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The Awesome Difficulty of Korean, Finnish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6341 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 161 of 559 13 August 2012 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a frustrating experience - again - trying to finish the sauna text in my Finnish textbook. It's because I don't care to learn the specific vocabulary and I don't understand the text without it. Argh. Why would a beginner need to know how to describe all the actions people do in the sauna? Or how to call a hole in the ice for swimming? But the thing is that I can't call a lesson finished unless I understand almost all of the text so I don't know what to do. I've abandoned the book before but I always come back to it. Maybe I'll focus on TY for a while, it's so nice and easy in comparison.
Random Finnish fact: Finnish has a totally different word for electricity. I had expected that of Korean but not of Finnish. It's elektrība in Latvian, Elektrizität in German, électricité in French, электричество in Russian, even in Estonian it's elekter but in Finnish it's sähkö. Go figure. Lesson 3x06 on TTMIK was very interesting, I mean the concept it focused on. I'll describe it briefly for those of you who are not familiar with Korean. In Korean, you form different verb tenses by attaching an ending to the verb stem and sometimes also another word after it. For example, you form the simple future tense by adding '-(으)ㄹ 거예요' [-(eu)l koyeyo] to the verb stem. This lesson introduced another way of forming the future tense, namely by adding '-(으)ㄹ게요' [-(eu)l keyo] to the stem. The difference in their usage is that you use the second ending if you just changed your mind and decided to do something based on what the other person said, or if you want to get the other person's opinion about what you are going to do. For example, if you say "I'll leave now, bye" using the second ending, it means that you are asking the other person(s) if they don't mind that you leave. It's a very neat way of asking someone's opinion and I love this ending. I don't know any other language that has such a concept in their grammar. Maybe Japanese has it but I haven't studied it so I can't compare them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6341 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 162 of 559 14 August 2012 at 9:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Finnish
Teach Yourself Finnish is such a breath of fresh air! I did the exercises on lesson 2 and started on lesson 3. I can enjoy these lessons now because I can figure out the grammar behind the expressions even if the book doesn't explain it. (This was the main reason I didn't start with TYF right away. I hate learning phrases without understanding what they're made of.) My strong points in Finnish are vocabulary and reading comprehension. I'm nearing 900 words in my Anki, plus all the pronouns, conjunctions, and postpositions that I don't enter into Anki. My weak points are writing and speaking, and TYF is going to help me with that, at least with the speaking part. There are many audio dialogues that I can put on loop to learn some typical phrases and case usages. I've had very little listening practice in Finnish but judging from the TYF dialogues, listening comprehension won't be a problem. Or maybe I'm being too optimistic because these dialogues are not spoken at natural speed (I think). We'll see. One thing I have to get used to is that the Finns pronounce the 'h' in words like 'mihin', 'puhun' very lightly, almost inaudibly. I didn't know that before so I've always been pronouncing them with a strong 'h' in my mind (like they would be pronounced in Latvian). A couple of days ago I added the word hymyillä (to smile) to Anki. It's one of the hardest Finnish words for me to pronounce. Korean Let me think what I did yesterday... Not that much. I repeated a couple of TTMIK lessons (just in the background while doing something else). I finally finished episode 3 of Gumiho. The main female actress keeps bugging me, I don't think her acting is very good. I also started on TTMIK lesson 3x07 but it's a complicated subject (the -서 connector for verbs) and I was tired so I decided to leave it for later. Remember I mentioned that Koreans like to repeat the same syllable in words? Well, turns out it may be even more than one syllable. Yesterday I came across this word in the dictionary: 조마조마하다 (to feel nervous). I almost started laughing when I saw it, it just seemed so funny. Why couldn't it be 'chomahada', why did it have to be 'chomachomahada'? Ah, the mysteries of a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4657 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 163 of 559 14 August 2012 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
There are more ending of this type and that's one of the interesting things about Korean - it's very focused on the audience and relationship-based (for lack of a better description). To get all the endings right I have to spend more time considering what the person I'm talking to knows, what our relationship is and what he or she might be thinking and feeling. The language promotes a type of mindfulness which I really like. Actually, I yet have to meet a single Korean who didn't also display that type of mindfulness, which in my opinion makes them some of the most pleasant people to be around. Language really plays a huge part in our socialization. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5324 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 164 of 559 15 August 2012 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||
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There are definitely tons of examples in Korean of both single syllable and multiple syllable repetition.
답답하다/갑갑하다 (to be stifling, frustrating) 두근두근 (the sound of a heartbeat thumping) 몰래몰래 (secretly, stealthily) 똑똑하다 (to be smart) 든든하다 (to be full) 단단하다/탄탄하다 (to be stout, solid, rigid, strong) 즉시즉시 (at each occurrence) 당당하다 (to be confident, dignified, imposing) 때때로 (sometimes, from time to time) 종종 (sometimes, from time to time) ...and that is just what comes to mind at the moment. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6341 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 165 of 559 15 August 2012 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
Yeah, I wonder why there are so many words with repeating syllables. But I guess I shouldn't complain, it makes the words easier to learn and hear. I guess this is why the male TTMIK host always says "something-something" instead of just "something" when it's a placeholder for any verb stem that you can attach an ending to. The female host used '모모' for the same purpose in lesson 3x07.
I was starting to realize this myself. I'm so happy to have started studying Korean because otherwise I would have missed all of this. Korean is fascinating and studying it is exciting. Yesterday I finished both texts (if you can call 5 sentences a text) of unit 5 on SNU so I'm officially done with this unit. I'll come back to those texts though, I still need to concentrate 100% in order to understand the audio, and sometimes I miss something even then. Listening to Korean is much more difficult for me than listening to Finnish. I also repeated the TTMIK lesson about linking verbs with -고 and then did the lesson about -서. This one will not be easy, it can be translated to so many different sentence types in English. And the fact that Koreans attach the word 'and' in all its various forms to the end of the first sentence instead of regarding it as the start of the second sentence (like the European languages do) is another concept that will be difficult to get used to. Today is the first day that I officially have more than 100 words to review in my Korean Anki deck. I'm kind of surprised it took this long. As for Finnish, I didn't do much yesterday, just read a part of one of the "News in Easy Finnish" articles and added some words to Anki. My Finnish vocabulary contains lots of high-level words like the government, fire people, publish a report, the director of a company, and so on. It feels like I'm learning the words sort of out of order, that there are more basic words I should be learning instead but reading internet news articles is what I like to do in Finnish so... That's just how it is. I'm sure my vocabulary gaps will get filled in eventually. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6341 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 166 of 559 17 August 2012 at 10:07am | IP Logged | ||
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I did very little studying in the last two days, and it's mostly because of Anki. Not directly but... I've been in this vicious circle where I want to push myself to learn as much as I can and I don't want to admit to myself when it's getting too much. I was reading kraemder's Japanese log yesterday and it reminded me how important sleep is for language studying (and not only for that). The review count in Anki has been growing slowly and steadily over the last few months, and more and more often I don't want to do the reviews so I procrastinate and then I can't go to sleep on time because I still must do the reviews. That causes me to be more tired the next day, which causes me to procrastinate more, and so it goes on and on. Not to mention that doing the reviews at night is not a good learning method because the brain works better during the day.
This is not a new problem for me, I've been trying to avoid this vicious circle practically since I started using Anki - with various amounts of success. But the more reviews I have to do, the more pronounced this problem becomes. I've tried to enter fewer new words and I've tried to learn them better before entering them into Anki but it hasn't been enough. So I feel something more drastic is in order. I've decided to remove my focus from vocabulary learning for a while and put it on grammar (and maybe writing practice). My plan is to keep doing the daily Anki reviews but enter only 2-3 words in each language per day. Hopefully that will cause my review count to go down a bit again. My plan is to pick up speed with vocabulary again once I start using Anki 2 and its new learning method, I think that might help me to learn the words better. The Anki statistics page tells me that I reviewed 114 cards per day on average during the last week in my Korean deck (105 cards per day during the last month), and 89 cards per day in my Finnish deck (83 during the last month). You can see the numbers are growing and I need to stop it somehow because it's really getting too much for me, especially since most of my cards are active cards and require more concentration to answer correctly. I almost forgot to mention that one of the reasons for this growing review count is that I went from mostly pressing the Good button to mostly pressing the Hard button. Pressing the Good button would probably cause the review count go down too but it's too long an interval for active cards for me so I think pressing 'Hard' is the right thing to do. That's enough about Anki. One thing I've been meaning to write about since Monday but always forgot is about the Finnish word oppia (to learn). Can you believe I saw this word for the first time only in TYF? Until then, I thought that opiskella (to study) means "to learn" because that's what my Russian textbook had stated in one of the first lessons. (And that was back when I hadn't discovered Wiktionary yet.) I think there's just one word for both of these meanings in Russian so my confusion may have come from that. Keeping in line with my new focus on grammar, I was looking for some information about the Finnish direct object on the internet and I came across this site. I only got as far as the 7th noun type but I'll be sure to read it all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6341 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 167 of 559 18 August 2012 at 9:50am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I'm feeling much more positive. I took my time with the Anki reviews yesterday and I reviewed 292 words in total. About 50-70 of them were leftovers from the previous day. Today I have to review only 96 Korean and 52 Finnish words, which is quite a lot less.
I did lessons 3x08 and 3x09 on TTMIK. I really wish they had some exercises because otherwise this stuff has a hard time sticking in my head. I guess I'll get back to my Korean textbook today to actually practice something. I worked on lesson 3 of TYF yesterday, it's about numbers, telling time and how to exchange money at the bank. I already know the numbers, of course, but I haven't practiced them much and I can't decipher them yet when they're spoken fast. So I'm using this lesson to practice it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6386 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 168 of 559 18 August 2012 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't say oppia and opiskella map directly onto learn and study. opiskella is technically a frequental verb, kinda like the continuous form in English. Like, the wiki example is "Haluan oppia uuden kielen" - I'd like to learn a new language. It's mostly used in general, about wanting or planning to learn, when asking "how to learn" etc. Opiskella just implies the process rather than the result, and it's not limited to the English "study". it's used for learning on your own, for example - opiskella omin päin.
as for sauna, the thing is that some things ARE a must to know. the verb saunoa - to have a sauna. the expression heittää löylyä - to pour water on the stones. you WILL be asked whether you mind it (as this makes the sauna hotter) or even asked to do that. and you also need to know that in public saunas men and women never sit together naked, that's a silly myth. oh and you do want to know whether in winter you can swim in an indoor pool or only in an avanto. (if it helps, it's related to the word avata) These are less relevant if you don't actually plan to go to Finland, I know. I suppose the book is mostly meant for people from St Petersburg and Karelia who live near Finland and travel there frequently. Edited by Serpent on 18 August 2012 at 1:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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