It’s January, a time when everyone sets goals for learning and self-improvement! So I’m also jumping on the bandwagon…
…Or that was the plan, but I realize I don’t have any serious plans for Cantonese lately. I’ve realized my stumbling block is the inability to make the transition from manufactured dialogues meant for learners to actual native-speaker material. In every language there’s a gap between the written language and the spoken one. But in Cantonese it’s even worse because they’re two different languages.
Last year, I looked around online to try and find a solution. Something to help me cross the intermediate plateau I’d reached. My research led me to two learning packages that people have offered for sale that feature just that kind of native Cantonese material, but I didn’t act on it and then I lost the links.
Cantonese Goal:
Sometime in 2020, track those packages down and give them a try to see if they can help me understand native material better. My long-term goal for the language isn’t complicated. I just want to be able to follow the occasional movie, Hong Kong drama and cooking/variety show online.
Korean Goal:
Long-term, I want to be able to read raw manhwa. That’s it. I’m not that into K-dramas, and anything that’s good will be immediately subbed anyway.
As I mentioned in my last post on learning Korean, I need to work hard on my grammar. Vocabulary is coming along well thanks to Memrise and other sources, but just knowing words isn’t enough. From now till the end of April, my goal is to make it through the extremely boring but helpful Korean Culture Series & Quick Korean lessons on Youtube. I only have 66 lessons left to go, so I could be done by early March if I did a lesson a day.
Once I get those done, I will return with updated goals for the language. Korean is going to be a bigger focus than Cantonese, mostly because there are far more free and useful resources out there so it’s an easier process. See you in a couple of months with an update, God willing!
I mentioned ages ago that I’ve been learning Korean idly for a while. And that most of my work is being done thanks to Talk to me in Korean – the website and the Memrise version. I promised to come back and report on my progress after two levels but now I’m almost done with the third level, so better late than never. Should mention the main means I’ve been using to learn Korean:
-Mainly going through the Talk to me in Korean lessons at a rate of two or three lessons a week. Listening to the podcasts and reading the PDFs doesn’t take that long, but practising sentences on Memrise takes longer and is, frankly, a little bit boring but really helpful for making the lessons stick on my head.
-Learning more vocab through a variety of other Memrise lessons.
Learned almost 600 words so far through the How to Study Korean Unit 1 course. Some overlap with the previous course.
Learned almost 170 words through the Korean through Hanja course. Because I know Japanese, I find Hanja EXTREMELY helpful when trying to learn Korean. If you have a Japanese or Chinese/Cantonese background, definitely go through hanja when trying to memorize intermediate and advanced vocabulary. It will make sooo much more sense, and once you learn what sound maps unto what sound (e.g. “ten” in Japanese usually becomes “chon” in Korean, “tai” becomes “che” etc), with a little context you can often guess what a word is supposed to be without a dictionary.
Watched a lot of the videos on Learn Korean with GO! Billy Korean channel. His explanations are excellent because he looks at things from an English-speaker’s perspective. And Keykat the teddy bear is cute.
-Supplementing the above two with Evita’s Korean Sentence Deck and another Hanja vocabulary builder deck on Anki. Not regularly though.
-Just started trying to follow real conversations through Youtube “Learn Korean through drama” type videos. Here’s one good channel with regular updates: FnE Korean. And another one, slightly harder and hasn’t updated in 2 years: Listen to Siri.
SO! After 80 lessons (out of 267), how good is my Korean? LOOOOOOOL, not that good! How do I tell? Well, it’s totally subjective, but my current goal in learning Korean is being able to read all the fun, beautifully-colored wish fulfillment manhwa they pump out, in the raw. A lot of it is scanlated up to date, but a few of them are way behind.
For example “This Girl is a little Wild” is scanlated up to chapter 37 as of writing, but is up to chapter 50 in the raws. “Sincerely: I Became a Duke’s Maid” is up to chapter 13 as of October 24, 2019, but up to 32 raw. And so on, and so forth. Also I’m greedy and would like to read things as soon as they come out. And there are so titles that have been abandoned/not discovered yet.
What about K-drama? I haven’t started one in a while. I would like to eventually be able to understand those, but the chances of a drama being good enough for me to like and yet not actively subtitled is almost non-existent, so I’m not worried about that. Besides, finding a good, non-cheesy, non-overwrought drama is a pain, so I wouldn’t learn Korean just for that.
This means “You’re noisy” or “You’re making noise.”
Back to the main point: since my goal is to read manhwa raw, the easier I find it to read manhwa, the better I can determine I am getting. Manhwa is good because the images help a lot with context, but you still need to understand the text in the end. Based on my recent attempts in the past week, I can say this:
I’ve definitely made a lot of progress. Thanks to my knowledge of vocabulary, I can usually figure out the subject and topic of most dialogue so I have some idea what each chapter about. It was even easier when I made a home-made Korean keyboard (lots of masking tape was involved) so I could easily google unfamiliar vocabulary.
I still need to work on grammar. Vocabulary helps you understand that the sentence involves “dog” and “eat” but if you don’t understand the verb conjugation, you don’t know if the dog was eaten, the dog ate, will eat, will be eaten with much delight, etc.
I need to learn “ban mal” i.e. casual Korean speech and verb endings, and fast. For real life conversations you’ll want to be as polite as possible, but in dramas, books, manhwa, there’s a lot of casual and abbreviated speech that most structured courses won’t prepare you for.
My next goals for learning Korean are thus as stated above. Learn more vocabulary, learn a ton more grammar and get familiar with casual forms as quickly as possible. So I would say that Talk to me in Korean does help a lot, but there’s so much grammar out there and they’ve only covered a fraction in 80 lessons, so if you focus on that exclusively, you won’t get far. Definitely supplement from other sources, especially when it comes to vocab.
That said, I’m not in any hurry and I like my current mix of teachers, so I’ll stick with them. Staying the course I’m currently on is the best plan because they’re all easy to understand. A steady, gradual pace and lots of input from a variety of sources is good enough for now. In a couple of months, I’d like to take a past TOPIK exam and see how well I do on that, but for now I’m going to stay the course.
I mentioned aaaages ago that I was learning Korean on and off with Talk to me in Korean. Yeahhh, that didn’t go so well. I got bored around level 2 and stopped doing it. Yah… We’ll talk about that some other time. I’m still trying to get back in the saddle with that. Thanks to Memrise my retention of the little I learned is extremely good so it’s worth pursuing but…. it’s boring… Anyway, it’s a topic for another day.
After quitting-ish TTMIK I heard about both Duolingo Korean and Lingodeer. I don’t have a good experience with Duolingo for other languages, but Lingodeer got great reviews from people who tried it so I thought I would give it a go. The best part is that you can download the whole course and use it offline for free, which you can’t do with Duolingo or Memrise without paying. This came in super handy because I can learn new things while I’m on the go or waiting in the doctor’s office and stuff.
That’s the main good point about Lingodeer. I guess the other good thing is that the deer mascot is cute <3. They should sell plushies.
So I did do the whole 100% of the Lingodeer Korean course. I said “I learned nothing!” in the topic title, but it’s more accurate to say “I retained nothing!” I know in my head that I learned a lot of different grammar points and some new vocabulary, but I don’t remember most of them.
This isn’t all Lingodeer’s fault. They introduce concepts gradually and clearly and I didn’t have a hard time learning those things in the first place. But their revision system is extremely weak and boring – and completely optional too, so the info is all in one year and out another. You learn something once, revise it once and then you don’t see it again.
What they could have done is to include the revision as a mandatory part of the program. You don’t pass regular reviews, you don’t go on to the next section. Furthermore, they could have done a better job of integrating past grammar points into future sentences. Sentences should have gotten longer and more complex with time.
Anyway, the TL;DR is that Lingodeer teaches a lot of new stuff and is easy to follow so it’s a good start for low-intermediate learners. But you might want to jot things down in a notebook or a flashcard system like Anki so what you learn might actually stick. For me I think I was better off with TTMIK and Memrise and really should push myself to get back into that. If I ever do… before the apocalypse, I will tell you guys about it.
Oh yeah, I did all this Lingodeer stuff around the end of 2017 – beginning of 2018. Recently I opened the app again and noticed they had added video lessons and speaking practice. That’s a great idea, but TBH it sounds like work so I don’t know if I will go through all that. If I do… before the end of the world… I will write a followup post to this one. ¡Adiós!
Talk to Me in Korean (a.k.a. TTMIK) is a website that teaches Korean to absolute beginners. It starts with stuff like “this” and “that” and “hello” and “goodbye,” the very basics of the basics. I’m not fluent in Cantonese yet, but I’m comfortable enough that I’m ready to start branching out into other languages. Besides, I’ve been watching a Korean drama lately that’s quite fun. I didn’t used to like the sound of Korean very much, but the more I listen to it, the more it grows on me, so I’ll be idly – very, very idly – learning Korean for the next year.
There was no special reason for me choosing Talk to Me in Korean, except people criticized it online for being too basic and I thought “That’s what I want!” Plus I downloaded a few other random resources and textbooks and they were all way too hardcore for me. My hardcore language for now will continue to be Cantonese. Korean will just be my bit on the side until I’m ready to dig deeper, so “too basic” is just perfect for me.
How’s my progress so far? Well I’ve learned all the basic Hangeul alphabet using a Memrise app for that (I used the Android version, not the website I linked, but it’s the same thing). It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Some people say you can go do it in 15 minutes, but for me it took about 2 weeks of repeated drilling for it to stick in my head. Now I can recognize most words after some study, and I think my recognition speed is getting faster by the day. Memrise is pretty handing for drilling stuff until you finally master it, more on it some other day.
After finishing the Hangeul, I’m now on Level 1 of the Talk to me in Korean lessons. I told you I was just doing the basics, didn’t I? Most recently I learned “It’s not me” and “That is not a cat.” I’m so fluent now… not! 😀 Baby steps. One thing I’m not doing is listening to the podcasts. I realized quickly they spend 95% of each lesson speaking in English. Besides, I don’t really like podcasts. I read much faster than I listen.
So what I do is, I read the PDFs under each lesson, then I drill them into my head using the corresponding Memrise lesson. Simple enough. It only takes about 15 minutes a day to go through a lesson so it’s not getting in the way of my other learning efforts. And since there about 265 lessons in the TTMIK curriculum, I should be done in roughly 8 months if I’m faithful and don’t skip too many days. I googled a lot to see how fluent I should be at that point, and the answer is “not very” but I want to see for myself.
I’m not affiliated with either Memrise or Talk to me in Korean, btw. Just recording what I’m doing and how it’s going. I’ll check back after… hmm… 3 months? If I don’t forget, that is. I’m also using Memrise to kick my Cantonese up a notch but I haven’t seen too much progress on that front yet. More on that story as it develops.
The TETSUWAN Dash!! (ザ!鉄腕!DASH!!) is a Japanese TV variety program that airs on Nihon TV and stars the members of Japanese boyband Tokio getting up to various hijinks. I say “boyband” but the member of Tokio are all past 40 by now and one episode even had two of them figuring out ways to burn fat and stay trim even in their late 30s.
How did I discover this program? Mostly by chance. I was browsing around some Japanese media fansites and saw a comment somewhere mentioning how much Japanese fans hate Taichi Kokubun, one of the members of Tokio. I browsed about a bit more and found a thread translated from 2channel about how much they hated him. TBH 2channel is just a bunch of trolls who shouldn’t be taken seriously and AFAIK Kokubun is actually one of the most popular members of the group. But long story short, someone in that thread mentioned The Tetsuwan Dash, I started googling around and quickly found this:
Lots and lots and lots of old The Tetsuwan Dash episodes! Yay! The video quality isn’t the best so some stuff can be a little hard to see sometimes, but it’s more than good enough for keeping up my Japanese while watching stuff that isn’t completely inane (i.e. doesn’t involve AKB48 or the likes).
As a bonus it’s actually a very educational show. Parts of it are a little boring and just have two members driving around Japan in a solar car ooh-ing and aah-ing over the local sights, but the Dash Village (Dash Mura) sections teach me a lot about small-scale farming. The first episode I watched taught me about cross-pollination as the team attempted to crossbreed two varieties of rice. It was a tremendous amount of effort, especially since one breed was growing faster than the other so they had to rig a hothouse over the slower one and transplant the faster one to somehow regulate the speeds, then they had to manually pollinate some of the rice and in the end a lot of the crop was still lost to disease, and on and on. Lots of very interesting, very educational drama.
In another episode I learned about how corn is pollinated – I always wanted what those long silky fibers on the end were for. Turns out each fiber is connected to a potential grain on the cob. The fiber absorbs the pollen, passes it down to the cob and then a grain grows on that spot on the cob. Fascinating stuff, I had no idea. Furthermore, the point of growing all that corn on the farm was to create silage. I know the term “silage” and I’ve seen silos on farms and stuff but I had no idea what was actually inside. They cut up the corn, put it in rubber bags, buried it and let it ferment, and then dug it up later and fed it to the goats. I learned so much from that episode alone.
Unfortunately it turns out that Dash Village was located in Fukushima Prefecture. It became heavily irradiated after the TEPCO incident in March 2011 and has been evacuated. Even worse, the knowledgeable old farmer who does all the teaching passed away in 2014 at the ripe old age of 84. That means no more Dash Village episodes anymore, awww :-< But I haven’t gotten that far yet. The episodes I’m watching date back to 2008 or so, so I still have a while left to get there.
The other variety parts of The Tetsuwan Dash can be hit or miss. The driving around in the solar car bits are usually quite meh. The reactions of the guys in the car are so fake, it’s pretty obvious that everything’s been set up in advance and they aren’t just randomly happening upon random fishermen who randomly take them out for fishing. How young do you think we are. But other segments can be fun, especially when the guys get involved in doing something physical like the exercise segments I mentioned at the top.
Overall it’s a very enjoyable program with likable hosts (even Kokubun!) and a high educational factor for both Japan/Japanese and general knowledge. And Kokubun isn’t as bad as the trolls make him out to be, even though he does seem to do less work and eat more than the others, haha. Give it a try if you’re looking for a (relatively) intelligent Japanese TV show to practice your Japanese listening skills, especially at the advanced level. If you’re a fan of Tokio, all the better!
Korean Goal:
