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Evita’s Mix of Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4650 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes  Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 153 of 236 06 October 2014 at 8:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it's great that you can join the Korean class whenever time allows. What a nice professor! How often do they meet?
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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 154 of 236 07 October 2014 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
I remember you mentioning this book, I have it as a PDF. I plan to read through it but not now, maybe next year.
Four times a week at 10:30. It's not quite as intensive as Tarko's classes over in Korea but it's still a lot. The bachelor program lasts three years and I think they plan to go through all four books during this time. I went to another lesson today and we practiced 것 같다. The girl next to me this time knew Korean even better than I did, I could tell she had watched a lot of Korean TV. I asked her about it and she said she's actually a first year student but she's been self-studying for about three years. I guess Korean entertainment lovers are not as rare in Latvia as I had thought. (Still pretty rare though.) 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 155 of 236 13 October 2014 at 11:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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Last week I decided to do another word-reordering on my Korean vocabulary deck. The last time I did this was in May, which is a long time ago. I've added lots of words since then that should be in the middle of the second thousand instead of the fourth one (so I reorder them periodically for the benefit of those who download my deck). I usually export the notes, rename the txt file to csv and edit it with LibreOffice Calc. This time though I decided to do it during the day at work. What a bad decision that turned out to be! No, don't worry, I didn't get into trouble at work or anything like that, I simply lost all the reordering work I had done during the three days. The problem was that I was using MS Excel to edit the file, and Excel (stupidly) saves the characters in ANSI encoding, not in Unicode, and I didn't know that. So when I took the file home on Friday evening and opened it again, there were only question marks instead of Korean letters. I tried everything to try to recover them, I even changed the default encoding in my Windows to Korean but it didn't help.
Oh well. Since there was nothing to be done, I just started again on Saturday. It might be even better this way because I found the pdf of "2000 Essential Korean Words" on the internet so I can check whether a given word is there or not. I also check them against this list of 6000 words. The overall order of words on this list isn't that useful because it only considers the printed media (or something like that), but there's a letter (A, B, or C) next to each word that shows how common that word is. I think the letters might be from the 6000 word book that Warp3 was using a while ago. Anyway, I'll probably keep working on my list for the next couple of weeks until I get sick of it and decide that the rest can wait. I'm still listening to Yoo Inna's podcasts almost every day. Last week I listened to the one from March 25 and since it was a Tuesday it had the 당신의 이유 segment, and for the first time I understood what it was about. This time it was about the reasons you still remember your school teachers. Even though I recognized a lot of words when they spoke, for the most part I still missed something to make sense of their sentences or their stories, but I was very happy that I mostly understood the first one. Basically the teacher was young and hot LOL. And she was an American history teacher. That's interesting, I didn't know Koreans had American history as a separate subject. 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 156 of 236 14 October 2014 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday I was reading an article on Dramabeans about the availability of Korean dramas on the internet. The comments below are most informative about various sites, circumventing your geographical location with VPN browser extensions and such stuff. One comment also linked to this article. Interesting.
I'm happy to report that I haven't heard the loud noise during the night since last Thursday even though I've been semi-awake and (subconsciously) listening for it. I'm so relieved that this problem appears to be fixed. I can't wait for my subconscious to get used to it and stop waiting for it. I'm also happy to report that I finally finished reading Iyagi #32. One useful expression I learned from it was "최선을 다하다" (to do one's best). I also figured out how to use Google Docs (I had never done it before) and imported my vocabulary list there. Now I can work on it both from work and from home without any problems. I'm disappointed that my grammar deck received another one star rating on Aniweb because the person couldn't open it or something. It's so demotivating but I think I may have figured out the root cause of the problem. The name of the deck in Anki is simply "Korean Sentences" but on Ankiweb it's "Evita's Korean Grammar Sentences". Anki users probably look for the same name in Anki and get confused when they can't find it. It's stupid, yeah, but it could actually be true. I'll have to rename the deck. 3 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 157 of 236 19 October 2014 at 9:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Look what I found! These are apps for vocabulary study. I checked out the Korean one and I was amazed to see that it offered translations into Latvian. I'm not a big fan of such apps in general because I like to choose myself which words to learn, but this app seems pretty good, it has lots of exercises disguised as games. The advanced level with all 6000 words is locked at first but you can watch a commercial to unlock it for 12 hours. Not too bad.
In other news, TTMIK have started offering news articles. They take 6 short articles a week, record them, translate them, and explain the more difficult grammar points. It's not free, though, a three month subscription costs $18. I don't think it's much to ask for 72 articles and I really want to buy this subscription but I'm holding myself back because I'm not ready for news yet. First I need to get comfortable with the Iyagis and build a vocabulary of over 5000 words, and then I can start thinking about the news. 3 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 158 of 236 20 October 2014 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As for what I did last week - nothing much except watching dramas, keeping up with Anki, listening to podcasts and sorting the Korean vocabulary list. "A couple of weeks" was clearly an unrealistic estimation for this job to be finished. It is an activity that requires a lot of concentration so I can't do it more than an hour per day. As a result, I'm only doing the letter ㄷ today (of the 2000 word list). I don't even want to guess when I'll be done, I just want to do it as quickly as I can so that I can focus on other things.
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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 159 of 236 25 October 2014 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Yesterday I went to the second Latvia - Korea club meeting. The first one was in spring and I missed it so I was excited to go to this one, but in the end I was rather disappointed. Sure, I met some Korean exchange students but most of the meeting was presentations about the Korean universities and Riga. There was no social part, no food, we just stayed talking a bit after the presentations had ended. I tried to talk to some of the Koreans but it didn't go very well. It was kind of chaotic and they didn't have a lot of time. Some of them were also not very good at speaking English. I'm sure it would have been much better if I had been able to speak Korean but I just couldn't. I will have to prepare something in advance if I go to a next meeting because otherwise it's such a wasted opportunity of speaking practice.
Now about something else. I don't write much about how I study my Anki vocabulary deck but that's only because it's become so automatic to do for me every day that it's not even worth mentioning. I started the deck in May 2012 and I've been studying it ever since. At the moment it has more than 3800 words. I've considered dropping it several times but never did it. It's an excellent way to make sure that my Korean keeps improving even if I don't study grammar or do anything else. I will keep this deck at least until I reach 5000 words and likely even longer. It's just something that works for me. Below are the latest stats from this deck. You can see that I rarely click the "Again" button for young cards, I usually click "Good" even if I didn't remember the word, I just spend a few seconds trying to memorize it again. That's why my time-per-card is so high. By the way, I do all my reviews on the phone these days. New cards I usually add on the computer, though. 
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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 160 of 236 31 October 2014 at 10:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I already mentioned that I was watching Yoona's Street. The problem is that it's on a cable network and none of the big streaming sites (like Viki or DramaFever) picked it up, and therefore there are no reliable subtitles available. There was a fan subbing team working on it (otherwise I wouldn't have started watching it) but the members apparently have gotten busy with real life and the subtitles have stopped at episode 36 even though episodes 45&46 were aired this week. There's no guarantee that the subtitles will eventually be completed and I didn't want to wait that long anyway so I decided to continue watching the drama without subtitles.
It's an interesting experience. I'm up to episode 43 now and I can understand enough in order to follow the basic plot. A lot of the conversations go over my head though. For example, there's one character that received a blackmail threat. Others are trying to figure out who the threat came from. I can understand that they are talking about it and that they still can't figure out who it is but I can't understand the details of their conversations. To be fair, sometimes it depends on how carefully I am listening. I can't listen actively all the time and when I don't then my level drops considerably. It's okay though. I'll probably rewatch these episodes in a year or so to see what I missed this time around. At least I have no problem understanding the easy conversations when they are talking about going somewhere or meeting someone or things like that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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