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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 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 473 of 559 03 July 2013 at 9:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I probably shouldn't make any plans since I rarely stick to them anyway. My plan to spend some time on German has gone nowhere, instead I've turned my attention back to Finnish. I've read a couple of news articles and I started lesson 8 of Suomea suomeksi. I've also been listening to the Finnish radio during work. Just a few hours a week.
I'm still watching MDSY. I won't bore you with the plot developments this time but here's an expression I've learned from watching the drama: 어떻게 된 거예요? It means "What happened?" or at least that's how it is usually translated in the subtitles. I didn't read this expression anywhere in Korean, I just heard it over and over again and at one point I just stopped to figure out how it must be spelled. I think I got the spelling right but I'm not too sure why it means what it means. The literal translation is something like "How is the thing that was done?" and it's quite a leap to get from that to "What happened?" I do know that Koreans often use 'how' or 'why' instead of 'what' but if anyone can explain this expression in a way that makes sense I'd appreciate it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5323 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 474 of 559 04 July 2013 at 7:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Remember that ~(으)ㄴ 거이다, despite its literal meaning of "is the thing that was ~", is really just a past tense form, so something like "how did it happen?" or "how did it become [the way it is]?" might be a better "literal" translation. 되다 forms don't often translate well in literal form anyway since 되다 has such numerous meanings and uses.
I agree with you about dramas where the plots are seemingly driven by nothing more than the characters inability to do anything but keep certain things secret for no obviously useful reason which leads to misunderstandings that should have never occurred in the first place. Dramas are much more watchable when they at least have a semi-logical reason behind their characters' behaviors. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 475 of 559 07 July 2013 at 11:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, Warp3, your explanation helped a bit. I guess the problem is that I haven't internalized this past form properly yet, I haven't seen it used a lot.
I wish I had a real paper Korean textbook. I have My Korean and Elementary Korean (and others as well) but they are all in electronic format and not as convenient to use. I've noticed that I'm much more likely to pick up one of my grammar books and study a random grammar point than study one of my electronic textbooks. I would definitely buy something in a local bookstore if there was anything but there's nothing, nothing Korean related at all, no dictionaries, no textbooks. I even called the library of our biggest university where they have Asian studies and they didn't have anything on Korean either, only on Chinese and Japanese. What a shame. The interesting thing though is that I heard they plan to offer Korean as an alternative to Chinese and Japanese starting from this September and I wonder how they are going to do it if they have nothing in the library. Maybe they'll buy something before September. I mentioned I want to study the scripts of a family drama because they have the easiest vocabulary, so I was looking through all the SBS weekend dramas on Wikipedia and trying to find something that would fit. I settled on Life is Beautiful, I found the Korean script but then I couldn't find the English subtitles. Argh! There are subtitles embedded in video on various websites but not in a text file. 몰라요. I'm so fickle and picky, I should just pick something and stick with it but I haven't managed it yet. Oh yeah, I finished MDSY. It had a satisfying ending so that counts for a lot. It was also less predictable than I feared so overall I liked it. Maybe you could have fit everything in 40 episodes and it would have been even better but you could say that for a lot of dramas. I managed to find the script for 3 episodes of MDSY so I am going to go through all the dialogue parts of at least one episode and see how it is, whether it's useful or not. I'm making the promise here so I can't back out of it. Opening HWP files is a bit of a headache. I don't have MS Office installed so the best way I found was to upload the files to member.thinkfree.com, open them with the online viewer and then copy the text into my local document. Aside from looking for and at scripts, I've been doing my normal activities. The size of my Anki vocabulary deck is almost 2200 words. Yesterday I found a post on Hangukdrama where the author says vocabulary lists don't work and to throw them away if we have any. The reason she gave was that words shouldn't be learned out of context. Reading all that made me quite angry and I considered writing a strong reply but in the end I refrained, it's no good arguing on the internet. Learning words without a context is acceptable, in my opinion, if you don't intend to use them actively right away, if you plan to see the context later. Just to be clear, I don't mind people expressing opposite opinions, it was just the "don't use them, throw away if you have any" part that I didn't like. It's good if it works for her but don't enforce it on everyone who happens to come by. Okay, rant over. Sorry. Oh yes, I did some Finnish as well, read a couple of articles with the help of Google Translate. I don't know if it helps much but at least I'm keeping the language active. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5323 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 476 of 559 07 July 2013 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Glad I could help. :)
Hmmm...I never realized Shanna was specifically opposed to isolated vocabulary learning, though I don't recall her making any posts about flashcards or SRS either, so I guess that makes some sense. Speaking of which: I need to start visiting her site again, as I've picked up some very useful information there (one of her posts is what got me started using Twitter as a reading source). Personally, I agree with both of you (as weird as that sounds). Some words (like concrete nouns and words with clear meanings and no homonyms) can be learned well without context, but some words aren't well suited that format since they are so context sensitive or have numerous homonyms making context imperative. That said, there is no reason you can't put context on the SRS card (which I do for words that fit that criteria). Once I stopped putting only sentences and phrases in my SRS, I went to using only the word itself on the question side *except* for words that need context (either because they are context-sensitive (like 되다) or because they have common homonyms). Words that fit that criteria get the smallest phrase I can find or build that distinguishes that meaning from any alternate meanings. Sometimes this is done by making a noun into a verb or adjective (often you'll find two nouns that are homonyms but only one can have ~하다 or ~되다 attached to become a verb or adjective). Other times it means including another word or two to make a phrase that can only fit one of the meanings of that word. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6760 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 477 of 559 08 July 2013 at 4:11am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't have any experience with Korean, but structured SRS vocabulary learning of 200 words a week has been the primary driver of my progress in Cantonese. Learning in context may be fine once you get your vocabulary up to a good enough level to understand 95% of the words you encounter, but if you are still trying to build up a base vocabulary, there will be simply too many words that you don't know. And it's impossible (at least for me) to learn from context if you don't understand half the sentence or don't have the time or ability to ask people what all the words mean. This is especially true in Asian languages, where there is almost no transparency with English. I've now learned about 4,000 Cantonese words, and still can't easily learn everything from context. I find context only important when idiomatic usage is at issue, in which case I just add a clarification point or example sentence to the Anki card. It seems terrible inefficient to me to wait until I encounter a word in context to learn it, when I can pre-learn the words and be prepared for those situations. In short, I agree with your approach, and I definitely won't be throwing away my vocabulary lists! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 478 of 559 11 July 2013 at 8:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm on vacation this week and I'm not at home and I haven't been studying almost anything even though I took a couple books with me and even though I could have made the time. I just didn't want to. Hopefully I can get back into my routine once I get back home. I've been trying to keep up with Anki but I'm reviewing only half or so of my cards every day. I'm having a really hard time concentrating on Korean while enjoying my vacation. Hopefully the catch-up won't be too hard.
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 479 of 559 15 July 2013 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lately I've been thinking more and more often that I won't last much longer with my current Anki habits. It's a lot of work every day and I need a lot of motivation to do it. And when I'm on vacation or simply want to relax during the weekend, it becomes too much of a chore. And like others have written on this forum, Anki is very good in the beginning stages of learning a language but once you have acquired a certain amount of basic vocabulary there are more fun ways to keep going, and that's reading in my case. I think I might be close to this threshold but I want to keep my Anki deck going for as long as I can because it's still the most efficient way to learn vocabulary.
I'm back at work today and I've also started to work on my Anki backlog. I don't know how big it is, probably several hundred cards, but I have my daily limit set to 150 reviews so that's what I'll try to do. If you factor in the new words and relearning words, it'll probably go over 200. If I can manage to get rid of the backlog during this week, I may have happier thoughts about Anki. Now, on a different subject. A long time ago, I wrote that I wanted to watch American TV shows with Korean subtitles. I recently tried that again and sadly I don't want to do it anymore because I realized the subtitles are not created by native Koreans. I read the word '당신' too many times. It's a pity, I thought this type of activity could be useful for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6340 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 480 of 559 19 July 2013 at 10:06am | IP Logged | |||||
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I haven't done a lot in the last few days, my Anki backlog is still 250 cards (I haven't been able to review all 150 cards even once during the week) but I do have my commuting time again so I've been using that to listen to the radio and work on Anki. I've also finished TTMIK level 7.
I've only 15 days left on my HaruKorean subscription and I haven't done anything. I'm a bit mad at myself for that. But at least I have started reading the MDSY transcript. Here's something I found accidentally: http://dic.impact.pe.kr It's a dictionary meant for Koreans who are studying English but it's usable the other way around as well. I'm in awe of how many example sentences and even example texts this site has. For example, I searched the word "step" and found this: "Possibly the most effective way to focus on your goals is to write them down. Although this may sound like an obvious first step, it is a step that many people ignore. As a result, their goals often remain unfocused, and therefore unrealized. Go to a fairly quiet place where you are not likely to be disturbed. Make a list of every goal you have. Include goals about finances, relationships, and your career. Be as specific as possible." 아마 당신의 목표에 집중할 수 있는 가장 효과적인 방법은 그것을 적어놓는 것일 것이다. 비록 이것이 자명한 첫걸음처럼 들리겠지만, 많은 이들이 이 과정을 무시한다. 이런 이유로 그들의 목표는 집중이 되지 않고, 따라서 실현되지 않는 것이다. 네가 방해받지 않을만한 아주 조용한 곳을 가라. 네가 가진 목표의 목록을 만들라. 재정, 관계, 직업에 대한 목표들도 포함시키라. 가능한 한 자세히. Can anyone confirm that the Korean translation is correct? If so, I can use this site as a source for parallel texts. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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