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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 9 of 35 16 March 2012 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Sometimes, learning vocabulary lists related to a specific exam gives hints to the culture of the country. When I was studying Mandarin, I had noticed that the TOP (Taiwan exam) had the word for baseball in its beginner level while the HSK (Chinese exam) didn't. Of course, you also got things like communism in HSK and not in TOP.
But now I'm wondering: why do "nosebleed" and "snivel" appear in the beginner vocabulary of the TOPIK (Korean exam)? I can understand the presence of kimchi or of the rain season, but there... I'm clueless. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4810 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 10 of 35 16 March 2012 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks for the music recommendations! The music videos look really great. They made me quite curious about the lyrics :) Once I start studying Chinese (who knows when, I keep wanting to start, but then also keep wanting not to mess with my progress in Korean) I'll get back to you and demand more recommendations, if that's okay :D
Congrats on your progress with Korean! Suddenly understanding the Intermediate reader much better sounds like a big jump! I think the fact that you just want to keep studying it (instead of dividing your time between Classical Chinese and Korean) is a really good sign. I always think it's difficult to seriously study 2 languages at once. Maybe you can dedicate more time to Classical Chinese when you're done with TOPIK. 40 new words per day! Wow! Now I wish I knew Chinese to get the Sino-Korean effect. But maybe I'll get the bonus when I study Chinese? I'd be fine with that, too :) If you finish this Sunday you'll be done sooner than I am (looks like I'll be rid of the list next week) and you started later and had more words to study, too :D I get the feeling that you're going to ace the TOPIK.
Same here. It's a funny effect. I have that with music (although I still can't stand most KPop, the kitschy ballads are surprisingly nice to listen to), but also with TV: I think I'd hate the kind of Kdramas I enjoy if I'd watch them in German or English... I'm guessing that a lot of the drama dialogue must sound stilted or stupid to native speakers, but as I don't necessarily notice it it's great. And the language adds a level of interest to otherwise slightly boring, predictable content. Sometimes I'm just slightly worried I'll end up sounding like a really bad TV show in Korean :D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4810 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 11 of 35 16 March 2012 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
:D Seriously? What are the Korean words? I think I haven't gotten there yet. I think they put in quite a few words about medical conditions, because the test is mostly aimed at foreigners living in Korea - and the test-makers probably think they need that knowledge for survival. Otherwise I don't see why words like "injections" need to be in a beginner list. I'm also still wondering about the purpose of the flower names. That shouldn't be very useful knwledge, but strangely enough I've run across a number of them in my reading... (but that may have more to do with the genre of children's books than with Korean culture) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 12 of 35 16 March 2012 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
With great pleasure! In every city I've been to in China, if I were to see a music shop, I would stop there, and at the end of my stay, I couldn't bring back all the cds I had bought unfortunately (well, I left the bad ones..). For these two songs, the guy really sings in a folkloric way (with a specific accent that makes it impossible to understand for me except with the lyrics..)
Come on, you're supposed to tell me to work harder on Classical Chinese too! And I'm starting to feel wanderlust again... Esperanto starts calling me back, I feel. But I'm aware that my dedication to Korean is the main reason for my quick progress, and I'd rather attain a high intermediate level in Korean than low beginner in 5 languages. Indeed, perhaps after the TOPIK I'll try to have a moderate amount of time dedicated to other languages. or not. We'll see, really.
To know if learning Chinese will be easier after Korean, I can't answer. It will probably have a smaller effect than the other way around, due to the fact that "Chinese phonology" > "Korean morphology" (phonological distinctions are blurred in Korean). But you will definitely enjoy seeing all these cognates... at least, I enjoy much more seeing cognates between Korean and Mandarin than English and French.
They're in the last hundred: 코피 (nose+bleed=nosebleed, woot) and 콧물 (nose water..). I can understand the presence of injection, because indeed that can be important, but... nosebleed, come on. :D And there were quite a few ones in the list where I just thought "wtf", but I didn't write them down unfortunately. The names of flowers: 벚꽃 (sakura), 무궁화 (rose of Sharon, one of the major symbols of Korea, since many centuries ago) and 진달래 (rhododendron?azalea?) are all very common flowers in Korea and I guess they're really a part of culture. But I wish we didn't have all these mountain & city & country names in the list. :D Anyway, 52 words left, so I'll be done by Sunday for the vocabulary, and I'll probably do a TOPIK past paper, to see if there's any progress in the overall comprehension. Can't wait to start writing to use all the grammar I've been viewing, too! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5477 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 13 of 35 16 March 2012 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've definitely noticed this concept as well. There are quite a few words that I've learned either on TV or from the 6000 essential list in Korean that are oddly common in Korean, but I've rarely, if ever, used in English.
Two examples from the 6000 essential word list are 개나리 (forsythia, golden bell) and 감 (persimmon). Both are "B" words (which places them in the the grouping of the *3000* or so most essential words) yet I can't recall using either English equivalent more than a handful of times in my life. An example of a word that isn't in the 6000 essential list, but still gets much heavier use for me than the English equivalent is 갯벌 (mud flat, salt flat; wetlands). Offhand I know I've seen 패밀리가 떴다, 1발 2일, and 청춘불패 2 all heavily make use of that term. I guess that's partly due to Korea being a fairly small peninsula, though, so there is a lot more coastline for its size than the US has. Another good example is 까나리 (sand eel). That term is not common in English, but is heavily used on certain Korean variety shows as they love use it as an ingredient in 복불복 foods for the unwitting participants of the show to eat. (복불복 roughly means something like "random chance". The literal meaning is: fortune-no-fortune, 福不福) Then there are the completely off-the-wall ones that make you think: "Korean has a word just for that?" One example (that is in the 6000 essential list) means "the hill behind one's house". (I can't recall the Korean word offhand as I only noted it while flipping through one of the vocab books previously.) EDIT: Corrected a definition...not sure why I typed "mud salt"...LOL Edited by Warp3 on 17 March 2012 at 12:31am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 14 of 35 16 March 2012 at 10:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
aka "kaki" are amazing fruits! Here in London, I've eaten dozens of them (but that seems to be mostly an Asian fruit, which in China you can eat dried!). You're definitely missing out on something. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4620 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 15 of 35 19 March 2012 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Weekly report! Perhaps I should rename the topic, as Korean has now taken 80% of my study time, the rest being spread unequally between Chinese, Classical Chinese and Latin. In other words, really not worth mentioning the 20% left... Anyway, good news to follow!
Korean: As said, Korean has been creeping up on my other languages and is now almost the only language I study, perhaps it's better like this, who knows. I've spent 27h on it this week, about 5h more than last week. As I aim at studying 35h a week, going any further than 27h would mean giving up on other languages. I really want to study several languages at a time, but I'm also aware that I prefer being decent at only one language than suck at three. I study mostly for my pleasure, but I can see that some languages could easily bring some interesting professional opportunities (wether it be in a country that speaks that language or not, as I work in Natural Language Processing), and Korean is one of them, especially when compared to Latin and Classical Chinese. So, this week, I've finished learning the vocabulary list for TOPIK's beginner level. That has been relatively intense as I've learnt over 600 words during the last month, but it was worth it. There is still around 40 that I keep on failing regularly, but now that I don't have any "obligation", I'll be able to tackle a few of them everyday, and everything will be fine, I'm sure. Immediately after completion of this learning, I decided to test myself again against some past papers. It's the third one I do, and I had seen a marginal improvement the second time, but now that I know the complete vocabulary, my score has simply skyrocketed, especially in listening and reading (going from high70-low80 to 90+) and I'm now confident that I can't fail to get the level 2 next month. My score for grammar and writing has remained about the same, and I'll probably spend some time going back to my mistakes and study the grammar points I have missed, though now that I'm confident enough for the exam, my focus is shifting a bit. I've been looking at the "intermediate reader" on my bookshelf for well over three months, waiting patiently for the time I would have the level required to tackle it. It seems this time has come, and I'll start plunging myself into its texts this week. I plan to do some scriptorium, study thoroughly the grammar presented (as well as learn the vocabulary, naturally) and I'll make special effort to write my own texts using the grammar and vocabulary I've learnt, as I've clearly been putting active skills aside until now (TOPIK, being mostly testing passive skills). On the hanja side, I've completed the level "4-2" which seems to correspond to the 5th year of hanja learning in Korea, summing up to 750 characters. I can see it helps me remembering vocabulary, as well as infer the meaning of new words I encounter, and when I had the opportunity to chat with some Korean people some weeks ago (in English), I could guess how to say some Korean words simply "trans-pronouncing" Chinese words. I'm going to pause on hanja for a few weeks, time for me to assimilate the few dozens I don't know very well yet. My goal is to learn them up to level 2 by the end of the year. I don't think the difficulty will be linear, as I know their writing and mostly need to learn their pronunciation, which tends to be quite redundant given the Mandarin one. I'm not learning their Korean meaning name (I know what they mean, but not how Koreans phrase it) yet, but that may come... perhaps if I want to sit the hanja exam some day. personal note: I've read that a very hanja can have a "Korean" reading (similar to kun'yomi in Japanese), while the normal rule is that they're all read with the Chinese reading (on'yomi). I'll try to know which those are, I've only read about 金 which is of course the family name Kim (and geum when meaning gold). If anyone's interested, I'll also show how some poetry can have ruby characters, similar to the furigana in annotating Japanese texts, and the freedom the poet gave himself in using some hanja while attributing them a native Korean value. (don't know if this is common, but I was very surprised to see this) Finally, I've bought new books, as the bookshop seemed to have loaded many more new books this week. I've put my hands on the 6000 Korean vocabulary that many people here are familiar with, I quite like the fact that it gives the meaning and hanja for the words (while TOPIK vocabulary lists let you guess which of the 10 meanings for the word XX you should know...). To learn it completely by the end of the year, that's only 15-16 per day, so completely doable I believe, but I don't want vocabulary to be my absolute focus, otherwise I'll suck at everything else... I've also bought a novel in Korean, as the glances I've had at a few pages made me think that it wasn't too difficult. Of course I can't read it now, but I want to give myself the chance to have some Korean to read whenever I feel like trying. Who knows, perhaps I'll be able to read it before the end of the TAC! Chinese (not Classical): Finally finished reading 莫言《酒国》, which I had left on my bookshelf for several months. Was a nice read until about half the book when I got really bored and had to force myself to finish it. My next book will be 余华 (my favourite Chinese author) 《十个词汇里的中国》. It will be the first Mandarin book I read in traditional characters and written vertically, as it's been banned in China and I had to buy it from Taiwan. We'll see how it goes! That's all for now, hopefully a new week of quick progress is starting! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5477 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 16 of 35 19 March 2012 at 2:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The vast majority of Hanja have only one reading which is a Sino-Korean reading. I imagine this was different in the past before the invention of Hangul (and thus the ability to have mixed scripts). I didn't actually realize that the 김 reading of 金 was technically a pure Korean reading, but it does make sense given that the 김 reading doesn't really apply to anything in Chinese. One of the things I've been meaning to learn is which family names map to which Hanja characters. AGTKC has a dedicated index for this, but I haven't had the chance to go through it yet, so 김(金) is the only one I know for certain currently (as I learned it when I learned the character initially). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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