한극어 — stagnation and revival

Next update on Korean studies after over half a year of mostly stagnation.

Shortly after the last update, Korean studies completely went on the back burner. This mostly was due to other things requiring my attention, but I guess another partial factor is that the stubborn “monolingual” sentence mining approach I took with 바른 한국어 just wasn’t working out as I had hoped. In hindsight, I think prioritizing grammar over vocab would’ve been better for me, such that I acquired the basic tools to construct sentences and look up words on the fly as needed.

In any case, over the last weeks I gradually got back into studying again—first working away the pile of Anki cards that had built up, then seeking out new resources and ways to study. In particular, I watched some videos on Talk To Me In Korean (TTMIK) and ジニ JINI TV resulting in a few grammar aha moments. Also, I added the Anki deck Korean Vocabulary by Evita to my routine.

So far, I think loosening up the study regime a bit was a good trade-off to make. TTMIK comes from an “English speaker’s perspective”, so there’s a non-zero chance I miss out on some connection to Japanese grammar that would make it easier for me to grasp or remember. But if a grammar point clicks for me and expands by range of expression, so be it. JINI TV provides a “Japanese speaker’s perspective”, but contains Korean pronounced by a non-native. Also not ideal, but as long as it’s not my main source of Korean listening input, it shouldn’t be a problem. Lastly, the Anki deck by Evita has only recognition cards (no recall) and no example sentences, but that’s better than nothing if I don’t have the time/language level/functioning routine for sentence mining at the moment.

With the bits and pieces of new grammar and vocab under my belt, I started to write at least one Korean post per day HelloTalk. A tool that has proven helpful for that is the Dongsa Korean Verb Conjugator. For looking up words, I haven’t found an offline solution yet and still use korean.dict.naver.com and hanja.dict.naver.com.

Lastly, regarding content, I’m still on the lookout for TV series, movies or similar for extra motivation. What I did find is the podcast KJしゃべラジ-韓国語＆日本語でおしゃべりラジオ- that I sometimes listen to.

Fingers crossed I manage to maintain some form of consistent progress from here on.