한극어 — come up and see my etchings writing system

Over Christmas and New Year’s I had spent some time creating Anki decks for Hangul and Cyrillic. Being able to “read” Korean as well as Ukrainian, Russian, etc. seemed like a fun skill, worth the necessary upfront effort and time necessary for continued retention. Of course, in both cases I would only be able to turn writing into sounds. To make sense of writing I’d need vocab and grammar, which I wasn’t planning on spending time on.

So over the last months I had fun deciphering Ukrainian signs at German train stations, Korean labels on imported supermarket products, and Russian signs in Hokkaidō. The thought of giving either learning Russian or Korean a proper go lingered in my head, but it seemed unrealistic to find things to de-prioritize and re-allocate time from. That is, until I realized that given how much similarity there is between Korean and Japanese, learning Korean with resources in Japanese would make munch more sense than using English or German study materials.

Studying Korean using Japanese means

• lots of shortcuts compared to starting from English/German, because concepts like particles etc. just map to existing stuff
• some amount of Japanese exposure with zero additional time spent — e.g. watching videos explaining grammar (not ideal though because it’ll be non-native Japanese)
• a risk of less study material being available (while surely the percentage of people studying Korean is higher in Japan than looking at a global average, the question is if that outweighs the difference in absolute numbers of people)
• the potential to make Japanese study buddies

Overall, the thought was enough to get me exited about the idea of giving it a go. So here are the first things I can report on after a weekend of orientation.

• Grammar
  • seemile Korean is what I currently use to learn basic grammar
    • presenter is a Korean native speaker
    • except for the first few videos on the writing system they seem to avoid transliterated spellings and just go with Hangul
    • sound quality is okay (projector fan noise is a bit loud)
    • no subtitles available
  • @QuickKorean’s 바른 한국어 series (1, 2, 3, 4) also seems promising (only had a quick look)
    • all videos appear to have Korean + English soft subs (sadly no Japanese)
    • explanations seem to be in Korean right from the start
• Sentence mining
  • I’ll give sentence mining from video contents a go to make creating flash cards more efficient
  • subs2srs cards with mpv is the Anki add-on I’ll use (requires minimal fiddling with the code to run on systems with Python 3.8 or higher)
  • opensubtitles has a nice advanced search allowing to filter for subs …
    • in either Korean on Japanese
    • for Korean movies/TV series
    • in .srt format (required by above Anki add-on)
    • sorted alphabetically
  • … which makes it easy to find Korean+Japanese pairs for a few movies

One thing I’m still missing which would be super beneficial is some content that interests me. Something apart from the interest in the language itself to drive me. I’m not much into romance, horror, or revenge though, which seem to be quite common themes. Then again, finding Japanese “dorama” that interested me wasn’t easy either, and my vague impression is that what Korea produces nowadays is of higher production quality overall.
Oh well, for the moment I’ll have to do a fair bit of vocab and grammar grinding anyway. ^_^

So yeah … came for the unique writing system, stayed (for the moment) for the cost efficiency and opportunity to trying out sentence mining early on in studying a language.