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Evita’s Mix of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5324 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 57 of 236 20 February 2014 at 2:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Like CZ noted, web comics can be good for short chunks of reading as well and the
language used in them doesn't seem quite as difficult as most books (usually, depending on the topic). Since i read various web comics daily anyway, I started feeding in some Korean and Spanish ones (and phased out a few English ones that had lost my interest). The only Korean one I'm currently reading is 와라! 편의점 (which is mostly about life working at a convenience store), but there are a ton available on both Naver and Daum. Here is the Korean web comic I current read: LINK That link starts you at page 1 (which was posted 2008.07.02). I've been reading one per day and I'm up to 389 read as of today. While grabbing the link I noticed that there are 574 strips total at the moment for that series, so I've made quite a dent in them, though I'm reading them faster than new ones are posted (they seem to be posted twice a week based on the dates on the last few). EDIT: Oh and my favorite episode yet (by far) has been this one: LINK It's a bit funnier if you get the two pop song references he is making near the end (Big Bang and Jewelry, respectively). Edited by Warp3 on 20 February 2014 at 2:32am 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 58 of 236 20 February 2014 at 8:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I haven't tried any web comics yet but it might be a good idea. I know I've had the thought several times to look up this 와라! 편의점 but I never actually did it. Now that Warp3 has so kindly provided the link, I'll check it out on the weekend. Thanks!
In German-related news, I haven't studied it but I still have to use it at work. Yesterday there was a bit of a problem and a Swiss colleague wanted to text-chat with me at first and then to call me on the phone. I honestly panicked when he said that because I knew I would be very bad at a phone conversation, especially if he spoke with a Swiss accent, so I tried to tell him that my colleague was working currently on the problem. I wrote "[Name] ist" and was trying to remember the continuous form of "arbeiten". Only after 20 seconds did I realize that such a form didn't exist in German. Yes, that's what my German looks like under pressure. 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 59 of 236 22 February 2014 at 8:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think this comic stuff is for me. First of all, why are all the people without eyes??? And the huge heads, OMG. I have to consciously tell myself to ignore the heads. But that aside, I can't read them well enough to understand them. I mean, I think I got the basic idea - a customer shows up, wants to buy a pack of cigarettes, he is asked to show his card but he's probably underage so he shows another person's card instead with his finger covering the photo. So? Was there a joke in there that I missed? I tried looking up words like 돈힐, 생긴건, 고딩 but couldn't find anything. There were also some grammar constructions and expressions I couldn't figure out. For example: 손님 맞을래요? Do you want to be right, customer? Or do you want to be hit, customer? None of that makes any sense.
Sure, I could keep reading understanding only half of it, I would definitely improve over time but I won't do it because it makes me feel stupid. I can't understand it even with the help of a dictionary. And that's a shame since I was looking forward to the reading material. 1 person has 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 60 of 236 22 February 2014 at 9:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I've looked up maybe 2-3 words out of that whole series. Don't get me wrong, there are
far more words than that I haven't known, but I've chosen to read that comic as "extensive reading" practice, so if I don't get something, I just shrug and keep going. There are some of those where I've understood everything and others where I have no clue what they are talking about for the bulk of the strip. It just varies based on the topic and the vocabulary used in each episode. The only time I've gone and looked something up is because I felt that one word was blocking my overall understanding of the strip in general (like it is repeated throughout that strip, but I can't figure it out from context). Otherwise, I just read. Also, the second link I included (which was my favorite strip so far from that series) shouldn't give you much in the way of vocabulary or grammar trouble as it is a fairly simple topic (methods for dealing with a customer who speaks to you in a foreign language).
I absolutely hated it when that happened early on in my Korean studies. The only way I got around it was to give up. No, really. If you can't understand it despite understanding all the components of it, then there is some bit of information you simply don't have yet that is necessary to decode it (background context, the original form of something that appears there in truncated and/or misspelled form, etc.). The only way (in my opinion) to avoid letting that drive you up the wall (short of asking someone every time this occurs) is to just ignore it and move on. Eventually, you'll circle back and see that same content again and frequently it will just make sense at that point. When I reviewed my old vocabulary notebook a couple years after I had stopped using it, the "CNF" (could not find) entries all made perfect sense in retrospect. More importantly, it was obvious that, for most of them, no amount of searching would have led to me finding the solution (often due to something like the words being intentionally misspelled or the word simply being an onomatopoeia, but not one standardized enough to be in the dictionary). Edited by Warp3 on 22 February 2014 at 9:21pm 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 61 of 236 22 February 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Oh, I had hoped you would provide some kind of an explanation about the first episode. But anyway, like you said, I'm giving up. I need to stick to materials where the English translation is available.
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| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5324 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 62 of 236 22 February 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I meant "give up trying to understand everything" and just consume material, not give up
on the media form. I'm definitely a perfectionist, but I've had to learn to curb that tendency with language-learning as most of the time it simply makes you frustrated rather than helping.
I'd always assumed this was a brand name of cigarettes since I've only seen it in that context. Actually, I just confirmed it. I searched Daum's dictionary (the K-K, not the K-E one) and it found it in a reference to this comic strip as the only example, however it had a correction of "던힐" out to the side. I searched for that and it is a cigarette brand, as in "Dunhill".
I would translate this as "as for (his) appearance" as a shortened from 생긴 것은. 생기 다 is the descriptive verb "to look (a certain way)" as seen in 잘생겼다 and 못생겼다 ("be attractive" and "be unattractive").
고딩 = slang for 고등학생 (when paired with the last answer it shows that she is stating that he looks like a high school student, which if true would make him too young to buy cigarettes) I guessed this one from previous context (but looked it up anyway to be certain before posting this) as 은지원 is often called by the nickname of 은초딩 on variety shows and 초 딩 = 초등학생. This is a good example of using Daum's K-to-K dictionary when their K-to-E dictionary shows nothing. 고딩 comes up blank in the K-to-E dictionary, but K-to-K gives: "【명사】 고등학교에 다니는 학생을 얕잡아 이르는 말." I've found myself doing this more and more lately as slang terms are often not in the K-to-E dictionaries but are in the K-to- K dictionaries at the very same sites.
The second one is pretty dead-on. As you continue reading you discover that 혜연 has a bit of a violent streak and has been known to threaten customers (think "Alice" in the US strip "Dilbert" if you've ever read that or the female lead in 엽기적인 그녀 (My Sassy Girl) with her constant "너 죽을래?" (You want to die?) threats). The meaning there is "Do you want hit?" (with 손님 filling the "you" role there as she is addressing the customer). Edited by Warp3 on 22 February 2014 at 10:31pm 3 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 63 of 236 23 February 2014 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Thanks for the explanations, now it makes a little more sense. However, I'm not using any Kor-Kor dictionaries yet and I'm not planning to start soon, I consider it too much for my current level. And as I said, I prefer to read something with a translation for now.
I do feel that my Korean hasn't been improving much lately, I mean in the last few months since I stopped regarding my Anki deck as important. I still continued to work with it but at a slower pace than before and not worrying about backlogs. Now I have decided that it's time to get back to it seriously so I've worked hard the last 3 days and got my backlog down to under a hundred notes. Another couple of days and it should be gone. The trick is to remember to do the reviews throughout the day because I can't do them all in one or even five tries. Usually I do them in about, I don't know, maybe 20 or more tries. It's not that difficult, I can do them on my phone anytime, I just have to remember it. And I'm determined that I will. I don't remember if I wrote this before but a while ago I started watching a drama called Smile, You. It's a family drama and quite boring in spots but that's mostly why I chose it - I wanted something that would be in Korean but wouldn't suck me in and distract me from studying. I'm over halfway now and I'll probably be reading the scripts after I finish it. I noticed in November last year that SBS stopped publishing the transcripts of the new episodes of their shows so I have to make do with old shows. My German goals haven't disappeared anywhere but right now I feel the urge to spend time on Korean and I don't want to fight it. The time for German will come soon. 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 64 of 236 26 February 2014 at 9:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I did it! My Anki deck is finally back to normal, no backlog anymore. I will increase the number of new words to 6 daily for the next couple of weeks and then I'll see how it goes, whether it's too much or not. And coincidentally, I just passed the 3000 word mark today. Yay! It's a big milestone for me. For some reason the number 3000 always seemed important to me (like it should get easier after that to read native materials and learn new words) so I'm excited to finally get it done.
Now's the perfect time to think about watching a drama without subtitles again because KBS just started airing a new family drama and it's not subtitled yet. I downloaded the first episode and started watching it but I didn't get very far, I think they were speaking with a Busan or some kind of other accent. I want to wait and see if maybe there are recaps on some site, then I would definitely watch it raw. But if I can't find a recap then I'm not sure I'll go through with it. Maybe a better idea would be to rewatch SG or something else without subtitles. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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