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The Awesome Difficulty of Korean, Finnish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 41 of 559 17 May 2012 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||
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As for reading, I really recommend Ilya Frank's method or simply parallel texts. This way you can start reading very early:)
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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 42 of 559 18 May 2012 at 12:39am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll leave the reading for a bit later, 400 words is not enough yet. Or maybe it's closer to 500. I don't add any pronouns or prepositions to Anki so they don't get counted officially even though I know a lot of them.
I didn't do much for Finnish today, just added some new words to Anki. As for Korean, I decided to finally properly tackle the Sino Korean numbers. I used random.org to generate random numbers and I practiced saying them out loud. I feel much more comfortable with them now. I also listened to TTMIK lesson 25 but I don't remember almost anything from it. In fact, the last 3-4 lessons are a blur, probably because I have listened to them only a couple of times. I need to listen to each lesson at least 5-7 times to properly absorb everything. 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 43 of 559 18 May 2012 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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A while ago I wrote that I had difficulty studying both languages on the same day. Well, it's safe to say I don't have this difficulty anymore because Anki makes sure I work on both languages every day. I believe most of my success, especially in Finnish, is due to Anki. It disciplines me.
Finnish Current word count is 420. Current review count has gone up to 40-50, mostly due to the fact that I don't remember recent cards well so I have to 'Again' many of them more than once. I'm nearing the finish of lesson 6. The way I know that is that I have most of the new vocabulary entered in Anki. I do it slowly, not more than 10 words a day, like I said before. I read in other logs that some people learn 50 new words a day but I can't imagine doing that. I'm satisfied with my slow and steady progress. Speaking of progress, I listened to the Finnish radio (YLE) for 20 or so minutes today. The results are encouraging. I understood very little, of course, but I could pick out a lot more words than a month ago. I thought I kept hearing various forms of the word 'keskusta' (center) and I thought that was strange but then I realized they were probably talking about centric political parties. A while later, I listened to the weather forecast. I didn't know what it was initially but I kept hearing 'minuuttia sekunnissa' and I assumed that was wind speed. So, it was fun. I heard a lot of numbers, too (presumably temperatures), but my brain couldn't translate them to Latvian as fast as they were speaking. Korean I reviewed TTMIK lessons up to lesson 18. I feel like I know that stuff quite well now. But reviewing the last lessons will take more time so I decided to do the test later when I feel ready. There's no reason I must do it on Sunday. My Korean Anki deck has 130 cards at the moment. It's interesting how my strategy for adding new cards is so different from my Finnish deck. In Finnish, I add only one way cards (Latvian -> Finnish) and I omit pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions. In Korean, on the other hand, I add two cards for each word, I use English instead of Latvian, and I add all kinds of words. The reason I use English is that all my resources and online dictionaries are in English so I want to keep it that way. But usually when I learn a Korean word I learn its Latvian meaning (I mean in my mind) so when I do my Anki reviews I have to do Korean - Latvian and Latvian - English translations. It's not the most straightforward way of learning but I think it was the right decision. I doubt if any Latvian - Korean dictionaries even exist. I've been to bookstores and I haven't seen any. I also finished SNU Unit 3 and started a bit on Unit 4. I think these lessons and the TTMIK lessons complement each other nicely. My Korean reading speed is getting better, mostly thanks to Anki. I'm still nowhere near comfortable with the letters but I'm not afraid of them anymore either. I honestly have no idea how long it will take for me to be able to look at a word and read it in less than a second even if I don't know what it means. A couple of months maybe? More? 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 44 of 559 19 May 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I spent almost an hour today trying to analyze tarvos's Russian text on his log and it made me wish I had a good Russian grammar book to look through. Russian has never been a priority for me and I have never studied it in an organized way so my knowledge of it is all over the place. I started learning it at school when I was 7 years old and I remember being very unhappy about it because other children knew it better than I did. The turning point was when I was 10-11 years old - some of the American and Latin-American TV shows and soap operas (and cartoons) started finding their way to the Russian TV and my parents watched them and I watched with them. They translated for me everything I didn't understand so I made major progress in less than a year. Then I stopped learning it at 14 and that was it.
Years later, at one point I got the urge to improve my Russian reading skills so I found some books to read online. I'm still not sure why I did it, it certainly wasn't out of love for the language. I guess I wanted to even out my skills a bit, the worst of which was (and still is) writing. I thought that by reading I could pick up a lot of clues on the written language, and I think I did. But that was years ago. I was more or less happy with my level of Russian since then until I came here. Studying two new languages and reading about others studying Russian has made me realize what a waste it is - to know a language to a fairly good level but not being able to put it to good use because some key pieces of grammar are missing. It feels like my Russian is an unfinished job and I'd like to finish it. Not right now, maybe later this year or next year. I should be able to find a good Russian grammar book for Latvians. Speaking of grammar, all this thinking about Russian also made me realize how happy I am about the Korean grammar. I've mentioned many times what's difficult about Korean but grammar has been fairly easy so far. No cases for nouns, verbs don't change in person or number... It sounds almost too good to be true. Sure, there are particles but those are not difficult in comparison to Finnish case endings. About the only difficult thing in Korean grammar so far has been the word order. All in all, I'm happy that my desire to learn both Finnish and Korean is still strong. 3 persons have 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 45 of 559 19 May 2012 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's easy to forget how logical and structured Korean grammar is until you dive back into another (supposedly easier) language. I recently started back on my Spanish studies and almost immediately all the annoying parts of Spanish grammar, that don't exist in Korean, came rushing back (several verbs with highly irregular conjugations, conjugation for person/number, noun/pronoun gender, etc.).
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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 46 of 559 19 May 2012 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, all those small details can be annoying until you learn them so well that they come automatically. Actually English has a lot of these annoying details as well. Although I consider my English to be excellent there are some areas I still haven't completely mastered, like when to say in, on, at (locations and times) and the correct usage of articles, and where to put commas. I guess it all depends on your mother tongue. At first I was shocked to see how minimalistic Korean is, what with their omitting everything that is obvious or can be guessed from the context and all, but now I'm starting to appreciate it.
On a different subject, my Korean Anki deck is finally showing new reverse cards to me. A while ago I increased the time between the forward and reverse cards so in the meantime I got no new English -> Korean cards. Out of my 142 cards, 48 are being held new/suspended until their time comes. So I did my Korean reviews and my Finnish reviews today and I can tell you doing the Finnish reviews is more stressful while doing Korean is more painless. This is because the Finnish deck asks me for the Finnish word at once and the Korean deck eases me slowly into the word (by having two cards for it). The Korean approach is certainly more pleasant but it's also slower. I think I made the right choice with Finnish, I can handle the words even if it is a more demanding activity. One thing though - I should do the reviews when I'm not totally tired because otherwise I can't remember many words. That's what happened in the last few days and why my review count went up to 52. I'll try to avoid it as much as possible in the future. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 47 of 559 20 May 2012 at 12:38am | IP Logged | ||
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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 48 of 559 20 May 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've been focusing a little more on Korean the last few days. It's because I don't have much left to do in lesson 6 of my Finnish textbook except to enter words into Anki (and I can't do them all in one day) and because I want to review the material in TTMIK's level 1 so I can start on level 2.
Today I did the exercises in the TTMIK workbook for lessons 11-20. I skipped the exercises about numbers but otherwise it went pretty well. I typed the answers out in Notepad and it was good writing practice, especially because I had to write verbs in the present and past forms (and I don't do that in Anki). I also found something in Korean that's exactly the same in Latvian. Yay! But it's just a funny little thing. The sound you say when you knock on a door, 'knock, knock, knock', it's 'tuk, tuk, tuk' in Korean (so says TTMIK) and it's also 'tuk, tuk, tuk' in Latvian. Summary This feels like the end of a stage because my job starts tomorrow and my routines will undoubtedly change. I'm excited to be working again but this will probably impact my language studies. Hopefully not too much though. I've never really measured how much time I spend on language studying because I feel it serves no purpose. Besides, 15 minutes spent doing Anki reviews are very different from 15 minutes spent listening to TTMIK so there's no easy way to quantify the work that's put into those activities. If I had to guess I'd say I spent about an hour a day on Finnish and Korean with the occasional 2-3 hour days (not including writing these posts). It's not very much when you think about it and that was my goal - to go slow and steady. I feel like I've achieved it so far and I'm happy about it. I'm happy that my Finnish vocabulary is growing all the time and nearing 500 words. I'm happy that I've learned Hangeul and that I'm able to type it. I'm just happy with my progress considering the time spent on it. I hope I'll be able to say the same in a month. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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