertaining but it's bad because it's interfering with my studying. Today was my first outing into the Korean part of the internet if you don't count online dictionaries. I wanted to find some Korean subtitles for Korean dramas, preferably Coffee Prince, and I wasn't having any luck. Then I stumbled onto the Korean drama scripts on the Dramabeans site and I was very excited - until I realized the scripts had been hosted on mediafire and they had all been taken down. I googled some more for the Coffee Prince script but I couldn't find it. I knew I wouldn't be able to use it now anyway, my Korean word count is maybe around 200, but I still wanted to find that script so I tried to search for it in Korean. I got the Korean name of the show from Wiki and I translated 'script' into Korean (대본) and the first hit on google was a success! I'm very happy about it although it's totally irrational since all I can do at the moment is stare at it and maybe read the character names. I did do some actual studying too. I went through both number systems again and repeated lesson 8 on TTMIK. I still got a kick out of every time they said 세 시. And I tried to do the quiz but I couldn't understand anything besides 저는 매일... I also listened to lesson 9 which introduced the counters. That was interesting, even if it's an unexpected complication. At the end, the quiz was different this time - they asked a question in Korean (without giving the translation) and we're supposed to write our answers. To my surprise, I understood the question right away or, well, after it was repeated more slowly. I think the main problem I have with the sample sentences and quiz sentences is that they are spoken too quickly and I'm not ready for that. The TTMIK hosts speak slower so it's much easier to understand them. If I'm correct (I haven't checked the comments of the lesson), the quiz question was this: 한국 친구 몇 명 있어요? (How many Korean friends do you have?) I'll give my answer here: 한국 친구 없어요. (I have no Korean friends.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 96 of 559 21 June 2012 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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TTMIK lesson 10 has the three progressive verb tenses. Very nice. Let me see if I can list all the verb forms I know.
자다 자요 잤어요 자고 싶어요 (this one is true at the moment) 잘 거예요 자고 있어요 자고 있었어요 자고 있을 거예요 I didn't have any new words for Anki today, I've been a bit busy with other things. Also, I've noticed that I make more mistakes in my Korean deck than before. I think it's due to the fact that I listened to the level 1 lessons much more than I'm listening to level 2. I think it's because now I prefer to watch a drama to hear some Korean. Again, no big news for either Finnish or Korean, I'm just doing small things every day because work and other stuff take up a lot of time. One thing I did want to mention is that I was reading CZ's Korean log from 2010 the other day and there were lots of discussions about Korean singers and variety shows. It's a pity that all the discussions were about girls since I'll probably prefer boy bands if I ever start following that stuff, haha. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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