I’ve dabbled with Korean on and off for the past 2+ years, and have recently gotten it into my head to finally commit myself to obtaining (conversational) fluency. The plan is to basically live there for two months (starting next week), and spend a couple hours a day on self-study, specifically Duolingo, a textbook written in Chinese, and the wonderful podcast TTMIK. While working on this self-improvement project, I hope to also direct this blog towards random musings on the learning process.
For the record, I have been to Korea twice so far, totaling almost three weeks in the country. I didn’t know any Korean prior to my first trip to Seoul in 2016, but after a few days, I had picked up the alphabet and was wandering the streets and subways sounding out all written signs to see if I could recognize any words through their similarity to Chinese or English.
About half a year later, a friend of mine announced her intention to take a semester of Korean lessons at my university, and in a show of solidarity I picked my own copy of the required textbooks and self-studied for a month or two. I only managed to finish the first of the two textbook set.
Planning to visit Korea a second time that summer and wanting to be better able to communicate, I must have watched about a dozen instructional videos on YouTube before I found the “Talk to Me in Korean” podcast, which I started listening to. Korea was to be the last stop on a roughly eight-week tour taking me through Singapore, Thailand, and Japan, so, though I was most motivated to learn Korean, I was also a little distracted by the other languages. By the time I made it to Busan, I “knew” maybe enough to fit on a notebook card.
After the trip, I rapidly forgot all the Korean I had studied, only briefly touching it for a couple weeks last Spring when I found it on Duolingo after finishing Spanish. However, I hadn’t reviewed or studied Korean until about two weeks ago, when I shifted the focus of my daily foreign language study over from German.
In these two weeks, I’ve been hacking away at Duolingo (57 crowns so far!) and spending a bit of time every day reviewing the Chinese textbook, and I have surprised myself not only by how much was still kicking around the old memory banks, but also how quickly I’ve incorporated new vocabulary. I am feeling very optimistic about how much progress I can make once I land at Incheon.