It’s been almost a month since I formally announced my plans to learn Korean, so now is as good a time as any to check in on how the mission is coming. I’ve been averaging several hours a day (usually most of the morning and a bit more in the late afternoon or evening) on Korean.
Apps
I’m two lessons short of finishing the tree on Duolingo, but it will be some time before I max out all the lessons to get all the “crowns.” Duolingo recently introduced a weekly leadership board, so that competitive element (to progress into the next league) has kept me motivated to do extra lessons everyday. Overall, I’m a bit bored of Duolingo.
I completely worked my way through one app called “Infinite Korean,” which drills up to 10 vocabulary items organized around topics (transportation, food, clothing, etc.) with a simple premise of picking the correct answer before the falling meteor hits the ground.
I’m also 85% through Korean on Lingodeer, which I think I might wholeheartedly recommend. It does look like it is designed by professional language teachers with more use of textbook style grammar exercises and a very systemic step-by-step approach. Each lesson is a little bit easy because it focuses on 4 sample sentences that just keep coming up with different tasks.
Podcast
I’ve barely started Level 3 of Talk to Me in Korean because I am not spending hours everyday out and about. It looks like it goes up to level 10, and 1441 unplayed episodes in the podcast feed, I’m certainly not going to run out of content.
Textbook
I’m really hating the Chinese-Korean textbook I brought with me, and instead of doing a lesson a day, I’m only covering one chapter every couple of days. I need to review more and go through the audio at least a dozen more times. The textbook is good because I am reading more than a sentence at a time.
There was a Level 1A Korean textbook in a bookcase at the hostel. I devoured that in a couple days (as it was 90% review for me). It’s also the textbook I’ve pushed on the other newbie learners in the hostel.
Life
I’ve definitely reverted into my natural state of introversion, getting by with minimal verbal interaction. It doesn’t take much Korean to order an americano, especially when the barista asks you “hot or iced” in English, and when shopping at a mart you just look at the screen with the total and hand over money.
I’ve got the Naver Korean-English dictionary app on my phone and if I am ever sitting around anywhere (such as a restaurant), I like to look up any words I see.
I’d guess that I “know” somewhere between 500 and 1,000 words by now, but I actually want to get a lot more precise. I’ve been thinking about starting up a database in an Excel file, much like I did with Chinese. I’ve been copying vocabulary into a notebook, but it is very disorganized with lots of repetition of words. I do pull it out occasionally to review a page or two, but not enough. I think I might wait until I finish the two learning apps, but it will be good to build a master list of vocabulary for a number of reasons: review, typing practice, identification of common words, a more precise count of how many words I know (or at least should know at this point), and a basis for a possible integration of Korean resources into my Chinese database.
Though Korean is turning out to be harder than I thought (in terms of so many rules and exceptions to rules regarding grammar and pronunciation), not only am I still confident of my ability to leave here a fluent speaker, but also a teacher of Korean. I’m already planning a mini-textbook on learning how to read the Korean alphabet.