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TAC 2013: Korean & Arabic | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5988 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 17 of 51 28 January 2013 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey billyshears66, thanks for your comment and good luck to you, too.
For my weekly progress report: Liberated from Anki, I had a great week with my languages, and especially with KOREAN. Online, I did three advancedkorean.com lessons (this involves reading short newspaper articles) and one GLOSS (2+ level) lesson (listening to a short broadcast and then answering a series of questions that help develop comprehension). I also watched a couple hours worth of miscellaneous Korean TV programs on YouTube. For more listening practice, I studied Chapter 5 of my 말하기 쉬운 한국어 book. This is a series of 12 books that I've been working with on and off for a few years. I started using it when I was a high beginner because it was about the only thing I could understand at the time. I've continued with it since it provides good supplementary listening practice along with transcripts of each dialogue. As of this week, I'm almost done with Volume 8. In my Korean class, we're studying Sogang 5A Chapter 3. It's slightly boring compared to my own outside reading, but it's really the only speaking I'm doing lately. I read the last three short stories in 벙어리 동찬이, a book of short stories for upper elementary kids that I've been working on for a while. The stories varied in difficulty, but I definitely noticed the reading getting easier towards the end; practice makes perfect. I find it amazing the number of words I can recognize while reading, though I would never be able to come up with the words myself, nor would I recognize them in a list, absent their context. Over the weekend I started my next book, 빈처 (Poor Man's Wife), which is a short story for adults and much, much harder to read. It's one of the volumes in the series Bi-Lingual Edition Modern Korean Literature. I'm leaning heavily on the translation during this reading, but I plan to read the story a second time bareback (without the translation). This is the most excited I've been about reading a Korean book; I'm absolutely loving it! As for ARABIC, I wasn't going to do it but couldn't resist ordering an Arabic textbook. I don't want to get bogged down in MSA, but I bought Mastering Arabic 1 by Wightwick & Gaafar, which comes with some CDs and is supposed to be good for self-learning. I completed the first chapter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4658 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 18 of 51 28 January 2013 at 12:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Have you read any non-fiction so far? It's usually easier than literature and may be fun to read without translation right from the beginning. I wish I could get hold of some interesting nonfiction books here in Germany.
Seeing as how you live in Korea I'm surprised that your only speaking lately was in your language class. At your level I suppose it wouldn't be difficult to find Koreans to talk to. Have you heard of the language cast meetings the TTMIK people organise? I suppose that's only relevant in Seoul and Busan, but it might be a fun way to practice Korean and maybe also Arabic later :) Btw, I'm looking forward to your 자기 소개 for the challenge! I'm not sure how closely you follow the team thread, we have had a lot of inspiring written and audio introductions, but only 2 in Korean so far. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5988 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 19 of 51 29 January 2013 at 1:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi druckfehler. For non-fiction it's mostly just newspaper articles and I'm also reading a short biography of Korean artist Oh Yoon which I forgot to mention above. It's hard to tear myself away from fiction; I really love it. What kind of non-fiction do you want to read?
It's actually surprisingly hard to speak Korean in my particular situation. All the Koreans I know or am apt to meet are completely fluent in English. I have brief exchanges with the dry cleaner, cleaning ladies, cashiers, etc., but to actually socialize with someone in Korean, I don't have anyone like that right now. And though I live in Seoul, I'm out of the age range for Language Cast. I'll figure something out eventually. I heard your introduction and was so impressed. I'll try to write something soon. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4658 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 20 of 51 01 February 2013 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Actually, just general non-fiction, nothing too complicated. Several people recommended 아프니까 청춘이야 and I think biography might also be nice.
I also think reading fiction in Korean is a treat, although it's still quite difficult for me. Bilingual works well, but when I have to look up a lot of words to even just get a sense of the subtleties it spoils the fun a bit. But there's also a certain charm in that, I think. Or maybe it's just that there's a certain charm in Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5988 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 21 of 51 04 February 2013 at 2:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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This week I had planned to produce a self-intro for the Asian Team challenge but I got very wrapped up in other things I was working on and missed the deadline. I didn't mean to blow it off and will still get around to it, but sometimes I become obsessed with something and when that happens I just go with it.
This week 세상을 바꾸는 시간 15분 ate up hours of my time as I watched one episode after another. They are short 15-minute lectures delivered by a variety of different people and they tend to be about self-improvement, self-help, life lessons, etc. I don't understand them completely, and of course each one is different, but on average they strike me as fairly low-brow and cliched. Some of them I watch a few times, improving my understanding each time. They're very challenging for me to try to follow, but I notice that if I watch them one after another for a long time, I start understanding better and translating less. If I could just force myself to watch an hour or two a day I think my listening would get so much better. Besides this extensive listening practice, I also finished the short story, Poor Man's Wife, by Eun Hee-kyoung, with great assistance from the translation, and I plan to read it all over again, this time forcing myself not to use the translation (but it's so tempting!!!) I also read a short biography of Oh Yoon, a Korean artist who was active in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s until his premature death at age 40 in 1986. This book, with many beautiful color illustrations of Oh Yoon's work, is written for children and covers the artist's childhood, the cultural and political influences that propelled his work (traditional Korean dance and theater; the student pro-democracy movement), and descriptions of his artistic techniques (especially printmaking). I chose this book because of his gorgeous art work, and this volume (희망을 새긴 판화가 오윤) is part of a series, 어린이 미술관, which includes biographies of many more noteworthy Koreans. I did some googling and could find almost no information online in English about this artist, so being able to read a Korean children's book introduced me to an artist I could never have learned about otherwise. I covered Chapter 6 in my 말하기 쉬운 한국어 textbook, so I'm all done with volume 8 and ready to start volume 9. I use these books primarily for the listening practice on the CDs, and I noticed with this latest book that I'm not learning much from them because they're not very hard. I will try the next book and if it's fairly easy I'll skip ahead, because I'm finding that I learn more if things are out of my reach. I need to work on my production of Korean, so this week I'm going to try to force myself to do some writing. I enjoy reading and it's hard to tear myself away. I didn't work on ARABIC at all this past week. Very bad. It's obviously not as fun being at the very beginning of learning a new language. Everything is painful and slow and the payoff seems so far away. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Takato Tetraglot Senior Member HungaryRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4838 days ago 249 posts - 276 votes Speaks: Hungarian*, EnglishB2, GermanB2, Japanese | Message 22 of 51 11 February 2013 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yeah. Sometimes it's hard to appreciate the novelties of studying a language you don't know much. Maybe you could look back at the your progress like this:
Or learn the Levantine dialect for the most part, if that's your ultimate goal. Among the materials teaching dialectal Arabic, not all textbooks are based on MSA (e.g. Spoken Lebanese seems like it doesn't require knowing MSA). I suppose you could try the Pimsleur Eastern Arabic course as well. Of course I didn't try either one. Reaching your goal may seem far off but if you stick to your learning consistently (like, not trying to learn too fast nor going elsewhere but reviewing the stuff you learn and learn some new stuff only when you feel confident at the previously learned items) then you definitely will reach it one day.
I guess your Korean took a bit of a time as well. :P Learning a language to fluency takes time. So I'd say it's the way to go that you incorporate your study in your daily life and review things when they feel complicated to learn (going through the same thing anew usually makes it easier to comprehend it). Edited by Takato on 11 February 2013 at 11:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5988 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 23 of 51 12 February 2013 at 7:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for your comment, Takato. I agree with you, incorporating the study into daily life the key to consistency. I can't live without Korean at this point, but fitting Arabic into my life is taking some time. I don't want to give up on it though.
Unfortunately, I have a strong perfectionist streak and though understanding spoken Levantine Arabic is my goal, and I swore I would not get hung up on MSA, I now find myself bogged down in the alphabet and learning to read. I'm not very good at learning aurally and I tend to forget things that I haven't read. My Arabic is not going well, but my husband keeps reminding me to get back to it (it's his native language), so I really don't think I'll drop it. Yes, Korean took me forever and now I remember why. The early stages of a language aren't fun for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5988 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 24 of 51 21 February 2013 at 4:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I haven't posted for a while, so thought I should do so today and not let my log go completely dormant.
I am continuing to work on Korean every day, though admittedly not with the same fervor. Am I burning out? Losing interest? Feeling discouraged? My progress with the language has always been halting and I've quit many times over the years, so at least I know enough not to quit again. As long as I'm doing something, anything with Korean every day, I am making progress even if it doesn't feel that way. I'm enrolled in a Korean class that offers 6 hours of weekly instruction and I've been faithfully completing the homework. I have been keeping up with the course but haven't been reviewing the lessons so I do forget a lot. Lately, I'm primarily reading. I should be doing more listening but frankly I enjoy reading more, so during this low-motivation slump I am kicking back with a book, doing the activity that I am least likely to shirk. I re-read Poor Man's Wife, an adult-level short story. Now I've started a book of short stories by Hwang Sun Won. The first story is called Sonagi, a story of first innocent love between two children. It is possibly Korea's most famous modern story, read by every Korean kid at school. I finished that story and then read the second one, 닭제, about a youth's senseless killing of his own pet rooster and his subsequent mental and physical suffering. These stories are written very simply and read by school children, but they were not written specifically for children. There's a lot of new vocab for me to plow through and I've been using a dictionary. In my Korean class, we are nearing the end of the Sogang 5A book. Compared to other books in the series, this one focuses heavily on reading rather than listening. There is a CD with the book, but it's mostly recordings of the essays rather than invented dialogues. During the summer when I don't take a class I will need to review the book extensively because there's a huge amount of vocab that I've barely glanced at. I hope the coming week will see my motivation return. I sense that I need to find more new and interesting ways to use Korean to keep my energy level high. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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