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Advancing Korean, Year 5/6: TAC15 東亞

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druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
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1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 89 of 344
17 September 2012 at 3:27pm | IP Logged 
I guess learning most of the radicals as I go does make more sense... Although it's a bit discouraging to have to learn two or three radicals/components for a single character.

I've noticed that learning characters passively doesn't seem to work very well for me. I had once before learned the numbers passively and forgot them very soon after. Now that I used mnemonics and know how to write them, they seem to stick better and passive recall has improved a lot.

I guess it might be a little different to learn the characters for Chinese, where all your text is in characters and for Korean, where 90% of the text in the reader so far is in Hangeul. I don't even have to remember the shapes, I can just guess the meaning from the context and that doesn't really help...
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Warp3
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United States
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Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese

 
 Message 90 of 344
23 September 2012 at 5:01pm | IP Logged 
Fortunately, many (but not all) of the radicals are characters in their own right anyway, so just learn all the characters that are also radicals first. However, there are some that look quite different in radical form than they do in their original form. For example, 水(수) is the water character, but in radical form it looks quite different. The left side of these characters is the radical form of that character: 江 河 洪 海   Another example is 火(화) which is the fire character. In radical form, it looks like the bottom of these characters: 馬 魚 鳥

Edited by Warp3 on 23 September 2012 at 5:03pm

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druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4664 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 91 of 344
25 September 2012 at 11:43pm | IP Logged 
Tuesday, 25th of September - 35th week

vocabulary from list: 10 words
hanja: ---
lessons studied: ---
reading: finished 파페포포 투게더
writing: ---
listening: 3 episodes of 신의
speaking: ---


I've finished the comic book Papepopo Together, the review of which you can find on my blog.

I'm also continuing to watch Faith/The Heavenly Doctor (신의), which is picking up plot-wise just when I was starting to get bored. It's Sageuk, so I find it a little harder to understand, but I tried subbing a part this week and noticed that I'm not having as much difficulty as anticipated. It has gotten increasingly easy to look up words I don't know, which indicates that my listening comprehension must be improving. I could not follow the whole plot on the first listen, but for the part I wrote subtitles for I understood all the plot points and around 50% of the sentences in their entirety.

Thanks for the Hanja/radical suggestions! You've convinced me that it's a good idea to learn both radicals and new characters at the same time. I didn't actually have time to do either last week, but I hope to get back to it as soon as possible. At least I'm still able to write all the characters from lesson 1 (the numbers, year, month, day) - although I have trouble remembering the correct stroke order of some.


new grammar:

-끼리 (only) among, by ourselves/themselves


Edited by druckfehler on 26 September 2012 at 12:30am

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druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4664 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 92 of 344
01 October 2012 at 11:54am | IP Logged 
Monday, 1st of October - 36th week

vocabulary from list: 31 words
hanja: ---
lessons studied: ---
reading: 3 blog entries, 17 pages of 콩쥐팥쥐 (casually)
writing: ---
listening: 1 episode of 신의, 6 episodes of 세상에서 어디에도 없는 차칸 남자
speaking: ---


Although the list of things I've done looks a bit empty, this week was a rather good week for Korean. I made some new vocabulary cards, got stuck on the occasional blog entry, started reading book no. 5 (the Korean version of Cinderella) and got sucked into a melodrama series. The new drama I started is 차칸 남자 (Nice Guy) - it's over the top dramatic, of course, as they always are, but the directing and acting is really good, so I'll see to which doom they all come in the end.

I've also started on the 2nd Hanja lesson, but haven't yet memorised anything. I hope to have finished this lesson by the time I write next week's entry. I wanted to use Anki for Hanja study, but I think I'll study without Anki for now - my current progress is so slow that it doesn't really make sense to use SRS for them yet. After going through 3 vocabulary decks I don't want to bother with 2 additional Hanja decks anyway. I'm still neglecting the audio sentence deck as well, but I'm motivated to get back to it sometime soon.

Edited by druckfehler on 01 October 2012 at 3:02pm

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The Real CZ
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Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean

 
 Message 93 of 344
01 October 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged 
I'm really enjoying Nice Guy. I only started watching it because Moon Chae Won is hot, but I'm enjoying it more than I thought I would.
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druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4664 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 94 of 344
06 October 2012 at 11:51pm | IP Logged 
Saturday, 6th of October - 37th week

vocabulary from list: 45 words
hanja: --
lessons studied: --
reading: 4 articles, 7(intensive)+22(extensive) pages of 콩쥐팥쥐
writing: --
listening: 2 episodes of 차칸 남자
speaking: self-talk


"Nice Guy" has totally replaced the boring "Faith" now. The actors are great, as is the thoughtful directing. The writing is still intriguing enough, although a lot of questions have been resolved in the last 2 episodes. This week I wrote subtitles for half of Episode 8 on Viki. I understood a whole lot immediately and with help from the dictionary I was able to sub more than 80%. (Just checked and in April I was only at 60% for romcom subbing, so this proves the substantial improvement I feel.) I'm also surprised that I almost effortlessly understand a lot of lyrics now. It won't be long until I can't not understand them when I listen to music casually. Feels great.

Reading is also becoming less and less challenging overall. By now I'm certain that I'll be able to reach my reading goal by the end of the year, at least with young adult fiction.

Korean self-talk feels like routine by now. But it's a bit weird... I just talk without a topic and without much logical coherence. I think once I want to say something specific my speaking skills suck phenomenally. But I'll soon find out how bad they are, I guess. I'm going to meet some Koreans and people interested in Korea for dinner tomorrow and I so hope that we'll speak some Korean. I wonder if I should revise some common topics... :D

Edited by druckfehler on 07 October 2012 at 12:15am

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druckfehler
Triglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4664 days ago

1181 posts - 1912 votes 
Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean
Studies: Persian

 
 Message 95 of 344
08 October 2012 at 1:20am | IP Logged 
Ha, I'll just do another update. I have so many thoughts on the meeting and on reading. And I'm having a mini-crisis regarding my Korean progress that I just need to voice somewhere...

The Korean-German meeting was very interesting, but unfortunately not from a language learning standpoint. In the end we were 3 Germans and 1 Korean. The Korean spoke impeccable German and the other Germans only knew 3 words of Korean. Naturally the only thing I said in Korean were a couple of sentences, mostly to the waitress about how great the food was. I had 짬뽕 and it was literally as good as in Korea. I guess if my Korean had been very good, I could've talked a little with the Korean, but without any warming up it was too difficult and would've been impolite to the others anyway. But there were some funny moments - my favourite was us Germans enthusing about how we make Kimchi and the Korean was just looking at us slightly incredulously - he had never made it before. I guess that's similar to Koreans singing German traditional songs about Edelweiß that very few Germans even know... Anyway, the plan for the next meeting is that one of the Germans will invite us and make Makgolli for us and I totally can't miss that opportunity - if there's Makgolli, I don't mind not speaking Korean :D

On the way to the meeting I started reading my book for young adults: "조선의 마지막 꽃 덕혜옹주". It's possible, but quite difficult - as in I can kind of follow the topic, but around 2/3 is just hard work trying to deduce what words mean. I lack so much vocabulary. Especially all the monarchy-related terms made my head spin. Maybe I'll leave the book for later. Or I'll follow TheRealCZ's approach and look up a lot of words in the beginning and make a little glossary - I guess some of these terms will just come up again and again.

Some days I think it's almost impossible to reach a high level in Korean. I don't think my Korean will ever be as good as my English, no matter how much time I invest. I should set a much lower goal, but sometimes when I read a challenging book or try to talk to people I just wish my language skills were much better. And suddenly my progress seems extremely slow... Despite Anki and dramas and all the study I do, getting a word into my active vocabulary is a long process and takes so much effort and unfortunately it doesn't take much to forget it again. I hope that I will one day converse effortlessly in Korean, but looking at the big picture I wonder when that will ever be. It would be easier if I was in Korea, but here... I just don't think I can pull off a GoldFibre :) I need to stop wishing for results that are so far away and continue to enjoy the process. It's just one of those days when it suddenly dawns on me that learning any language is an enormous undertaking and the fact that the language in question is Korean doesn't exactly make things easier.

Edited by druckfehler on 08 October 2012 at 1:29am

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Warp3
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United States
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 Message 96 of 344
08 October 2012 at 2:57am | IP Logged 
I've found myself experiencing that quite a lot lately as well. One minute I'm ecstatic about how much better I can understand written and spoken Korean now and the next minute I run across something that reminds me just how much I still suck at it.

However...from your description above about translating dramas, it sounds like you have already exceeded my listening level by a good bit. That's one area I really need to focus more on. My listening skills are improving, but they are nowhere near what they should be yet. I really need to focus more on unsubbed TV as this should help that aspect notably. It sounds like you've exceeded my level in that aspect by quite a bit already, so you should be quite proud of that fact. 잘한다!

Your comment about the difficulty in reading that book is a big part of the reason why I'm still on bilingual books at the moment. It's much more difficult to maintain motivation when you dive straight into a Korean-only story. Personally, I'd rather half-heartedly read hundreds of pages of Korean text rather than thoroughly read 8 pages then find myself giving up out of lack of motivation.

That's also why I've chosen to restrict myself from SRSing anything I learn from those bilingual books. Sure that would likely be very useful, but I know myself well enough to know that if I start SRSing text from those books, then I'll start to feel that I *should* SRS new things when I come across them. Once that happens, I'll start losing motivation to read since it will involve mining for vocabulary rather than just reading for the sake of reading. I have still picked up some vocabulary from the books regardless, however the only ones I've allowed myself to SRS are the ones I've come across elsewhere. Once I see it anywhere else, I can SRS it if I want and even point to the book as one of the sources, but otherwise my reading material is not for SRS mining. Two examples of this were 우물 (a well) from 어린 왕자 and 이윽고 (finally) from 노인과 바다. They used those words enough in each book for them to stick fairly well, but I didn't actually add them to Anki until I came across them elsewhere (then included the book title in the source field of the card as one of the source examples).

Despite that, however, I have seriously considered diving into a Korean-only book and intensively reading at least the first chapter or two to get a good base for the vocabulary used in the story, then trying my best to extensively read the remaining book from that base. If I can just maintain the motivation to plow through the intensive reading section at the start, it should make the remainder of the book notably easier than it would be otherwise (due to an author's tendency to reuse certain vocabulary).

Edited by Warp3 on 08 October 2012 at 3:00am



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