공부하자

Now that I have a 100 day streak on Clozemaster I thought I should do a review. 

Clozemaster is a gamified vocabulary building app based off material from Tatoeba (a free database of example sentences). The developer said it aims to answer the question “What should I do after Duolingo?”. It seems best suited for intermediate learners so I have only been using it for Korean and not Japanese. 

Positives

More enjoyable than flashcard apps.

The free version doesn’t have ads and you can use it perfectly well. 

Wide variety of sentences and vocab - even swear words. 

Decent amount of content for Korean. 

Korean audio is decent (though a tad emotionless). 

Negatives

Most of the negatives come from the fact that everything is getting pulled from Tatoeba without any human review.

People’s names like 톰 come up as a key word or occasionally only part of a foreign word is used as a key word.

Occasionally get these ridiculously long sentences (like the screenshot above). 

From the looks of it there are 8 courses in total in the A Bridge to the World series - Beginner 1,2,3, Intermediate 1,2,3 and Advanced 1,2. 

Sungkyunkwan University has a three Korean classes on Coursera at the moment - Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. 

There have been beginner Korean classes from other universities on Coursera for a while but more advanced content is rarer so I was excited to see this class. 

In hindsight I probably should have just done the advanced class because this class is very low intermediate. The class is taught in Korean though so if nothing it was listening practice. 

Positives

Free course taught in Korean.

Downloadable lecture notes and exercises. 

Review quizzes.

Negatives

Over focus on simple conjugation differences (eg, verbs that end in vowels vs consonants). 

Having to watch foreigners solve exercises for every grammar unit. 

Note

If you’re not paying for the certificate (which you 100% don’t need to) it won’t let you submit the assessment quizzes. So you’ll need to click around a bit to get into week 4′s content as it keeps trying to get you to upgrade. 

For example “미선 씨가 편지 쓰는 것을 도와주는 대신에 내가 점심을 사기로 했다” gets translated to “Instead of helping Miseon to write a letter, I decided to buy lunch.”

Similarly “일을 일찍 시작하는 대신에 일찍 끝낼 수 있다” gets translated to “Instead of starting work early, we can finish work early”

While 대신에 can be translated to ‘instead of’ in a lot cases, it doesn’t work for these sentences.

More accurate translations for these sentences would be “In exchange for helping me write a letter, I decided to buy Miseon lunch” and “(We) get to finish work early because (we) start work early” 

Hi~

All the resources I’ve seen teach hiragana first and then teach katakana afterwards. I also learnt the basics of hiragana before moving onto katakana. Hiragana comes first as katakana is mostly used for foreign loan words. I wouldn’t recommend learning both from scratch at the same time as there are katakana equivalents of hiragana so it could be quite confusing! 

You can get started on very basic vocab and grammar with only hiragana. But you can’t hold off learning katakana for very long because to do a self-introduction like “My name is X” or “I’m from [country name]” you're going to need to know katakana (as most country names are in katakana). 

Side note: A lot of beginner Japanese resources will assume you don’t know kana well or at all and so put romaji next to all kana. So you could ‘learn’ grammar and vocab without putting much into learning kana upfront. I personally wouldn’t recommend this approach as it’ll hurt your pronunciation. 

I probably should have noted in my earlier post that you don’t need to go through all four resources before doing anything else. Rather these are the steps that I did:

Use Duolingo for a week or so to test my interest in learning Japanese. 

Continue with Duolingo but also start using Memory Hint to learn and test myself on a ‘row’ of hiragana and then review that row with HirKat. 

Use HirKat to teach the additional rows that Memory Hint doesn’t teach.

Start using Kanji Teacher to check that I can remember all of the hiragana.

Once I reached the ‘katakana 1′ unit on Duolingo I repeated steps 2 & 3 but with katakana. 

Then I fully completed the kana tutor tests of Kanji Teacher. 

After that, I completed the hiragana and katakana self-study courses on Minato.

After step 5 you’ll have a basic understanding of kana and can start using other resources if you like. Step 6 will help you recall kana quicker, while step 7 will help you read words (in particular the units on long vowels and small tsu sounds are really invaluable). 

So I’ve started learning Japanese. I know from my experience learning Korean that getting familiar with the writing system is crucial, and relying on romanisation will only hurt your pronunciation in the long term. 

While there are a lot of resources out there saying they can teach you hangul or hiragana in a hour, realistically it’s going to take you longer to get comfortable with the writing system. 

Below is a list of the resources (all free!) that I used to really get comfortable with hiragana and katakana. Hopefully they can help you too ~~

Hiragana Memory Hint (mobile app) - this app teaches you hiragana using mnemonic pictures. I’ve never used mnemonics before so I was a bit unsure but honestly they helped me learn 80% of the characters. I like this app because they remind you of the mnemonic every time you do a quiz - even when you get the answer right. It’s important to note that the mnemonics they use focus more on the pronunciation rather than the associated romaji spelling.

HirKat (mobile app) - while the memory hint app is good it has some weak points namely the quizzes are too easy (they give you a second chance and the fonts used are ones that closely resemble the mnemonic) and it only teaches the base hiragana (it doesn’t go into が、ば、ぱ or any of the small　や、ゆ、よ sounds like ちゃ). HirKat doesn’t have these weaknesses so it is a good way to review your knowledge after you have completed a row in the Memory Hint app. 

Kanji Teacher (mobile app) - despite the name the app also has a kana teaching section. While Kanji Teacher uses some mnemonics the Memory Hint ones are much better in my opinion. What Kanji Teacher does that the early app’s don’t is that it will give you hard quizzes (9 possible answers), the quizzes develop over time so hiragana you have ‘learnt’ don’t show up anymore, and it will teach and test your writing (including the stroke order). I would note that the app has a lot of customization options and features so it can be overwhelming to navigate - my advice would be to use the ‘kana tutor’ button to walk through the tests. 

Minato - Hiragana A1 Self-Study Course (web based course) - this is one of the courses available on https://minato-jf.jp/Home/Index. You need to make an account to access the course but all of the self-study courses are free. The first half of the course will introduce hiragana and test your reading and listening skills. The second half of the course is the best part though - it will teach you small　つ sounds like きって, long vowel sounds and how to type hiragana on a computer keyboard! They also have some printable pdfs to practice your handwriting. 

목도리 is a winter scarf that you wear to keep warm

While 스카프 is a thin decorative scarf which you wear for fashion not for warmth

However 만나다 can also be used when focusing on the relationship/connection between people, rather than the physical act of “meeting someone”. For example in Korean you can describe “부모 잘 만나요” or “좋은 남편을 만나요”.

Below is a dialogue that always confused me before I learnt the wider usage of 만나다. 

가: 남자 친구가 있어요?

나: 네, 있어요.

가: 만난지 얼마나 됐어요?

While the lessons are mostly in Korean please don’t be put off. The teachers speak slowly and clearly so even low intermediate learners should have no problem understanding :)

아임달imdal Korean teacher

Grammar and vocab videos both TOPIK specific and more everyday content. Beginner through to high intermediate level.  I really like all of the videos I have watched. In some of her videos she sets ‘homework’ and asks viewers to post in the comments and she will personally mark it for you! 

현명한 선택,知好樂

Mainly intermediate level grammar comparison videos (ie, what is the difference between similar grammar points). She takes requests from viewers.

10분한국어 10min Korean

As the channel name suggests most of her videos are around 10 minutes long. Predominately intermediate and advanced grammar lessons but she also has videos on hanja. 

베이직 코리안 basic Korean

Beginner content from reading and pronouncing hangul through to basic grammar. Videos are in Korean but have English subtitles. 

PARKSSEAM OK-KOREAN

Hi ~

I know there was one a few years back but I’m not sure what happened to it.