druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 121 of 344 02 December 2012 at 11:42am | IP Logged |
Sunday, 1st of December - 45th week
new vocabulary from list: 46
new audio cards: 18
extensive reading: 19 pages of 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다, 5 pages of 개미의 탑, 3 blog entries
listening: 1 episode of 차칸 남자, 2 episodes of 드라마의 제왕, 김영하의 TED 강연
I finally finished "Nice Guy", which proved to be the perfect drama for improving listening comprehension. It seems like melodrama is especially suited for intermediate students - most actors enunciated their lines beautifully and the many flashbacks reinforced what I learned nicely. I wrote a review for my Super Challenge blog as well: Nice Guy review
Now I'm totally enthusiastic about the exceptionally well-written, well-produced "King of Dramas". It's harder to understand and it bugs me that I don't get all the details, but even here I feel largely comfortable without subtitles - nowadays they seem to be more of a distraction than being helpful. As a matter of fact, I'm still helping to MAKE subtitles for this series. It motivates me to look up and learn new words, but I usually only manage to completely understand and sub 50-70% of the sentences.
This week I also got a package of Korean books I had ordered as something of an early Christmas present for myself:
- 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다 (I have the right to destroy myself), which is a story about someone whose occupation is to help people commit suicide. I started reading and it seems like an enjoyable if shocking book. I understand the general trajectory and I sometimes understand the details, but often I don't. However, I can already say that I like the author's writing style. I can't wait to get better at Korean so I can fully understand the book. For now I might just read it through and see how much I get out of it. There's also a podcast by the author 김영하 where he reads some passages from the book. I might use this for audio cards later. This week I also watched a TED talk by him about being creative. I understood his speech and liked it a lot.
- 개미의 탑 (Tower of Ants). From what I read in the description, it seems to be a criticism of society, conveyed through the story of a man who fights against ants that infest his apartment. I read a couple of pages and it seems manageable - maybe more manageable than the first book. Not sure I'm totally into the subject matter, but that's not too important. Although this is a bilingual book, I want to look at the English version as little as possible.
- 두겹의 노래 (Twofold Song), which is also a bilingual edition. It sounded good from its description, but is pretty much unreadable at my level. It's very poetic, very symbolic and I was totally lost without the English text. I'm not sure I'm ever going to enjoy this book either...
The new books motivate me a lot. I still have unread and half-read books lying around, but I got a bit sick of them lately. I will certainly finish all of them eventually. The most important thing now is increasing my vocabulary. There are still gaping holes in my Korean knowledge and it will take a while to fill them.
new grammar:
(으)ㄴ 지 ... 됐다 it's been ... since ...
Edited by druckfehler on 02 December 2012 at 11:50am
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Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5527 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese
| Message 122 of 344 02 December 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the reviews of the difficulty levels of those Korean books. That is useful info that is difficult to come by. For reference, of all the bilingual books I've read thus far, Hunger Games (헝거 게임) seems to be one of the easiest to read on the Korean side thus far. It's tempting to write this off as simply being due to being the latest book I've read, but I honestly think it is just written more simply than the others I've read so far. The style the translator uses for this book just seems to use more common grammar forms than the earlier books I've come across (except for maybe "Aekyung's Dream" which is written for a very young audience and thus uses very simple grammar).
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Leurre Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5417 days ago 219 posts - 372 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Korean, Haitian Creole, SpanishC2 Studies: Japanese
| Message 123 of 344 02 December 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged |
나나파권(나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다)이 엄청 야함 ㅋ
징그러울 정도로!
즐독~
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 124 of 344 02 December 2012 at 11:38pm | IP Logged |
진그러울 정도로? 야한 부분을 별로 이해할 수 없을 것 같으니 다행이네요 ^^ 한국어 실력의 부족함은 장점이 될 줄은 미처 몰랐네요. ^^
이해가 잘 안돼요... 무슨 뜻이죠?
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The Real CZ Senior Member United States Joined 5641 days ago 1069 posts - 1495 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 125 of 344 03 December 2012 at 12:08am | IP Logged |
즐겁게 독서하세요.
'즐겁게 독서하세요'가 '즐독 ->ㅈ ㄷ' 으로 ... ㅈㄷ'은 '즐겁게'와 '독서'를 합성한 '즐독'을 아예 글자의 초성만 남겨 'ㅈㄷ'으로 표현한 것이다.
That's what I found through Google.
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 126 of 344 10 December 2012 at 12:55am | IP Logged |
Sunday, 9th of December - 46th week
new vocabulary from list: 17
new audio cards: 21
extensive reading: 28 pages of 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다, 2 blog entries, 2 articles
intensive reading: 2 news items
listening: 2 episodes of 드라마의 제왕, 2 news items
I finished the second chapter of 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다 today. Reading this book has become easier over time. I guess now that I understand the setup, it's simply easier to follow the story. I've noticed that sometimes two or three unknown words can completely obstruct my understanding. It's a very curious phenomenon. When I lack words that are important for figuring out the context, Korean can end up being gibberish to me. Once I get those words sorted out, a paragraph that made no sense at all suddenly becomes accessible and I begin to not only understand the topic, but also the details. I think some of this has to do with words who have more than one meaning. I frequently stumble over 눈, which can mean either "eye" or "snow", for example in the word 눈길, which I at first thought would mean "look, gaze", as usual, but here it turned out to mean "snowy road". So my current tactic is to do extensive reading with some dictionary lookups when I feel like they would be useful. This way I can easily understand the book.
I'm still enjoying the weekly news item on stuff the North Korean media air. It seems like there are some interesting developments going on propaganda-wise with Kim Jong-Un trying to project a positive, internationally-minded image. I was quite surprised at the report about English education - apparently there have been native English speaking teachers in North Korea for some years... The amount of vocabulary cards I'm making from the 요즘 북한은 reports is quite excessive. I usually end up with around 30 sentence cards. I guess even if I don't manage to learn all the words frequent ones will definitely stick in my memory. Some of those are North Korea/communism-specific (탈북자 - North Korean defector, 혁명 - revolution, 주석 - Premier, Kim Il-Sung's title), some are news-specific (진행하다 - to anchor, to introduce, 전파를 타다 - to go on air), some are general expressions (상당히 - quite, 이례적이다 - unusual, 각별하다 - special).
I've been on the lookout for a new Korean language tandem and I may have found one. I hope it works out well, I sorely need speaking practice. Any tips on how to make a language tandem successful in both languages?
new grammar:
-어/아 놓다 to do something in preparation/in advance
Edited by druckfehler on 10 December 2012 at 12:56am
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druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4860 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian
| Message 127 of 344 16 December 2012 at 8:04pm | IP Logged |
Sunday, 16th of December - 47th week?
new audio cards: 9
semi-intensive reading: 35 pages of 나는 나를 파괴할 권리가 있다, 1 news item
listening: 2 episodes of 드라마의 제왕, 1 news item
I didn't do much during the week (only watched dramas and sometimes did Anki), but spent the weekend with a good amount of Korean.
I read chapter 3 of 나나파권 over the weekend. It's really starting to become a little disgusting, but I still think it's a good choice for my first Korean novel. The language is fairly straightforward and a lot of the difficult words are actually English/European terms.
I also watched 요즘 북한은 today and learned that it's -17°C in Pyeongyang and that the North Korea authorities are interested in wind energy to improve their chronic power shortage. It's interesting to watch these news snippets, but I really dislike the video format KBS2 and the other news channels use. It just doesn't work properly on any computer I tried.
I'm looking forward to TAC 2013! I'll be adding Persian and Mandarin to my study routine. I spent some time this week thinking about my goals for the challenge and got very excited about once again starting a language from scratch. To think that every new word I'm going to learn is infinitely important. That's something which can only be experienced properly in the beginner stage.
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Élan Senior Member United States Joined 5436 days ago 165 posts - 211 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Persian
| Message 128 of 344 18 December 2012 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
Hi druckfehler! I'm so glad to have another Persian learner on the Middle East team. Please don't hesitate to PM me
or post on my (soon-to-be-created) log with questions about Persian. I feel that Persian is a very beautiful
language and is not -too- difficult for English speakers until you get to an advanced stage of study. I'm excited to
hear your impressions of the language along the way. :)
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