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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 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 393 of 559 09 March 2013 at 7:08pm | IP Logged |
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Speaking of Haru Korean, it's been a while since I wrote my last sentence there. I should work on it tomorrow. I should also do some Finnish stuff so that I'd have something to write about for those of my readers who don't care about Korean.
Speaking of Korean, I was working on my sentence deck and therefore listening to TTMIK lesson 2x01 again. I had such a BAM moment again but it was different this time and quite funny too. This lesson was about the future tense and towards the end the female host was saying weird examples, like "I'm going to meet rain tomorrow" and "I'll ask him to do the lessons with us". I remember scratching my head at the weirdness of it when I listened to it for the first time, it seemed like they were purposefully pretending as if rain was a person you could meet but somehow it didn't sound like a joke. Well, whatever, soon I forgot about it. Now that I know Rain is a famous singer and actor in Korea it all makes perfect sense. They really should have explained it in the lesson instead of assuming everyone would know who "rain" is. It really didn't enter my mind that a celebrity would choose a name like 'Rain' for themselves. The TTMIK staff are still working on their site, and they've posted a message about the missing downloads and that they're all coming back. That's a relief. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 394 of 559 11 March 2013 at 11:48am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I worked on my Finnish listening for a bit. I reviewed all the audio files from TY lessons 2 and 3 and I'm happy to report I could understand almost everything without looking at the text. And by the way, it's not like I've listened to these dialogues tens of times before. When I was studying TYF I mostly concentrated on the written text and only listened to the audio once or twice so this is a nice way of reviewing it.
I didn't write anything on Haru Korean, I was working on my sentence deck instead. I added about 30 sentences this weekend. Working on it is slow and tedious but I love, love, love the end result. I also love that these TTMIK lessons seem so easy to me now. I can't wait until I get to level 4 (or even 3) and start entering sentences that are actually useful to me. But this deck will be more for future Korean learners than for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 395 of 559 13 March 2013 at 9:59am | IP Logged |
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I've done a lot of listening since my last update - Iyagi lessons, TTMIK lessons, radio Sun. I wish there was some kind of transcript for everything they say on the radio but that's not possible of course. Still, it would be so helpful! I like listening to Finnish and yesterday I tried to do it a bit more actively than usual. When there were phone numbers in ads I tried to translate them in my head and I was moderately successful. The size of my Finnish vocabulary is more than 1000 words which should be enough for me to understand some of the stuff on the radio, especially considering that part of the vocabulary came from news articles. But the problem is that I can recognize a lot of these words only when they are in their nominative/infinitive forms, the way they are in Anki. I need practice using them in other cases, that will help my listening skills a lot.
As for Korean, did I say I would be working on the Iyagi lesson about Dramas? Haha. I'm so impatient, I get bored easily, I want new stuff all the time so of course after reading one page I moved on to a different lesson, this time #11 about 아르바이트 (part-time jobs). I had listened to this podcast already more than 5 times during the last few months but usually not very intensively. I understood quite a lot when I listened to it yesterday, and actually already some time before I had caught the word 신기한 (amazing) and I was curious which part-time job were they talking about that was so amazing. So I opened the transcript and saw that it was "교통량 조사". A traffic census??? I don't get it. I tried to read a bit more explanation but didn't get very far. Do they stand on the street and count the cars that drive by or what? I need to say a few words about Anki again. It takes up a lot of my time but it works so well, it's pretty amazing. I can see how having a bigger vocabulary is helping me understand spoken Korean better and I wouldn't have achieved this without Anki, I don't have the self discipline to study vocabulary outside of Anki. But my "slow and steady" method with Anki is working very well. I'm up to lesson 7x04 on TTMIK. It seems to me that these lessons are getting easier instead of harder and it's very encouraging, I think it might mean that most of the new grammar points will be similar to constructions I already know and I won't need to adapt to a new way of thinking. Level 2 was especially difficult in this regard and also level 5 with all the quoting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 396 of 559 14 March 2013 at 9:13am | IP Logged |
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I was posting in Kuji's log yesterday about how I use Anki and he made a comment that totally resonated with me. He said he likes to study languages "bottom-up" instead of "top-down" and I realized I'm the same. That's why I prefer to learn individual words instead of sentences and that's why I don't like language courses/books that start each chapter with a dialogue or text that's full of unknown things, it makes me feel stupid. I enjoy breaking sentences apart but only if I already know all the used grammar points.
I've noticed that at the beginning of Iyagi lessons when the hosts are introducing the day's topic they usually say "애기 해 볼까요", not "애기 할까요". I'm getting used to it now but at first I thought it was funny. Why would they "try talking" instead of just "talk"? It's as though they aren't sure whether they'll manage to get the recording done, which seems silly. Offtopic: I wanted to watch the Gulbis-Nadal tennis match so I only slept about 4 hours tonight. Today is going to be difficult. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 397 of 559 17 March 2013 at 11:11pm | IP Logged |
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I had only 60 reviews left in my Finnish Anki deck, I thought I would be making the big announcement today that I finally cleared the backlog but instead my announcement is a little different: I'm abandoning my Finnish deck. Since I stopped actively studying grammar the main purpose of this deck was not to let me forget Finnish but now I have radio Sun for that and it's a much more enjoyable activity. Now I'll have 5-10 more minutes for Finnish every day - to read some articles or whatever.
Today was my best Finnish day this year, I think. I am feeling the urge to start refreshing some grammar now that I don't have to worry about vocabulary. I'll write more about that some other time. Today I finally found the lyrics of a song that I had heard on the radio several times and whose lyrics were very difficult for me to catch. So I used the app on my phone to record the song and tried to figure out some lines and it turned out it's "Vapaus käteen jää" by Haloo Helsinki!. I like the energy of the song and it has a lot of lyrics so I think I'm going to study them sometime soon. I'm using LyricsTranslate, it's an excellent site and has lots of Finnish song text translations. As for Korean, I spent many hours on it yesterday but not exactly studying. I was reading back through this log, not my own posts but those with helpful hints about Korean. It now seems that some of my questions were so silly... But anyway, I was looking through the thread because I need to give my list of book titles to the colleague who's going to Korea. Renate recommended the Bond Girl book, perhaps someone has any other specific titles to recommend? Ones that might be available in bookstores? I can't browse internet bookstores in Korean so it's difficult for me to find anything. I'm looking for mostly easy reading but it can be a bit difficult as well, I'll have many years to read the books. I'd also like a book that teaches Hanja (either in English or in Korean) but I'm hesitant to tell my colleague just to buy any hanja book. This weekend I was working on my Korean sentence deck as always, made some progress. I also started to watch Answer Me 1997. It hasn't grabbed me yet and probably won't but I like its realism. I did have to read the recap on dramabeans after the first episode because I could barely understand what was going on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 398 of 559 20 March 2013 at 10:46am | IP Logged |
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I's been about a year since I started studying Korean so it's time for a progress report and some new goals.
If I remember correctly, my goals to accomplish by this date were the first 5 levels of TTMIK, both My Korean books, and all 20 units of Click Korean on SNU. I succeeded with the first goal, failed the other two, but it doesn't really matter. The important thing is that I was studying the language and made a lot of progress. I think I wrote here after the first 6 months that my progress had been slower than expected. Well, this time I can say that my progress in the last 6 months has been quicker than expected. If I took an Iyagi lesson and learned some 10 most relevant words regarding the topic of that lesson, I think I could understand up to 40-50% of the dialogue just from listening alone (maybe with a repeat listening). That's much better than I expected 6 months ago. My reading speed is still not good but it's getting better all the time. I think it's maybe 20-30% slower than the speed they speak at in the Iyagi lessons. My typing speed, on the other hand, is quite good since I've been practicing it every day doing my Anki reviews. I don't have stickers on my keyboard keys or anything, in my mind I've linked the Korean letters to the English letters. Sometimes I do make mistakes though, it's not perfect yet. My active skills... I'm not sure how to rate them, I've been focusing primarily on passive skills. Speaking I haven't tried at all but I suppose I could produce enough coherent Korean in order not to get lost if I went to Korea. As for writing, the only notable thing I did was write my introduction for our TAC team's January challenge. I've also registered on Haru Korean but haven't written much there. I plan to fix that as soon as I can. My goals for the next year are as follows: 1) Understand at least 70% of the dialogue of a modern Korean drama like Secret Garden or Nice Guy, 2) Understand at least 85% of Iyagi lessons, 3) Learn at least 2000 new Korean words (my current Anki deck size is 1500 cards), 4) Learn at least 100 hanja characters. As you can see, I haven't mentioned any specific resources I plan to use - there's just no point because I will use whatever I want to anyway and that's the best approach for me. Of these four goals, the first one is the only one that's really important. The second goal will be achieved automatically with the first one, I think, and the third goal is to support the first goal. The hanja goal is just an afterthought. I don't plan to work on it seriously but 100 characters in a year is not a lot and I would just like to get some head start for whenever I decide to tackle them seriously. I'm placing a heavy emphasis on passive goals because they are more useful to me and because I believe that active usage is much easier after a lot of passive exposure to the language. Still, I'd like to write something now and then so I'll try to do it on Haru Korean at least once a week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5658 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 399 of 559 20 March 2013 at 1:39pm | IP Logged |
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I just want to let you know that goals #1 and #3 contradict each other. From what I know, you only know around 1500 words in Korean, so 2000 more wouldn't help you understand 70% of the dialogue in a Korean drama. I know over 10,000 words and still don't understand 70% of the dialogue consistently. There are times when I'm up to 80-90 percent and then maybe ten minutes later it's around 50%.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6561 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 400 of 559 20 March 2013 at 2:16pm | IP Logged |
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Hmm, that's not contradictory, it just means that my third goal is redundant (and too low) but I see your point. Nevertheless, that's what I will try to achieve. If I have a good year I might add 2500 words, but more importantly, I think those 2000-2500 words might be very different depending on my sources. If the majority of those words come from dramas I think that might help.
In any case, I do realize that 70% might be too high, I just felt like setting a challenging goal for myself. I think I'd be happy even with 50% because that would still be a lot more than my current 5-10%. And since I can't measure these percentages anyway, let's just say that my goal is to be happy about how much my listening comprehension has improved. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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