Redeveloping Study Habits

I haven’t been “studying” like I had planned to for about 5 months now. For me studying is sitting down with a textbook and doing work that way, not reading, or listening or even speaking; those are activities that you do to accentuate studying, not replace it. Of course that’s my opinion, and despite being happy that my Korean has dramatically improved for the past few months, I know that if I don’t at least skim through my textbook every once in awhile I won’t improve much. Last week I started chapter one of Intermediate College Korean! Technically I should still be on chapter 16 of College Korean, but based on the vocabulary and grammatical concepts introduced in Intermediate College Korean, I thought it would serve me better to start with that book and then return to where I left off in College Korean. I have completed Chapter 1 and I’m on Chapter two and I really like it so far. I actually know almost all of the grammar introduced in the earlier chapters so right now it feels more like a review/revision of things I have encountered while reading. One thing that I have noticed is that at the end of each chapter there are a lot of exercises and even a Conversational Topics part to compliment the chapter. I’m planning on using these as a weekly “essay-like” assignment for myself because right now a lot of my Korean is passive, and I want to improve my writing skills as well. ^-^ Also, since there are so many exercises, I have borrowed the idea of “breaking them up” like my Trig. teacher does when he give  us worksheets with a lot of questions on it. I think doing a little each day will prove to be better than doing everything in one day. It works in math class, so I hope it’ll work with learning Korean as well.

새해 복 많이 받으세요~

Happy New Years everyone! I can’t believe it’s 2014 already! Time really flies by! I’m not really going to post anything of substance today, but I’ll try to find time this weekend to make a real post.

Until then~

This is a day late but 메리 크리스마스 여러분!

Don’t worry I come with gifts~

I recently found a chart of punctuation marks with their Korean equivalent names here. This is something that could be useful, of course you don’t have to memorize all of them; I only picked out the ones that I found the most important such as the exclamation point, the question mark, the period, @ symbol and the + and = signs. Coincidentally, an hour after looking at this chart I watched the first episode of 1997 응답하라 and looking at those words was the main reason I was able to understand the second half of the episode!

Bye for now~

Finished my first “books”!

Hello, it’s been awhile. I am absolutely certiin that I  won’t be posting once every week now so I will stop saying that at the beginning of my posts. As you can see in the title I finished my first books in Korean! The reason I put the word ‘book’ in quotation is because typically when people think of books + in foreign language, they think of a thick novel. I didn’t finish twilight, I actually have that on hold, but I finished the 만화 version of 넌내반! ^-^ I’m so proud of myself! I ended up making about 750 anki cards from it, and it helped me get more aquainted with commonly used grammatical concepts such as the modifiers -을 것, 는 것, 은 것, that I had a lot of trouble with. I understand them much more now and I feel more confident when using them in sentences. 행복해요. 이따 돌아와서 다른글을 쓸거에요. :]

Look alive, sunshine

It’s been a long time since my last post(about a month). Oddly enough I’ve been extremely busy…with school! The workload has doubled from last year, so now I typically spend about six hours doing homework. I don’t mind though, afterall I did want to take more rigorous courses this year and I’ve always has this weird desire to be that student that gets tons of homework everyday(I’m such a nerd). No, I have not given up Korean, in fact I actually started German last month, but that’s another story for another day.

On another note, I’ve been trying to ‘activate’ my Korean, so I made a new account for Lang-8 last week and posted some stuff there. Maybe I’ll elaborate more in my next post, but I don’t have time right now, just wanted to make a quick update. Stay tuned~

Reflecting

오랜만이죠? It’s been about 2 weeks since my last post—so much for posting regularly. This summer felt extremely long because I had so much fun and learned so much new things. I’ll admit I haven’t been entirely sticking to textbooks recently but I think that has made a huge impact on my grammar knowledge. There’s still lots for me to learn in terms of set expressions specific to the language and grammar but listening and especially reading no longer feels like a hunt for a new grammatical structures and concepts. Now I try to focus more or less on meaning and of course that means the continuation of the long mangled path of acquiring vocabulary and forgetting it maybe even 10 times or 20 times before finally internalizing most of its various usages. I guess this stage is called Intermediate? Whether it is or if I can still be called a beginner I no longer care because I can actually pickup native material(with scripts of course) and learn something from it without feeling like I’ve thrown myself in the deep-end of a pool, unable to float. Being able to listen and read things outside of textbooks is such a good feeling.

Since school has started I need to prioritize so I will be returning to my textbooks but “learning” the content will not be my focus. Textbooks are like Teachers, all they can do is introduce new information to you and/or point out things that they think you may have overlooked, but they cannot do your tests and assignments for you. In the case of language learning they cannot speak/write/comprehend everything for you, they are merely there for assistance.

언니?

I was watching 넌 내게 반했어(Heartstrings) and I noticed that 준희 used 언니 with 규원 and 희주. The first couple of times I didn’t think much of it but then It struck me, isn’t 언니 used by girls?! I remember drilling myself on the differences between 누나 and 언니, 오빠 and 형 to avoid gender confusion when speaking/chatting with Koreans. So when I heard him continuously using “언니” it was kind of awkward although I was just the listener. Mind you I don’t watch anything with subtitles(not even in Korean because I’ve become to lazy) but I’m pretty confident that I heard him say 언니 when referring to female students.

I’m having the same experience while reading Twilight. I wanted to make a post about it but alas again laziness took over. I’m five pages away from chapter 3 for intensive reading and I’m on the part where Edward is talking to Bella. That sounds normal right? Wrong, he starts using 반말 despite how rude he came across during Bella’s last encounter with him. Maybe I’m the one wrong here and maybe it’s actually normal but because of that simple fact I get the : “Who do you think you are?! I don’t even know you!” type of feeling. In fact after I read “내 옆 자리 의자가 움직이는 소리를 분명히 들었지만 나는 조심스럽게 그리고 있던 무늬에만 시선을 집중했다. ‘안녕'” I just closed the book and took a short break. If you can’t understand it, it roughly translates to something a long the lines of “I heard the distinctive(?) sound of the chair beside me move but carefully concentrated on drawing the pattern. ‘Hey'”. Obviously I fail at translations and translating an already translated piece isn’t the best thing you could do(as seen here) but I don’t have the English version nor would I feel like searching for those two specific sentences if I did. I think it’s very interesting how while learning languages certain words become more deeply rooted in feeling rather than just the practical meaning. Take for instance in English being greeted with “Hi!” and “Hey, b****!” can stir up completely different reaction however it heavily depends on context and how it is used. To some people the second greeting can actually seem friendly and this is part of the reason I don’t use memorise anymore. Although I love memorise and will probably use it again If I decide to start another language, I don’t think simply depending on word lists past the first 2,000 or 3,000 words is enough because usually those words deeper down in the frequency chart obviously show up less frequently and are usually words that hold deeper meanings. I’d like to hear what you guys think so leave a comment below! 😀

Book Haul~

Lately I have found it hard to get around to make a new post because I have been engrossed the drama “여왕의 교실” which I’ll probably finish watching later today, and on top of that I have begun reading Twilight! I only read 2 pages a day for intensive reading and as much as I feel like reading at the moment for extensive reading. Typically one page takes me 2 hours to read intensively and I know that sounds like a lot but what’s interesting is it takes me half that time to read the second page. I am only on page 20 and 26 but I can only imagine how much smoother things will become by the time I am halfway through the book. As you guys already know I have the first two books, but because I like having things ahead of time I went out of my way to get the other 2!

I didn’t expect Eclipse to be hardcover

Also I got two pictures of the cartoon version of Bella and Edward that came with Breaking Dawn!

I’ve never owned  a complete series of books before so I’m really happy to have them all. As time goes on and I get deeper into the series I’ll also get deeper into these textbooks:

I love College Korean! This is the book I leaned on whenever the explanations in Ewha Korean 1-2 failed me which started happening so often that I now only use the book for review of past materials I’ve already learned. Since I only had the pdf version and it was so helpful I decided to buy the physical copy along with the predecessor Intermediate College Korean.

The cover is so pretty!

I don’t plan to read this book until I’ve finished the Twilight series but it’s always found some way to leap into my head and whisper “buy me—”. It wasn’t until I saw it on amazon for $11 plus $3 shipping that I decided to actually buy it. The shipping was the real eye catcher and since it was the only one left in stock I had to buy it! By the way all of the books I’ve introduced excluding Intermediate College Korean are used and all of them except Eclipse(which is in okay condition) are like brand new so that’s a plus.

Now these…where do I start. I didn’t buy all of this—technically I didn’t buy anything, my older brother funded this entire haul—the notebook, pen and Highcut(Newspaper?) were gifts from Twochois! The gifts were more or less a surprise. It’s funny because the most I expected to receive was a pen or two, not a notebook and certainly not an Edition of HighCut. Although I don’t have an interest in celebrities it equals more reading material and is full of eye-catching photos. Everything was wrapped so carefully that I started to question my views of “good packaging”. Although I chose AirMail everything arrived 5 days after I ordered it, which is surprising because I live in the States. The two 만화 sets I ordered were 넌 내게 반했어 as well as 미남이시네요. The reason I bought them is because my friend told me that I would like the storylines and they’re much easier to read than a novel. I haven’t gotten too far into them because I want to see the actual dramas first but they seem interesting.

Overall I think all of this was more than worth it and I probably won’t to buy another book for a while

Exclamations

Today I learned a handful of useful Korean exclamations solely because I actually attempted to have a conversation with native Korean speakers today although the conversations were short-lived. To be honest it wasn’t until after I had spoken to these people that I realized, colloquial Korean is no joke! I was faced with a lot of slang and vaguely familiar word endings which I have only seen while reading 만화. However that was not the reason the conversations were short-lived, I was able to pick up the general gist of what was being said but I am terrible at starting a conversation even in English unless I know the person well! When I know the person I have background information on them that I can always fall back on to revive a dead conversation, but not with new people. On top of that most people in chat rooms(based on my experience) have completely meaningless conversations—with random/ever changing topics—which I find boring and hard to follow. Just so you know I did have one decent conversation with a girl who was a Korean born American a.k.a a 재미교포. I can at least say I got SOME exposure, because it made it much easier to learn exclamations such as 헉!, 헐 and 아이고(For some reason I always thought 아이고 was 아이구 spelled incorrectly purpose like how some people spell hi as hai when texting).

To backtrack a little, I discovered Line Play today which is really cool! It’s a chat room(that allows you to make the most adorable avatars) app available on iOS and Android devices made by Line! Since Line is pretty popular in Asia I came across many Chinese, Japanese, and even Indonesian speakers(too bad I don’t speak any of these languages). I pretty much spent half of my day lurking in the “China” chat room looking at all the seemingly strange characters envious of those who could actually understand them!

Children Songs

I know It’s probably been over a week but I’ve actually been really busy studying and being lazy(when not studying). I meant to post something on thursday but I didn’t again due to laziness and I wasn’t too sure what to write about. Actually thursday was my birthday and I got a lot of books! If I remember correctly I got 10 books(most of which are still on their way to my house right now haha). So until they’re all here, their identities shall remain a secret! On a side note, today I stumbled upon the most ADORABLE song ever! I found it when I got really frustrated with the dead sounding textbook dialogues I have been listening to for the past 2 months!

I’m so happy I found it, because it opened up an entirely new realm of material and revealed my secret infatuation with children media! From now on I’ll be listening to children songs and studying them for listening practice. 😀