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Advice for a beginning student of Korean? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| YoAdam Diglot Newbie United States yoadam.com Joined 5696 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, Marshallese Studies: German, Korean | Message 1 of 2 17 October 2008 at 12:16am | IP Logged |
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Professor Alexander Arguelles,
Thanks for providing the information in the thread entitled, "Ideal Systematic Approach to Korean." I have found it very helpful and already have ordered most of the materials you recommended. I was also pleasantly surprised when I ordered your book, Historical, Literary, and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language; to be of such high printed quality-- I cannot wait to begin! But first I am trying to blind shadow, shadow, and then learn hangul + basic vocab / phrases from Let's Learn Korean as you advised in your ideal systematic study recommendations. Even though I am just now meeting you, if you will, please consider me a student of yours-- as I am doing my best to incorporate the principles of language learning you advocate throughout this internet forum. I must say, it is NOT EASY-- being a 20 year old college student and trying to live a disciplined life of juggling college courses along with extra-curricular, self--language-study! Korean is not the only language I am actively studying, nor is it my first "exotic language." I also have achieved near-basic-fluency in Marshallese over the last two summers which I spent in the Marshall Islands... (For those who are interested, pictures of the people, myself, and stories from the islands are on my internet blog, www.yoadam.com.) Goal - My goal is to to reach and exceed the ACTFL Advanced (-Low, -Mid, or – High; or ILR Level 2 or 2+) proficiency level in Korean within the next two years. I want to join the Korean Language Flagship Program at the University of Hawaii, which requires this level of proficiency to be accepted. The program spends one-year on intensive task-based teaching, and then a second year abroad studying in Seoul, Korea. At the end of the program, the students who succeed and complete of the program demonstrate the ability to use Korean at the professional level (ILR 3, ACTFL “superior”) I am blessed because our family is hosting a Korean Exchange student for perhaps the next two years-- which means I will be able to immediately and daily use the seventh element of your systematic study plan. She will be able to help me and converse with me in Korean daily over the next two years. I also will be using University of Hawaii's KLEAR Integrated Korean textbook series, along with an intermediate reader and hanja book which teaches 512 "most useful" hanja (both are from UHM Press, again). I will pick up the other materials you recommend when I reach the time to be able to use them, as I have already spent over $800 USD on learning materials. I am following your recommendations to reach this lofty goal, so I figure that I should also keep you updated on my progress in the language-- and I will do so if you would like. I also have many questions that come up from time to time, and I do hope you will find time to address them periodically. I will also be keeping a daily korean language learning logbook on this internet forum. My first question is, how many hours/day do you think I should spend to reach this "level 2 or 2+" of Korean proficiency? 3? 6? 12? I have the time slot between 4:30am am to 7:30 am open in my schedule, and I am willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve this goal. I know one thing is for certain, I will definitely break-up your 6-pronged study method into pieces, and devote 30 minutes per method so as to increase learning efficiency. The following is my current weekly language study schedule: 5am-8am :: Korean 8am-9am :: Marshallese 9am-10am :: German 1:00pm-2:00pm :: German (at College) (Note: I have changed my diet to vegetarian. I also take Ginkgo Biloba, which will hopefully aid my memory capabilities like many people say it does...) I'm doing well studying the other languages (non-korean) because of the abundance of high quality materials that are available. It's the Korean language that I need the most guidance in self-studying. After this fall term at college is finished and after I am able to quit my job-- I should be able to organize my schedule in a way to allow more time (hopefully 3 additional hours) for studying Korean in the Evenings as well. A second question that has been bothering me lately is, what should I shadow after I complete and master the "Let's Learn Korean" course by B.J. Jones? Should I shadow your tapes from your book, Historical, Literary, and Cultural Approach to the Korean Language? Should I shadow the KLEAR Integrated Korean course? (you can listen to them at the following website link: http://www.hawaii.edu/uhpress/mp3/klear/ (If you have not heard the quality of these accompanying audio files, I am quite curious to know what you think.) Or are there better materials out there that I should be shadowing to learn Korean? Once again, Thanks for all of the help you have provided through these forums. And I appreciate any time you are willing to spend helping out an aspiring polyglot-- yet novice, like me. Sincerely, Adam Schaefers Edited by YoAdam on 23 October 2008 at 10:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7036 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes  | Message 2 of 2 04 December 2008 at 1:18pm | IP Logged |
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Dear Mr. Schaefers,
Thank you for your letter and please accept my apologies for such a terribly tardy response. I hope that you have been making progress in your studies and that my delayed answer will not have affected them in any negative way. As a preliminary answer to your first question about how many hours a day you should study to reach your goal of attaining ILR 2 or 2+ of Korean proficiency within 2 years time, you will need a total of 1980 hours to attain that goal (a figure I extracted from one of their charts, combining class hours + self-study). You will probably be happy to learn that at your current rate of 3 hours per day (each and every single day, I do take it?), you should attain your goal in 660 days or well with your timeframe. If, as it seems, you have the will and the ability to do even more, then you can get there even sooner, mathematically within a calendar year if you can manage 6 hours a day. Of course, however, study does not work in such a purely mathematical fashion, while systematic regularity is indeed the key, your rate of progress is actually more contingent upon the efficacy of your study habits than a pure sum total of hours. So, my advice to you is to increase your hours as much as you can and still enjoy the entire process. In this fashion, and given your motivation and privileged circumstances, you should be comfortably secure of attaining your goals. As for what to shadow, yes, you can use the tapes for the course that Dr. Kim Jongrok and I co-wrote. I listed to the audio files for the KLEAR course and you could also use some of those in terms of their quality (they are awfully textbook like, but I sure wish I had had something like that available to me when I was in your shoes), but I have not seen the books so I do not know what the layout is like: are they in bilingual format or at least in such a fashion that you can convert them to that? Not to push my own works too much, but when you get a bit more advanced, the recordings of my Korean Newspaper Reader are a bit more authentic, and the layout of the texts is adaptable; furthermore, I deliberately employed a style of translation that would lend itself to this end. I think the best solution in your privileged circumstances would be to ask your exchange student “sister” to make some recordings for you of a text that actually interests you. There are whole series of bilingual English-Korean texts designed for Koreans to learn English but which you can use in reverse. Perhaps she even has some of the 100+ volumes in the YBM series with her. They are text only without recordings in English, so you could offer to do the same for her. By the way, how is the Korean interaction going with her? It does sound like a potentially ideal situation for you, but, depending upon her personality and expectations, I think she might understandably feel somewhat reticent to help you all that much – put yourself in her shoes, when you go to Korea to try to immerse yourself in Korean, and your host family wants to speak English with you… (which is probably what will happen!). I hope this answers your questions? I am once again making a renewed effort to contribute regularly to this forum although honestly I find its anonymity and lack of continuity to be rather alienating, so even if you should have no more questions, please do post periodic progress reports in this thread as it is very gratifying for me to know that I have truly helped a particular individual with my advice. Yours with best wishes, Alexander Arguelles 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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