If it wasn’t already apparent that I am crazy, this should settle it. I’m about a month into cramming Korean into my brain, and I’m already building a dictionary. It’s a work in progress and more importantly its part of my process for retaining vocabulary.
I don’t have the patience to sit and attempt to memorize vocabulary lists. I don’t mind copying a vocabulary word here or there, either by hand or into the computer, but I also recoiled at the idea of just writing a character or word 50 times in a row (as is standard among Chinese learners). I always found flashcards to be a mixed blessing. Whether physical or digital, its a lot of work maintaining a deck–adding new items and removing items you are confident about. Something about the randomness seems suboptimal.
On the other hand, I am willing to take the time to engage with large volumes of vocabulary items while performing a variety of menial tasks–copying from app/pdf worksheet/textbook to paper, typing into computer, sorting and collating lists in Excel, removing duplicates, finding typos, etc. There is something immensely satisfying to discover that some words that stubbornly remain in the peripheral of my vocabulary have actually shown up across multiple sources. The clouds parts, the sun shines through, and the word catches on fire under the laser focus of attention.
I think there is something to say about the wisdom of the crowd. If you try learning a language from any given source, there are going to be tons of words that raise eyebrows for their seeming impracticality. However, once you start averaging across multiple sources, you can identify the truly widespread and common words (through a sort of low level manual corpus analysis). I actually wrote a paper taking this idea as a hack for estimating age of acquisition of characters among Chinese native speakers (I should probably dust it off and finally get around to submitting it to a journal). On the other hand, its interesting to see which words are completely glossed over because its assumed you already know it. However, there is a messiness to the merging process, as I’m not working off of official vocabulary lists.
The cool thing is I finally have a rough estimate of my vocabulary in Korean, under 1000 words. Of course, there is the entirety of Duolingo’s vocabulary to be integrated as well as additional lessons from the current three sources (TTMIK, Lingodeer, 新标准韩语).
Ultimately, I’m hoping to use this dictionary as a basis to design some newbie learner resources.