Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 385 of 559 01 March 2013 at 11:29am | IP Logged |
I've been too tired these days to do much more studying than Anki reviews, and by studying I mean active studying. I have the Iyagi Airports transcript open all the time on my computer and every day I think I should work on it but then I take a look at it and realize how difficult it is and I just have no energy for it. Maybe I'd read a couple sentences but that's it.
Since I'm studying very little I have to look to word lists for new words to enter into Anki. Currently I'm using this one, but only the Korean words, not the translations; I always look up the translations myself. Sometimes I also look at some example sentences in Naver but usually I'm too lazy to do that so my words in Anki often have no context even in my mind. That's fine. It's better to learn words this way than not to learn them at all. There are many days when I don't want to do the reviews but then I just force myself reminding myself that there will be a payoff in the end. Anki is without a question the most important tool in my studies.
I still listen to either music or podcasts when commuting but I don't consider that active studying.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 386 of 559 04 March 2013 at 9:58am | IP Logged |
On Saturday, I spent about 2 hours on hanja. I think I would eventually like to get to it so I was trying to find a good book that I could ask my colleague to buy in Korea (she leaves in a couple of weeks). Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any books, just some websites. So I looked at some radicals, some Chinese characters, just out of curiosity. I can't imagine learning those that contain more than 5 strokes.
Otherwise I spent the weekend mostly on working on my sentence deck. I figured out how to extract audio from SWF files so I could add sentences from SNU's Click Korean. My total sentence count is 123 at the moment. I think I'll wait until maybe 500 sentences before I publish it.
Yesterday I saw that the March challenge is to do a GLOSS lesson. I took a look at one lesson in the 1+ level and I think it might be more interesting than I had thought. Figuring out (without a context or dictionary) what 쿼드코어 meant was really challenging but in the end I did it.
I've recently resumed watching Can you hear my heart. I started it several months ago but it was so... sad that I couldn't even finish one episode. Still, I downloaded it all so I've been watching it when I'm too lazy to look for anything else. Rewatching Secret Garden all the time gets a bit boring and I don't like to stream shows.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 387 of 559 05 March 2013 at 4:25pm | IP Logged |
I just saw that the TTMIK website has a new design. Cool. The navigation is better but why did they remove the page with the links to all the grammar lessons? It was very useful if you wanted to review a particular topic but didn't remember which lesson it was in.
Speaking of grammar, I just had a major aha! moment that was at the same time also a why-didn't-I-realize-it-sooner moment. I'm talking about quoting in Korean. It's been very difficult for me to learn it, to recognize it or use it. I kept listening to the relevant TTMIK lessons and kept lamenting the fact that you use the normal present/past tense in English when you say "He says he is a student" or "I heard they went out". The fact that there is no special grammar form in English for these cases made it so much harder for me. So guess what I realized today? I should have been translating these sentences to Latvian in my head because we do have special verb endings for quoting stuff. I just tried it with 3 or 4 sentences and it was so much easier I almost couldn't believe it. How stupid of me not to do it sooner.
There is a reason though why I didn't think of it sooner, and the reason is that these endings are used much less often in Latvian than in Korean so my subconscious must have thought they can't possibly be the same thing. In Korean, you use this ending practically every time you are retelling something but in Latvian, I use it mostly to emphasize that I heard it from someone else and I have doubts whether this is even true or if I'm just passing on some information and I don't want to be held accountable if it turns out to be wrong. In normal cases if I believe what someone says to me is true then I won't use the quoting ending when retelling this. Still, despite these differences in usage the idea of quoting is the same and I will try to take advantage of it starting from now.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5648 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 388 of 559 05 March 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged |
I remember the quoting in Korean taking me a while to grasp too. When I first came upon it, it didn't make any sense at all, but over the next few months, I learned some grammar points that were sort of related and it became much clearer after that.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 389 of 559 07 March 2013 at 11:56am | IP Logged |
I suddenly found my desire to study again yesterday and I finished all my Korean Anki reviews except the relearning cards (it's expected that some of them stay there until the next day). I had been a little behind on my Korean reviews for over a week so this is nice. I also entered a bunch of new words for the upcoming days. And I set my daily new word limit back to 6 because I still haven't cleared my Finnish card backlog. It's getting ridiculous. I'd love to set a goal to finish it in 5 days or so but I can't do it because the Korean reviews are more important. Argh.
I also started level 7 on TTMIK. Lesson 7x01 was about the 군요 ending and it was pretty easy, I had already noticed the word 그렇구나 in the Iyagi lessons. What was not easy was finding the PDF for the lesson. With their new design the links to the PDF's have simply disappeared! And the same is true for the Iyagi lessons. I don't know what they are planning to do with them but they better fix it soon. In the meanwhile, my method of getting the pdf's is to copy the link to the mp3 file and just change the extension 'mp3' to 'pdf'. It seems to work.
Yesterday I also listened to Iyagi #41 about dramas for the first time. They made the podcast when Secret Garden was airing so naturally that was their main topic. I didn't understand much but I did understand maybe 10-20% from listening alone. For example, when Hyunwoo asked Kyeongeun since when she's been watching dramas and she said since she was little. By the way, the phrase '얼였을 때' is used almost in every Iyagi podcast and this is how I learned the -ㄹ 때 construction. Anyway, I found that the KoreanWikiProject has free English translations available for some Iyagi episodes including this one so I'm going to take a break from Airports and focus on Dramas for a while. I think it'll be easier too.
One unexpected challenge regarding studying the Iyagi transcripts is to refrain from reading it all in English at the start. I didn't follow this rule for my first transcript about deliveries and I quickly realized that knowing it all reduces my motivation to study by a lot. If I don't know what it means, what comes next then it's like figuring out a puzzle, it's fun. If I already know it then it's just a chore. Still, I want to read the drama transcript because I'm curious what they said. This is testing my self-control.
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5648 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 390 of 559 07 March 2013 at 1:31pm | IP Logged |
They link to the PDF inside each lesson. It's right under the embedded soundcloud file.
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Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6551 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 391 of 559 07 March 2013 at 1:53pm | IP Logged |
I guess they are working on the links. Some lessons have them now, some have links to Scribd (???) and some still don't have any, like Iyagi #41 for example. I hope they don't move the pdf's to Scribd permanently, I don't like that site. 싫어요.
I noticed they've also started offering Skype lessons. Hmm, I don't think I'm going to use those but good for them, they keep offering more and more services. It's pretty smart. First build up your reputation by offering free stuff and then try to turn the fans into paying customers. It must be working pretty well.
Edited by Evita on 07 March 2013 at 1:59pm
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5648 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 392 of 559 07 March 2013 at 2:55pm | IP Logged |
Well, I just checked the lessons to see if I could help you out. I saw some lessons linking the PDFs, so like you said, it's probably a work in process.
I think it's great they're providing Skype lessons. They already provide writing corrections at Haru Korean, so it's nice to see them expanding. I really like their business model. They allow you to get the important content for free, but offer services if people are willing to pay for them. Too many sites don't even let you get much content for free.
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