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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 14 10 October 2007 at 6:04am | IP Logged |
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I decided to keep a kind of diary here so that I can track my progress in learning Korean.
I have been flirting with learning for 18 months or so during which time I have picked up a few words and expressions but I have only been making a sustained effort for a couple of weeks now. I started with Pimsleur, so far i am on lesson 7, I find the material surprisingly difficult, I think this is simply because it's Korean rather than anything about Pimsleur per se. Still I have mixed feelings towards Pimsleur already. On the one hand I am learning the material and it is sticking in my mind, this is obviously a good thing. On the other hand I'm finding it quite tiresome to have to go through the lessons 4-6 times each in order to get a good handle on the material, I wonder if this is really time efficient given the amount of English on the recordings? I also think a transcript in hangul would be really useful. I dont see myself finishing the course in the 4-6 weeks I was initially hoping to finish in, I am for now determined to persevere though because, although its a little painful, it is so far proving effective. I tried Rosetta Stone out also, I couldnt keep interested in this at this point but I plan on revisitting the software in the future. Hopefully I can learn something from this. Looking around the forum people seem to think its a good vocabulary builder though at this point I am inclined to use flash card software instead, I picked up Declan's Korean flashcards and initially I am quite impressed, hopefully I can build a little vocabulary this way, probably starting with nouns and worrying about verbs more once I have some feeling for the grammar. I've been using a textbook originally brought in Korea, 'Korean made easy for beginners', it comes with an audio cd and so far has allowed me to pick up Hangul to a reasonable level, I've also learnt a few things not covered in Pimsleur so far. My early impression of this book is pretty good, it's been quite painless in the early stages, which I think is important for me at this point, each lesson contains a couple of dialogs both in hangul and on the cd and it's this I am finding most useful. I also downloaded Arirang TV's lets speak Korean ( both the old and new versions ), oddly its the older version I find most useful right now as it repeats its dialogs with lots of Hangul on screen, this is really helping me find my feet with hangul and again i am learning a little that isnt covered in the other materials I'm using. I will watch the new series once I'm done with the old, hopefully it tackles the same stuff from a slightly different angle and will be effective reinforcement. My wife is Korean and the reason for me to learn in the first place. Obviously I get to practice with her a lot, this I think is actually the critical factor for me and will probably be the thing that gets me through this early phase, my pronunciation would already be awful if I didnt have someone willing to help me correct my numerous errors at this early stage. I truly wonder how people ever learn without considerable help from a native speaker, I think it would be a formiddable task and not one I personally could succeed at. My goal at this point is quite simple, I want just enough Korean so that I can deal with some basic Korean material and manage more useful conversation with my wife. I suspect that my progress will accelerate quite nicely once I get beyond what is in fact a fairly painful beginning. On Sunday I found a Korean Bookshop so I know that written Korean material wont be a problem for me in the long term, this is very encouraging as I have always loved to read. With Korean drama being quite easy to find on site's like D-Addicts native material wont be a problem once I get enough of a foothold to start tackling it. Right now that day cannot come quickly enough. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| skeeterses Senior Member United States angelfire.com/games5Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6561 days ago 302 posts - 356 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Spanish | Message 2 of 14 11 October 2007 at 12:06am | IP Logged |
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I haven't seen the Pimsleur or the Rosetta Stone stuff for Korean. At Amazon.com, I've only seen bad reviews for the Pimsleur for Korean. All I can say is choose one good Korean-101 book and stick with it. Once you get past the Korean-101 stuff, you should try reading some real-world Korean stuff. And the real-world stuff can range from easy to hard like the other languages. If you spend too much time on the textbooks, you could get bored. Good Luck.
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| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 14 15 October 2007 at 9:41am | IP Logged |
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My wife corrects the Pimsleur stuff as she sometimes doesnt like the phrasing but I havent heard her say anything is actually wrong so far. Overall I feel it's proving a pretty good experience for me, it seems to teach grammar without actively teaching it which is great, I really dont want to consciously think about word orders etc, I dont do it in English and dont want to in Korean.
Pimsleur is the only course I'm following with any structure now but I'm dipping into other material on an ad-hoc basis ( particularly Korean made easy for beginners ) and my vocabulary is growing because of it. My reading is improving bit by bit just by dipping my toe here and there and thats good enough on that front for now, I think spending a while on Hangul has really helped my pronunciation and listening skill too, just sitting around deliberately working on making mouth shapes and thinking about tongue and lip positioning I think has been good. I'm looking forward to books but I'm not quite ready for them yet. My wife went out to a Korean restaurant with workmates on Saturday and I was pleased to be able to pick her up without directions simply because I've practiced reading the Hangul shop signs when I see them and could remember the name when she said it ( despite never having heard it before ). I also tried my Korean out whilst shopping, people could understand me ( though I cant say much yet ) and were quite complimentary about my efforts which was very nice. I'm recognising a few more words in K-Dramas than I could a couple of weeks ago, I find that very encouraging particularly as my initial reaction wasnt to translate them in my head, they were simply what they were and i understood them. Although I'm progressing slowly I feel I'm building a solid foundation and am in fact quite encouraged, I was a little discouraged when i wrote my first entry here. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6285 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 4 of 14 15 October 2007 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
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There are many negative comments about Pimsleur on Amazon and on this forum stating the speakers are not native. Is it true? Is their accent native-like or do they make pronunciation mistakes?
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| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 5 of 14 16 October 2007 at 4:49am | IP Logged |
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My impression is that the bad reviews are actually for the old 10 lesson course, the 30 lesson comprehensive course was re-done. I can't comment much on the native accents, they sound fine to me but I might not be able to tell. My wife hasn't said anything to make me think that is a problem though, she definitely hasn't mentioned any pronunciation errors on the course ( and she's pretty quick to point mine out so I'm guessing she'd say ). She does sometimes comment that it might be better to use a different phrase here or there and she would prefer I learn a more formal style initially.
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| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 14 19 October 2007 at 9:04am | IP Logged |
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I've had a bad few days since my last post here. I experimented with a more textbook approach to try and get some Korean grammar down quicker than Pimsleur was moving but it seems I am not cut out for this approach. I also tried flashcards to get my vocabulary growing, I experienced some initial success here getting the 2 number systems under my belt but I dont have it in me I think to really get a lot of vocabulary this way and I think anything that isnt used really heavily may not stick well for any length of time anyway.
On the plus side I have been watching 'Coffee Prince' and am definitely getting a better feel for the language, I have been able to pick up several words and a couple of expressions over the last few days this way despite not understanding the majority of what I hear. I'm also continuing to pick out a few more words than before which doesnt allow me to understand much yet but is encouraging all the same. Best of all from picking out the verbs I recognise I'm getting my first feel for the various forms they take. There is a very long way to go but I'm beginning to get an inkling of how to approach this area. The combination of English subtitle and Korean audio seems to work well for me and because I enjoy the program its not even any real hardship, in fact I dont count this as study at all. I guess what i was doing anyway, Pimsleur plus the older arirang TV lessons as well as working on the dialogs from Korean made Easy is the best way forward for me right now. That and watching TV drama. Actually looking back maybe it hasnt been a bad few days afterall, at least I have a clearer idea of what is working for me. That must bode well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 7 of 14 29 October 2007 at 6:27am | IP Logged |
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It's been an interesting week for me. I think I am beginning over time to grasp that the single largest problem in learning Korean is probably the acquisition of vocabulary. This is the problem that is limitting progress more than any other and it is a problem i have been consciously focusing on.
What I believe i have actually established is that for me personally it is quite difficult to memorise vocabulary items devoid of context, flashcards and wordlists dont really work for me in acquiring vocabulary except as an ancilliary method. What it seems to take for me to acquire vocabulary is to experience the new vocabulary item in a range of different contexts, so for instance I have noticed that vocabulary items that I encounter from one source become far more accessible the moment I encounter them in a second source and really firm up with a third or fourth encounter. To deal with this I am spreading my efforts widely now and including Rosetta Stone, Toddlers picture books, Lets Speak Korean TV lessons, some language book work and Pimsleur ( which now gets a lot less time than previously because I'm using it mainly to pick up grammar patterns ). The result is that I am learning slowly but that what I learn is really very solidified in my mind. I will continue to look for a way to accelerate vocabulary acquisition, though I suspect that this may only come in time as I begin to be able to read books and watch TV without subtitles, for now I will have to be content with building solid foundations before I try to construct anything on top of them. On the grammar front I am not really having problems so far, sure it's different from English but I dont seem to have any real problem organising my thoughts differently for Korean, I may not know much but what sentences I actually form alone seem to come out generally in the right order without any real conscious attempt to ensure that is the case, any errors are corrected quickly by my wife so I am confident I wont fossilise any bad errors. I'd like to try out shadowing I think and am considering picking up Prof Arguelles' book, largely for the audio. I havent found much in the way of reviews though. At the moment I do Pimsleur as i take a lunchtime walk where I work and think that this time offers a good opportunity to shadow whilst moving as the Prof describes in some of his posts. Edited by ChrisWebb on 29 October 2007 at 6:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ChrisWebb Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6206 days ago 181 posts - 190 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean | Message 8 of 14 07 November 2007 at 5:34am | IP Logged |
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Well, it's been about a week and I have been working on my Korean every day ( usually about 1.5 hours study ). I am seeing progress, vocabulary is still coming on slowly but progress is progress so I am content that with work I will continue to grow.
I'm about halfway through Pimsleur level 1 now, I find it a little slow but it does seem to really drive home what it teaches so I am persisting and will press on to level 2 once I finish level 1. I've watched 22 of the 60 episodes of the older version of 'Let's Speak Korean' now, this is forming the foundation of my study, the audio-visual format I find quite easy to deal with and the grammar lessons seem to stick more effectively than if they were in a book form. The constant repetitions of the dialogues in the programmes is great, especially as they are combined with subtitles part of the time. I really feel that I get a lot out of watching the programmes a few times. What I'm doing with these is watching 4 episodes a day, each day adding one new episode and dropping the oldest episode that i've watched, so I watch 18, 19, 20, 21 then the next day 19, 20, 21, 22. Each programme gets a day where i really study it making notes and vocabulary lists from it ( usually day 2 in its cycle of 4) , my hangul handwriting is getting better and I'm seeing the first signs of being able to spell too and I think this is from making vocab notes. I'm not really using books at all at this point, my eyes tend to glaze over a little too fast reading grammar notes and vocab just doesnt stick very well without the audio. I have ordered the Assimil course though, I intend to shadow the audio and use the book as a reader, I dont speak French so using it as intended isnt really an option, hopefully the course will be of benefit anyway. I've also ordered the first 2 Yonsei readers, they will take a while to arrive but when they do I'll hopefully be in a position to really make a drive at developing basic literacy. I'm convinced that long-term most of my growth will come from using native books and TV. At some point I have to start Hanja as well but I dont have a timeframe in mind, it's just an awareness that the time will come for now. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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