한극어 — 한자 help and HelloTalk hurdles

Quick update on Korean studies after roughtly 2 months.

After taking a proper look at 바른 한국어 I completely switched to the series in favor of seemile Korean. Each lesson is packed with a considerable amount of new vocab, which is why it takes me quite a bit of time to go though each, as I put most of it into my Anki deck (currently at lesson 5-1).

One of the words introduced is 기숙사, which brings me to the first main point.

한자 help

Because I failed my 기숙사 Anki card over and over again, I looked into the words origin. Turns out it’s 寄宿舎, which, if you pronounce it in Japanese, is „kishukusha”. Knowing that the word is quite easy to remember. After that I learned about 한자 and, so far, got a few rules of thumb and resources that make vocab acquisition much easier.

Below are examples of a few words and the “requirements” to be able to make good use of 한자 if you know Japanese.

  • 기숙사 → 寄宿舎
    • need to know the 한자 (b/c you’d say 寮 in Japanese)
  • 우체국 → 郵遞局 → 郵逓局 (逓 as in 逓信 which iirc is origin of the 〒 symbol)
    • need to know the 한자 and how they map to Japanese Kanji
  • 경찰 → 警察
    • need to know peculiar pronunciation mappings like -ㄹ ↔ -つ
  • 시계 → 時計 / 건물 → 建物
    • need to resist 音読み

When adding new Anki cards, I currently use the following two websites.

(Side note: in case someone’s aware of EPWING dictionaries for ko↔ja and or 한글→한자, let me know.)

HelloTalk hurdles

Completely unrelated, I stumbled upon some weird behavior in the HelloTalk app. I set my learning language to Korean, and for some reason the my list of voice rooms appears to filter out Japanese⇄Korean rooms, while Korean only rooms as well as other mixed rooms such as Korean⇄French and Korean⇄Chinese are displayed.

I reported the problem to HelloTalk and for the mean time set up a second account on a different device as a Japanese speaker learning Korean. Problem is, this account for some reason got flagged for suspicious behavior after a day or two — although all I did was hang out in voice rooms. Well … with a flagged account your prompted to add a phone number, which the device I run the account on does not have. Luckily, I found a way to get around the phone number prompt. On the off chance that this is useful to someone, here’s how to do it:

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Ending words regarding the bigger picture — progress is slower than I’d like, but I currently can’t afford to spend as much time on Korean as I’d like to. Hope I can report on some first tandem experiences in the next post.

2023-08-20