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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 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 497 of 559 26 August 2013 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Renate! Nice to see you haven't completely disappeared.
LOL, I never thought of it that way but it may be quite true. As for dramas, I use Dramabeans for all my information regarding what to watch and what not. The Open Threads are most useful for that, everyone writes what they watch and how they like it. So I checked out both current ghost stories even though I never watch horror films, and I liked Who Are You a lot better than Master's Sun. Who Are You is kind of like a police procedural and that's my thing, while MS seems so silly in comparison. The main reason I want to watch MS is that it's on SBS and it has a transcript available. On the other hand, SBS also has had lots of other dramas so it's not a very good reason. Well, it doesn't matter, I'll just watch what I feel like. I want to check out Two Weeks as well but I'm going to wait until it's finished. Oh and I also checked out Queen's Classroom but dropped it after one episode (and after reading up on how it ended). No matter how good this drama may be, I simply have no desire to watch a teacher torture 12 year old kids just to teach them how difficult life is. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 498 of 559 29 August 2013 at 9:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm still trying to get back into my routine but it's difficult because I've been busy at work and I haven't had enough sleep so I haven't been eager to study in the evenings. My Anki backlog is still about 250 cards so it will take a while to catch up. I still have my maximum daily review card count set to 120 in Anki and more often than not I can't manage even that.
Two days ago I was looking for a radio station to listen to on my way home from work. The Korean stations kept disconnecting, and I didn't feel like Finnish or German so I found a Spanish radio station called Portal Argentina. Some kind of travel show was on the air and I was thoroughly enjoying how much I could understand it, maybe 70-80%. What I couldn't understand was because of my lack of vocabulary, not because they were speaking too quickly. I got fond of the Argentinian kind of Spanish a long time ago when I was watching a telenovela called Muñeca Brava, even though I was watching it with a Russian voice-over. Go figure. Speaking of Russian, I've gotten a lot more comfortable with speaking it. I don't do it a lot but I have the feeling that I could. Yesterday I was taking a walk with a Russian colleague who knows Latvian pretty well but is not really fluent, and we were talking in a mix of Latvian and Russian, like two sentences would be in Russian, then three sentences would be in Latvian, and so on. I hadn't had this kind of experience before I started working on this project so it's pretty interesting. Speaking of Korean dramas, I finished watching LSS. The last episodes were pretty good and the ending was satisfying so I think I'll have good memories of it. I'm kind of sad that it's over but I'm also looking forward to the new drama. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 499 of 559 01 September 2013 at 12:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a dream in German last night! I don't remember what it was about but I do remember waking up and thinking "wow, German, cool". But I didn't study any German this week, only listened to a bit of radio.
I worked a bit on my Korean textbook, finished lesson 8 and started lesson 9. I also worked through the first 4 minutes of this video. Practically everything I've watched in Korean so far has been dramas but I do want to learn more about the actors and the entertainment industry so I'll try watching this Entertainment Weekly show. I found it by accident but it's cool, especially the parts where they speak in English and have Korean subtitles. I found several words for my Anki there, like 멋지다, 할리우드, 유지하다, 명성. They also have two actors from Secret Garden in this particular episode, that's a bonus for me. I decided to keep watching Master's Sun after all. I don't like the horror stuff but overall it's fun enough. I'm also reading (or trying to read) the transcript. I've discovered that the best way for me to work with a transcript is to read it right after watching it because otherwise I forget the English translation and, well, it's just too boring to read old scripts. So I watch a scene, then I press pause, find the scene in the transcript, start reading it, try to understand, look up the unknown words, decide whether they should go into Anki, if yes then add them, etc. As you can imagine, this process is very slow and it's not really fun to watch a drama this way so I need to find a good compromise of how much to read and how much to just let go by. Reading drama transcripts is a very important activity for me (because understanding dramas is one of my main goals) but it's also very time-consuming and tiring. I hope that it will get easier with time. 갈수록 쉬워질 거예요. I also watched about half an hour of the new weekend drama, King's Family, before I decided to wait for subtitles after all. I had read the synopsis so I could understand the major things going on but I felt I was still missing a lot and it was not worth watching it like that. I'm also thinking about watching Giant, a weekend drama from 3 years ago. I don't know if I'll have the time but it has a transcript available so I've started downloading it. I've heard good things about it. My hanja list has 18 characters at the moment and I've already recognized some as part of words I already know - 了, 人, 入, 力. I'm not learning how to write them, just the meaning and the pronunciation. I'm so glad there's usually just one way to pronounce each of them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5317 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 500 of 559 01 September 2013 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Having single readings for each character is rather nice (unlike in, say, Japanese). There are some with more than that, but the vast majority only have a single pronunciation in Korean.
One thing I found interesting after studying Hanja for a while is that I started mentally breaking apart new words into their Hanja to decode them (not even intentionally, it just automatically happens with Sino-Korean words now). Due to how this happens, it actually works better with subtitled material or material where I can guess the meaning of the word from context. For example, I recently saw 태평양 (which I already knew as Pacific Ocean) used in a song on 도전 1000곡 and noticed 대서양 used along with it, which I guessed meant Atlantic Ocean based on the context (it also had 인도양, which was obviously Indian Ocean, in the same line). Immediately I started breaking the word apart mentally. 양 = 洋 (ocean), 서 = 西 (West), 대 = 大 (big, great)...thus "great West ocean". When I then looked up the word, I confirmed that yes that word does mean the Atlantic Ocean and yes those are the exact Hanja that form that word. Granted you could do something similar without the Hanja (by just remembering the roots, such as 서 often means "West") but it seems to help having that extra mental hook to attach to designate *which* 서 root is present by attaching to an actual distinct character (西). Occasionally I will pick the wrong Hanja in my head (especially with roots like 자 where 子 (아들) and 者 (놈/사람) are both pronounced that way and both can be used as a "person" suffix), but it gets more accurate over time. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 501 of 559 01 September 2013 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I have been doing the same thing without knowing Hanja but it's difficult because often the meaning of individual characters is not obvious (and I haven't been checking the Naver hanja dictionary).
To update my log, I'm practically done with lesson 9 of my textbook. The most interesting bit of information I got out of it was about the use of the -고 싶다 construction. Usually it is used with the object marking particle (밥을 먹고 싶어요) but it can also be used with the subject marking particle if you want to emphasize that you really want to do something: 아이스크림이 먹고 싶어요. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 502 of 559 05 September 2013 at 10:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I'm having fun with Korean. Yesterday I finally finished my Anki backlog and today I had only 57 cards to review. That feels like nothing, I can easily do it during commute or breaks at work. But now that I'm studying more new cards again, I'm sure the review number will rise again. That's fine, as long as it doesn't rise above 90.
I've been listening to the title song of Good Doctor, I almost know all the words by heart now. And since GD is the kind of show I don't mind watching each episode twice, I've adopted the following manner for watching it: Monday's episode on Monday (without subtitles) and on Tuesday or Wednesday (with subtitles), then Tuesday's episode (without subtitles although they are already available by this time) and then repeat it with subtitles on the weekend. I've tried this approach for a couple of weeks and it works well. At first I tried watching first both episodes without subtitles and then both of them subtitled but it was too confusing from the story point of view. Lesson 10 of EK is a review lesson. I've done very few exercises in all my time studying Korean (because they are not fun and I don't have a class where it would be required) and I don't see it changing much but this lesson has a section of 50 Korean sentences and I want to at least read them all. Then I'll consider this lesson done. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 503 of 559 09 September 2013 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||
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There's not much to report this time, except that I was a little sick and thus not very inclined to studying. But I've kept up with Anki and I'm almost done with those 50 sentences in lesson 10. I've also kept up with my dramas. Master's Sun has risen quite a lot in my estimation, it may even become my favorite Hong sisters drama. Who Are You, on the other hand, has become more boring but I'll still finish it. I haven't started watching Wang Family yet because there are no subtitles available, not even hardcoded. What's up with that? I hope they do become available in the next couple of weeks but if not then I'll try watching it without subtitles (again). But for now, I've started watching Giant. It took me a long time to finish the first episode because it's so tragic and I knew what was coming and I kept postponing watching it LOL. But it's a family drama that has a transcript available so I'm going to watch it and use it for studying.
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6334 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 504 of 559 12 September 2013 at 10:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Good Doctor continues to be awesome and I'm happy with how much I can understand without subtitles. I noticed this especially in episode 11 - I was never totally lost in a scene except when they were talking about hospital politics or medical stuff. Of course I can't understand whole conversations yet but I can usually catch enough keywords so that I can figure out what's going on. I laughed when Yoon-seo said "빨리 빨리 대답합니다" because she was imitating Si-on and it was supposed to be funny. It was one of the first Korean jokes I understood without a translation.
I also watched my first Master's Sun episode without subtitles and I have to say I had way more difficulty with that one. I hadn't intended to watch it that way but the previous episode ended on a love confession so naturally I wanted to know what happened next. To my disappointment, I could understand very little of the dialogue that followed. I think this drama uses more complex grammar and vocabulary than GD but that could be just my imagination. Anyway, even though I had no subtitles, SBS had already published the transcript of the episode so I thought to check it out and see if I could understand more after reading it. Well, it turned out that no, reading it didn't help a lot. If I had spent 3 minutes on every sentence trying to figure it out then maybe it would have helped but I was not in the mood to do that so I just watched the episode. Now it's all such a mess with all these dramas, I can hardly remember what I have already watched and what I should rewatch. I can't wait to not need subtitles anymore. I've been sick and tired these last few days so I didn't have the energy to do much more after work than watch dramas but I did look up their soundtracks on youtube and downloaded some songs. I'll be mining the lyrics for words to learn. And speaking of words, Anki is going great. I'm learning 7 new words a day and currently I'm at 2455 total. The number of reviews has been between 65 and 80 so still manageable. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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