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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 6549 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 121 of 559 13 July 2012 at 9:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Finnish
I'm done with lesson 8! Phew. Lesson 9 is about being sick and the first text is about going to the dentist's. Why they couldn't pick some more interesting (and pleasant) topics I will never know. Korean I did TTMIK lesson 22 in which they explain the difference between 좋다 and 좋아하다. I was not confused about these two verbs before so this was easy for me but I didn't realize there are other verb pairs like this, for example 싫다 and 싫어하다. Interesting. I haven't watched any dramas this week due to not being at home. I plan to rectify it this weekend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6549 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 122 of 559 15 July 2012 at 12:23am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm back home again and today was a pretty good day for my language studying.
Finnish Lesson 9 has less new vocabulary than lesson 8 so I should be able to finish it quicker. Maybe in 2 weeks. The lesson starts off with a table of various verb groups and their present tense conjugations. Mostly I already knew them (sort of) but I read them aloud anyway just to review and practice. And then there was the dentist dialogue. I usually stop reading texts from my textbook once I gather the "required" 7 new words for Anki so that's what I did today. Sometimes when I don't want to read any texts I would just go to the vocabulary section of the lesson and find some new words there. The point is (as I'm sure you all know because I've said it a hundred times already) that Anki is my most valuable tool in learning Finnish so I make sure to add new words all the time. Maybe I shouldn't though, sometimes I think I should take it easier and not add new words on days when I haven't managed to study any texts. But my motivation to learn Finnish as soon as possible is still high so I don't want to waste any days. I suspect my production skills in Finnish are abysmal but I don't really know because I haven't tried speaking or writing. Grammar is what's holding me back and I'm okay with that considering how little time I've spent studying grammar versus studying vocabulary. I'll learn grammar once I start reading native materials. Korean The drama I'm watching (My name is Kim Sam Soon) isn't as fun as I had hoped but I will probably finish it anyway. I'm uncomfortable with how much I've forgotten from the earlier TTMIK lessons. I need to make a serious effort to add all the grammar to Anki and I've only just started a bit. In fact, this is a good opportunity to set a short-term goal for myself: - add the grammar from the TTMIK lessons (levels 1 & 2) to Anki by next Sunday Otherwise, everything is going fine. I learned the "if" construction today. I should have known Korean would have a verb ending for that too, ha. Hmm, what else... Oh yeah, Wiktionary for Korean isn't that great, they are missing many words so I'll stick to other resources. I still love my paper dictionary, I wish I had one for Finnish too. Wiktionary for Finnish is great though so I can't justify spending money on a real dictionary but that doesn't stop me from wishing I had one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4865 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 123 of 559 15 July 2012 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
Despite the hype on dramabeans I didn't enjoy it very much either. I thought it was one of those dramas with a rather repetitive plot, annoying side characters and an almost abusive male lead... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6549 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 124 of 559 15 July 2012 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yeah, suddenly I got a craving for Coffee Prince today so I spent more than 3 hours watching it. I still love it. I can't wait until I'm able to read the script.
Finnish Today I realized I have a flaw in my learning method. Why am I learning vocabulary in the Latvian -> Finnish direction if I'm not planning to produce any Finnish until I've read lots of native materials and absorbed grammar? By that point I would have surely absorbed enough vocabulary as well, right? And it should be easy to activate it, right? So I'm suddenly wondering why I'm putting myself through this torture of learning the active cards. If I learned them passively I could learn words twice as fast with the same effort. The reason I'm in this situation is that originally when I started to use Anki I didn't plan on postponing producing Finnish, the grammar took me by surprise, particularly the consonant gradation and the mess that is the Genitive/Accusative/Partitive cases and when I should use which one. Lesson 8 had a lot to say about that, and lesson 9 added a bunch of new rules. Anyway, now I'm thinking there's no benefit for me to learn vocabulary this way but I'm also reluctant to change how I work with Anki because my current system gets good results even if it requires a lot of effort. I guess I'll think about it some more and not make any rash decisions. That said, I spent a lot of time on Finnish today. I listened to the radio for a while (because it had been a while since I had done it) and I read the whole grammar section of lesson 9 of my textbook. It introduced the plural imperative for verbs and also the finished/unfinished verbs and objects. Like I said above, it's just a mess in my head right now. I get that there's a system and actually the rules are very clear, it's just that there's so many of them I can't remember them all. Maybe I'll work on it, maybe I won't, maybe in a month or two. We'll see. I have Nora Roberts's book Sea Swept both in English and in Finnish. I bought it when I was in Finland 4 or 5 years ago with the hope that someday I'd be able to read it. Well, I'm not able to read it yet but I do understand more of the general sentence structure and grammar forms than I did a couple months ago. I won't add the book to my daily routine yet but it's something more interesting than my textbook or the radio so it'll be good for when I don't feel like studying. Like I said, I can't read it yet but I can read the same paragraphs in English and then try to decipher the Finnish text. I tried it today and it was fun. Most of the Finnish text was too difficult so I just left it but I did add some words to Anki. I wouldn't be able to do this without Wiktionary. Korean I did a new TTMIK lesson today, it was about 'somewhere', 'something' etc. I thought "what an easy topic, great" and then they mentioned that the -ㄴ가 part can be omitted and I was like "oh no, not again?" This thing where Koreans omit everything unless it's essential to the sentence is starting to get really annoying because I have to learn to recognize both the short form and the long form (without the omission) and I have to rely on intonation if it's the short form. It's more difficult. I also studied a little bit from my textbook and I did an audio exercise where I had to recognize what time it was. It helped a lot. I wish the book had more audio exercises. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 125 of 559 16 July 2012 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Looool I love texts about health and those about food make me hungry so I tend to skip them :D In this particular case I didn't, though, and I remember having a food poisoning when doing the lesson XDDDD
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6549 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 126 of 559 18 July 2012 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I studied a lot in the last two days, mainly Korean. Well, "a lot" for a working day anyway, especially yesterday. I had some free time at work so I went back to the SNU LEI unit 4 (I had stopped studying it after encountering the strange construction "There where is?") and I finished almost all of it except the second practice text. It was very encouraging to see how my reading and listening skills have improved compared to a month ago, especially my listening skills. When I was doing unit 3 I had trouble registering words even if I knew them and knew translation but this time it went much better. I think it's thanks to the TTMIK lessons and drama watching.
Speaking of TTMIK, I did lessons 26 (-(으)세요) and 27 (-아/어/여 주세요). Lesson 26 was easy since this form is used in many expressions like 'hi' and 'bye' but lesson 27 had to go and make it more confusing, argh. I'm not really mad, it's just that it will take a lot of practice for me to use both these forms correctly and not to mix them up. And as if that wasn't enough, one of their example sentences in lesson 27 was: 도와 줄 수 있어요? I just can't get my head around to it. Shouldn't it be something simpler, like maybe 돕을 수 있어요? On top of all this, I've been studying Anki, of course. And just like I predicted, the Korean review count keeps climbing higher and higher - I have to review 82 words today. It's still manageable but I don't want it to go over a hundred. If that happens I'll reduce my daily new card limit which is currently 12. Thankfully the Finnish review count is staying constant at 50-60. I estimate I work with Anki about an hour and a half every day, including adding new cards. I read some text from my Finnish textbook yesterday hunting for new words to add to Anki, and the text was about a guy feeling sick and his mother asking him questions about it. It was so... I don't know, it almost made me feel sick. I'll be glad when this lesson is over. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4865 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 127 of 559 18 July 2012 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
돕다 is an irregular verb, so whenever it's followed by a vowel (e.g. -어/아, -을 수 있다) the ㅂ turns into 오 or 우. That's why you would say 도울 수 있어요? But I don't think I've ever heard that used. (edit: I googled it and it appears that people do use it, but not when requesting help.) When something is done for the benefit of another person, Koreans usually use -어/아 주다. When you want to say "please help me" (which is done for your benefit) you will say 도와 주세요. When you ask if someone can help you, the helping is still done for your benefit. That's why you add 돕다 (help) + 어/아 주다 (for my benefit) + ㄹ 수 있다 (can). Basically, the agglutination in Korean works in a way that you can add multiple endings to one word, if needed. To give you another example of the difference: 김치를 먹을 수 있어요? - "Can you eat Kimchi?" This is asking a person whether they are able to eat Kimchi (a popular question for foreigners :D). Obviously the eating is not done for someone else's benefit. 한국어를 가르쳐 줄 수 있어요? - "Can you teach me Korean?" Here the teaching would be done for the asker's benefit. In the English sentence you find the concept of 어/아 주다 in the "me". This sentence could also mean "Can you teach him/her/us/them Korean? I hope that helps. TTMIK seems to teach fairly difficult concepts quite early on... Edited by druckfehler on 18 July 2012 at 4:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6594 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 128 of 559 18 July 2012 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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