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FINALLY Getting Serious About Korean | ||
Tags: Heritage Language | Korean | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4206 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes  Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 1 of 16 22 May 2013 at 8:44pm | IP Logged |
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So basically, I want to learn Korean primarily because it’s kind of a heritage language
for me. My mother is Korean and I was raised with the culture and bits of the language. My mother made it mandatory for my siblings and I to read books on the culture as kids, and I’ve just always loved Korea. I also want to learn Korean because it’ll be a great help to my career. I’m in college now to become an anthropologist. My geographical area of expertise is going to be East Asia (Mongolia, China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, the Koreas ect.) so I’ll need to have some language experience to work in that field. After I get to a better level in Korean, I want to go back and learn Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Mongolian. (A lot, I know.) So Korean is kind of a launching pad for me~ If I were to assess my level of Korean, I’d say it’s pretty…uneven. I can understand a great deal and have a fantastic grasp of grammar (thank you, Talk To Me In Korean) but speaking gets a little fuzzy. I’ve been told by a native speaker that I sound almost like a native speaker. Yay! Only problem is I can barely speak. I’m a fantastic mimic and have a vocabulary of around 4000ish words, but I can barely put a sentence together. Original composition is the main thing I need to work on, but I’m having a terrible time finding native speakers to help me. I get super nervous around them and can’t even form sentences. It’s the worst. Plus, I really need to find a specific kind of native speaker. A female around the ages of 17-24 would be best. I hate having to talk to guys because I feel so weird about it. I prefer talking to females. I don’t have Skype, I don’t have Kakaotalk (won’t work with my phone) and every other person I try to talk to online pretty much refuses to use Korean with me. I do however use kik and Voxer. Meh. Any native speakers out there? Any suggestions?? So basically, I’m in between semesters in college. I already know my language learning pursuits are going to suffer during the fall because I have a ton of classes to focus on. So I’ve decided to spend the next three months this summer studying Korean like crazy. I’m aiming for two hours of study or more each day between now and August 25th. Here’s the schedule for each day: 1.) One LingQ lessons/TTMIK Iyaki 2.) 20 Minutes of a Korean Drama script with audio 3.) Learn the vocabulary from both on Memrise/Anki 4.) Review vocabulary and grammar from previous days 5.) Five random sentences/phrases 6.) Five TTMIK/KoreanClass101.com lessons 7.) write sentences using new vocabulary 8.) chat in Korean with native speakers. So I think that’s about it. I’ll try writing on here every day or at least every other day. Hopefully that’ll give me some motivation to stay consistent. Any suggestions (and native speakers) are welcome!! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4653 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 2 of 16 23 May 2013 at 11:52am | IP Logged |
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Sounds like a neat self-teaching program.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 16 23 May 2013 at 3:20pm | IP Logged |
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I'd like to recommend Haru Korean to you. It's run by the same people who run TTMIK and I can attest that they really do correct every sentence within 24 hours and sometimes they also suggest how to change your sentence to be more natural sounding. The only downside is that you can only write sentences as comments to their lessons (or let's call them blog posts because they are not all lessons) and each of these posts has a specific topic (either a grammar construction or a picture or a question that you must respond to) so it's a bit difficult to write sentences about anything and then finding an appropriate lesson under which to post them. If you are studying grammar from the first 6 levels of TTMIK then you will have no problems because all lessons from the 6 levels are available on HK. If you want to practice some other grammar point or something else entirely then you can make your sentences a bit longer and include a grammar point from the available six levels. That's the strategy I use.
Overall your plan sounds good and also quite ambitious. If you stick to it, your level of Korean will definitely be quite a bit higher than it is now. Good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4870 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 4 of 16 23 May 2013 at 6:07pm | IP Logged |
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You might like to try text chatting for as long as you feel uncomfortable with speaking. I thought it was a great preparation that gives you a little more time to structure your thoughts. I used to go to sharedtalk to text chat, although it can be difficult to find someone who will keep in touch.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4738 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 16 23 May 2013 at 8:33pm | IP Logged |
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Why don't you have Skype? You don't have to pay for it and it's available on just about
any platform. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4206 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 6 of 16 23 May 2013 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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Phew...Today was fun! I finished just about everything I set out to study. I was
reading along with one of TTMIK's Iyaki's and was super pleased that I could understand just about everything being said. I'm glad I'm changing the way I learn vocabulary. Instead of going through frequency lists, taking new words out of articles, songs, and Korean dramas is working a lot better. I spent a ton of time too trying to strike up conversations with Korean native speakers. Hopefully that'll pay off. I do want to use HaruKorean. Everything I've heard about it has been positive. Isn't it a paid service though? If it is, I might be have to pass on it. #collegelife I don't use Skype because the internet where I live is dodgy at best. Posting on a forum is feasible, but seldom is something like video chatting. Plus my iPhone is pretty old and buggy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6554 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 16 24 May 2013 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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Yeah, HaruKorean is a paid service but it's just 6 dollars a month (I think). Maybe you can afford to try it out for one month. If not then you can probably make do with text chatting and lang-8.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| JiEunNinja Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4206 days ago 64 posts - 115 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Japanese | Message 8 of 16 29 May 2013 at 9:25pm | IP Logged |
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Alright, so I haven't exactly been studying as much as I wanted to these past few days.
I'm forgiving myself though and decided to start back up on Friday. I did realize something though. I think my Korean is better than I gave myself credit for. I was talking to a native speaker and realized I was able to communicate a bit easier than I thought. I'm realizing that perhaps I simple psych myself into believing that I'm terrible at Korean, and therefore have a terrible time trying to use it. I've been reading native Korean materials and have noticed that I understand almost everything. Needless to say, I feel like my confidence is boosting and really the main thing I need to work on is speaking/writing. I've connected with a few native Korean speakers who live in the US. I should have thought of trying to find Korean-Americans to practice with a long time ago. At least the time difference is much smaller and I don't have to worry about them trying to practice their English with me; they already speak it!! So anyway, I'm changing my focus and spending most of my time practicing with native speakers. I'm going to keep using TTMIK's Iyaki's and the Korean drama scripts. That's what's helping me most, so that's what I'm going to stick to. Anyway, I'm feeling much more optimistic. So, I'll start fresh on Friday (tomorrow I'll be too busy because of my brother's graduation). So to myself, FIGHTING!!~~ 1 person has voted this message useful |
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