PPCheng Diglot Newbie Taiwan Joined 4109 days ago 9 posts - 10 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: Korean
| Message 1 of 4 07 October 2013 at 4:52pm | IP Logged |
I have been studying Korean for about 3 months. Not working on it regularly though, I study much more (like
an afternoon) some days when prompted by a certain impulse and not practice it when i am busy. I have so
far maintained the basic vocabulary and grammars, understand basic reading materials and probably basic
conversations.
There are numerous resources for basic learners here but not much for intermediate learners. I now plan to
enhance my ability by working on a book "Korean Reading" with several articles in it and visiting the website
"Advanced Korean" (a little difficult for me though). However i find a bottleneck as the basic materials are too
easy for me and the advanced one is too hard.
Anyone has similar experiences and some advices?
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emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map
| Message 2 of 4 07 October 2013 at 5:27pm | IP Logged |
PPCheng wrote:
However i find a bottleneck as the basic materials are too easy for me and the advanced one is too hard.
Anyone has similar experiences and some advices? |
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I don't know whether my experience is really relevant, because French and English are quite close languages in many ways, and my Middle Egyptian is still sub-A1. Also, I rely more on native media than I do on explicit study, and not everybody finds that effective. But I do remember that transition as an especially awkward time.
Two things that helped me were lots of reading and some intensive vocabulary study. I found a really interesting non-fiction book, and the first chapter was hard. I underlined unknown words with a faint pencil (naughty!), and I added hundreds and hundreds of words to my SRS deck. But as a I kept reading, a weird thing happened: When I went back to add words to my deck, I found I knew half of them already! By the time I reached page 500, reading was much easier, even though I still missed a lot.
Later, I went through a similar transition with TV, clawing my way through several episodes of Buffy using a transcript and multiple watchings, and spending most of the first season frequently confused. But by the end of the season, I was having fun watching, and by season 4, I'd sometimes understand 95% of an easy episode.
For a while, this process would start over with each new book and TV series. But after a few go-arounds, my skills broadened out, and the first page/episode wasn't quite so bad anymore.
So if the advanced materials are a struggle, but not completely impossible, it might be possible to jump in, accept that some parts will still be too hard, and just push through for a bit?
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tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish
| Message 3 of 4 07 October 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged |
You've been going for three months. Keep going, push on into advanced materials and don't
get thrown off if you don't understand. With time, you will.
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Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5730 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee
| Message 4 of 4 20 October 2013 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
With advanced materials, it's okay to go super-slow, look up every other word in the dictionary, and if you have to, parse the sentence - write out what every word means grammatically. Then spend a few minutes puzzling out the meaning. This is the way *everyone* has to make sense of complex sentences at first, so don't worry! You're not alone. The good news is that it gets easier FAST if you stick with it.
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