#koreanstudylog

After a small break from posting to focus on Korean I've noticed I have hit a new roadblock, and one I hadn't anticipated at the beginning of the year.

Over the summer I managed to pass from the Int1 class to the Int2 class with my tutor and I was absolutely bricking it when she told me this because from my studies into Beginner was a big leap in work load, and Beginner to Int1 was insanity I had 200(ish, it varied by chapter) vocab/expressions a week and it was just impossible to clear a chapter before the next one was assigned. So the thought of it going up again was not fun, however so far that's not happened. It's only been about 20 words a week but all the grammar explainations are now in Korean so that's maybe the trade off there.

However, with this dip in the immediate workload I've noticed that I don't find Korean fun anymore. I feel like I'm just doing it for class now and it's just for a deadline and I feel stagnent with my progress I feel like I'm still a beginner and I'm a fraud in the Int2 class cause I may know 1200 words but I can't use 98% of them cause I can't make sentences and express myself in Korean.

I don't know if this feeling is burnout, it doesn't feel like burnout though it's more unlike being unmotivated and just not wanting to do anything with Korean even just getting my flashcards done is a struggle right now and I'd finally got them under 200 a day after the peak of 400+ in Int1 which did slightly fry my head near the end. I've noticed before I'd do work for my class but also do things for myself like topik grammar classes, or ttmik courses, or using my books, but now it's so hard to open anything to study for fun.

So with this I've basically been pouring an unhealthy amount of hours into animal crossing *again* which I say like I haven't done the same thing in Skyrim before several times over across I think 6 save files now and 2000 hours minimum not even going into other games but shhh.

I want to try and strike a better balance for the remainder of the year, I know it's not even 3 months but I think since I'm skipping my normal end of year activities such as Inktober and NaNoWriMo because I do not have enough time/energy this year and I'm not going to try and actually burn out again like 2018 because no, it should be doable to make small changes to try and regain the fun in Korean and not hit 1000 hours in AC before November because atm that's very likely.

At the moment my plan im progress is I want to try and doing daily writing in the vain hope of getting some progress with the sentence forming thing and hopefully it will help with getting comfortable with the grammar too. My friend very kindly made me a list of topics to write about to get started so we'll see how well I can answer those. I'd also like to wrap up my topik grammar class cause it will expire soon and there's only 3 classes left of the 23 total and it probably will be useful for some of the harder propmts cause there's some tricky ones in there. Though she may say the same for the ones I gave her so I shouldn't complain.

안녕하세요~ 제 이름은 명이슬이에요. 지금은 24살이에요. 생일이 다음 달이에요. 남동생이 있어요. 저와는 달리 남동생은 인기예요. 대학교에서 의상학을 전공했어요. 패션 관련 기술과 제작에 중점을 두고 배웠어요. ♡

Short and sweet because I have no idea what to say and it took me like 6 hours just to figure out how to say my degree name, which I'm still not actually sure if it's right I don't know the difference between 의상학 and 의류학 so that may be the wrong name.

I'm very much new to actually using Korean even though I've been studying it for a very long time now so corrections are always welcome, and if I missed anything important please let me know and I'll follow up with some answers. |ω･`)

Okay, so the eventual has come. My tutor has given me the date for the end of course test. I mean I always knew it was coming she told me the set up back in my trial lesson when she didn’t know if I’d even take lessons from her yet. However, I wasn’t expecting it so soon.

I don’t feel like I’m ready to take the test, I know it’s a 4 part reading, writing, listening, speaking test. At the moment I feel I can almost do one of those never mind all of them in one go. I want to do well and I’ve been trying to improve my weak areas but my lessons started mid-late November last year that’s not even a full year I haven’t even gotten all the vocab down let alone have any clue about the grammar. I literally had to make myself a cheat sheet chart for grammar cause I literally remember maybe 5 of the 35 in the textbook, and that’s even worse when you consider the overall number for the year currently stands at 74. 

I have been doing my flashcards daily trying in vain to get the vocab down to the point I’ve learned that Anki can mark cards as leeches, like how many times do you have to forget a word for that to trigger it’s been months of failing at vocab why’s it only starting to do that now? Also no I don’t want you to decide the cards not worth studying that’s not how classes work I can’t choose to ignore problem vocab much as I’d like to. I still have issues with uni course names, actually at this point general uni words like major/minor, credit etc. Though again that may be down to in my school experience none of those words apply.

As much as I’d love to try the intermediate course, I know it naturally will be harder than what I’m already doing which I don’t deem easy anyway. I guess I’m just hopeful that because I’ve tried so hard this year especially with being ill and not having the best retention, or concentration, and generally just being drained I might still do okay. Though factoring that in, I feel like I’ve managed a fair amount regardless of pass or fail.

With a current pool of over 2000 vocab, I don’t have many problematic words and I’ve gotten over the issues with most of them. The grammar’s still difficult but I suppose one side always will be harder than the other. I know with time it probably will improve, with slowly being able to read more (harder) texts, having something that resembles listening skills will also help loads since I’ll be able to listen to songs, and radio shows, and podcasts and even watch tv and be able to hear the grammar in use. I understand why my tutor wants me to avoid Korean tv for the moment but it’s also kind of a bummer cause I see people being all excited about shows and I want to try and stay spoiler free but also do as I’m asked... please lift the ban soon ;u;

Basically I’m panicking over this test and slowly realising how little high school actually did to show you how to study properly. High school studying was a wing and a prayer and cramming in vain and retaining literally nothing after the fact. I didn’t really notice till now since at the time it’s all we knew, and was what everyone was doing and what the teacher’s basically told us to do and that was just the norm and was fine. But now when I actually need/want to study and retain long term it’s like walking through thick fog and I’m wandering aimless and hopeful but I could easily fall flat on my face or into a well or something.

My expectations of how this will go, is I will probably fail and it’ll be down to lack of grammar. Though I don’t really know what I’m going into more than simply you’ll be tested on all sides. I don’t even know what the pass rate is or if it’s 100%/fail. I’m not sure which I’d prefer to be honest, I don’t know if I’m ready for intermediate, I can’t tell where I sit anymore which is part of my stress like I could be fine and ace it or I could be as prepared as a 7 year old taking a standard grade (I know they’re nat 5′s now, but I’m old they’re the exams I know I don’t understand the new exams, but if you took them please feel free to let me know I’d love to see if they made life easier for people with the new set up).

Lately I’ve been feeling rather deflated about my Korean studies, I feel like no matter how hard I try I just stay standing still. A little like wading quicksand. I tried so hard to move forward, I was churning through my vocab cards in vain hope that some of them would start to click and I’m still struggling hard. For some reason uni subjects just don’t retain for me, or the 4 marrige verbs (engaged, married, divorced, remarried) though that’s possibly in part to not being something I’ve thought anything about in English let alone Korean.

I am maintaining my italki lessons, which are currently equally frustrating to me as I fell after nearly a year and being basically finished the beginners course (having started unit 20 of 20) I should at least be able to write a decent sentence. Or at least able to write more than one three word sentence without resorting to checking every word on Papago. Admittedly that ones on me but I’m not confident at all in my abilities and I don’t want to offend anyone. Still traumatised by the time I accidentally swore without knowing I’d strung a word together let alone a cuss.

So I had a good long think about what I was doing, what I wanted to be able to do and decided that there’s going to be a little change of action this week. Since I managed to do all my homework the day it was given which I’ve never managed before, I get to do what I want this week so I’m taking steps to tackle a major problem area. Listening.

For someone whose been listening to K-pop for like 7-8 years my listening is awful, I can listen and pick up the words and sing along quite happily, I’ve even performed several K-Pop songs but I can’t listen to dialog and understand much of anything. I am not exaggerating when I say my tutor can say something, even something simple in Korean and I will understand nothing and then she’ll type it for me and I’ll understand perfectly, like I know I spend years studying alone with books but that’s really bad 11 months on from my trial lesson with her.

Now, I know she really doesn’t like TTMIK, but since I’d already bought an excessive amount of their products before saying this (well and I like them which is the important thing) I’m going to use them. So after going through the things I had I have picked out the Listening Practice in Slow Korean, and IYAGI Beginner’s courses and instead of just listening to them I’m dictating them. So far I’ve done the 김밥 and 카페 stories, with varying degrees of success. For 3-4 minute stories, they’re taking 2 hours to write and correct so I’m worried about moving onto the IYAGI ones cause they probably will get longer.

Even at only being 2 stories in I am noticing an improvement. There were words in the 김밥 story that I got very very wrong and in the 카페 story managed to get them right so I can see that there is some progress, which is really nice but I’m hoping it gets to a point were I hear it and understand it because that’d be really nice. I’m also handwriting them because that way I don’t have the red squiggly line of ‘nope, try again’ because I don’t trust myself not to autopilot and fix it before I realise what I did.

I’m also hoping listening to all these I’ll start to understand sentence structure more and begin to help the grammar side of things cause I know that’s part of my problem too. I have covered at least 250 grammar points and I remember maybe 10 of them. Not to mention anything that might help with understanding what particles to use when can only help. 은/는/이/가/을/를 are probably the thing I’ve reviewed most and I still basically guess which is the appropriate particle in the sentence, sadly knowing whether to use 은 or 는 doesn’t help decide if its 은, 이 or 을.

I’m hoping by the end of this exercise I will have a better foundation for my listening skills, or at least create a foundation for my listening skills since they’re incredibly lacking. I have been instructed not to use drama’s for listing practice, reasons not given and technically I was told not to use TTMIK either but shhh we’ll just not mention that.

So I’ve been using iTalki for a while now and I thought I’d come in with an update because, well I didn’t expect to be still going through with it this long, and it’s just nice to see reviews. I like reading through them sometimes and I can’t be the only one. (¯―¯٥)

I had made my account back in February last year, but didn’t feel brave enough to deal with it then so I left it sitting with a few teachers favourited but nothing more done on the site. After several months of arguing with myself, I did my first trial lesson mid September, and was absolutely terrified. I actually had a panic attack 5-10 minutes before it started and nearly knocked a full cup of tea over my laptop. Probably wasn’t my best move, I knew I’d have an empty house and thought it would be the best time to try it out because I knew the house would be quiet but it came with having to pull myself together very quickly which I’m not very good at even now. 

So the trial lesson was essentially a placement test, she gave me things to read to see what my pronunciation and reading abilities were, reading was way worse than I thought it was going into it which was a good reality check on my studies. Then after that, I had a bunch of words I’d to define if I could, or I was given the English word to see if I knew the Korean word for. I knew I’d have to do this going in, but I wasn’t expecting to struggle as much as I did. Granted I’d never had that type of interaction where I couldn’t take as much time as I needed to and had to actually hold a conversation in a reasonable time.

After this she told me that if I was to take lessons from her I’d be in the beginners course, which I’d expected anyways being on beginner textbooks at the time. She was really good about giving corrections, I wasn’t allowed to progress until I said it correctly, which is something that I really wanted to have in a tutor since well who want’s to learn to speak incorrectly. Added bonus of having something to work on each week was a big selling point at the time, I was in dire need of some structure at that point.

Since then it’s been very up and down, much like normal classes I’ve been both excited to have work to do and severely bored of it. There have been weeks where I could knock everything out and understand everything, but mostly it’s been a whole lot of headaches and frustration. Even with this my tutor’s been super understanding, if I can’t manage the work for one reason or another (not for lack of trying) it’s fine, and if I need to reschedule for a doctors appointment even rather last minute it’s sorted with no issue which is particularly useful right now.

Even though right now I can’t get my head round 80% of what I’m doing right now, and it’s driving me crazy, I know I’m still making progress. Without these lessons, I’d never have spoken a word in Korean, I wouldn’t be trying form sentences properly (not talking about the success rate here since it’s still basically non-existent) and I’d be about 10 steps further back with particles than I currently am. Not that I’m very far forward but I’m making fewer mistakes than I was and that’s a start for now.

Even ignoring the actual learning side of the tutoring, I can see a huge improvement overall. I no longer take panic attacks before the calls, anxiety spikes still happen but they’re way easier to deal with. I’m no longer a sobbing mess afterwards either. Normally I’d have to sleep something like that off for 2+ hours, but now I can just go on and do something else (at home anyways). I’ve never been good at talking to anyone, let alone strangers, and now I can somewhat comfortably hold a conversation and not have a total meltdown.

By no means would I say it’s a magical one size fits all cure, I mean more than 1 person and I’m still way out my depth and basically useless, but I can now manage 1 person. Even if it’s not in person, 1 person is a start. I never thought I’d be able to get on top of my social anxiety, but this makes me feel like it’s not quite as impossible now.

Going back to the language side of it, I do still get tongue tied, and I have moment’s when I just wanna hang up and run away and yes I say the wrong word which for her is hilarious half the time because it obviously sounds ridiculous and that’s fair. Sometimes I can even laugh at it too. This would have been impossible this time last year, I would have been a sobbing wreck and probably would have hung up there and then and not went back. So the fact I still take my lessons, I think that shows some progress.

Overall, I’m glad I took this leap. It’s something I never saw myself doing, and now I’d seriously consider doing it again for another language in the future, and even more so doing it myself possibly. I don’t know if I’ll act on that one, but I wouldn’t have even thought of it before so it’s something interesting I’ve noticed. While it can be very daunting to find a tutor because of the sheer number of them, and then finding one that suits you/isn’t too expensive for you can take longer still but is definitely worth the effort. Admittedly if you’re like me and are (very) socially anxious then it will be hard at first, and it may not be for you but I would say it’s worth trying it to see if it can help. You can tell the person that you have this anxiety and it can be a way to either make it easier to go ahead with it, or learn that they’re not the tutor for you, and this can be done before paying for anything so something to keep in mind.

I am sad that the trial lessons are capped at 3 (1 per teacher) but I can understand why this is implemented. It was a nice test to see if a tutor suited but apparently that wasn’t the intended use so I can’t really argue with the decision. I did only use 1 knowing I wanted to do more languages in the future and I was very lucky to find someone that did what I was looking for/was comfortable with first try but not everyone will be this fortunate so that’s something else to be aware of.

I didn’t want to have to post this, but this blog is meant to be a way for me to track my progress and this is a huge boulder that’s blocking the path right now so it only seems fair.

Since last February I’ve been taking particularly bad panic attacks, and they’ve become a lot more frequent this year which is becoming a huge inconvenience in general but it also ruins any and all attempts to study regularly. I’d been studying or revising daily getting 10+ hours a week in, but because these are becoming so common it’s meant that I’ve been lucky to get 4 hours done. Most of the time they hit late at night so I’m up all night and it’s just hard to focus long enough to study when you’ve not slept a wink.

Even my motivation to study has begun to fade, some days it’s fine, but because some of the attacks can take a few days to get back into a normal rhythm again it doesn’t really help matters. It’s kinda funny, between the rest of the issues I’ve had to deal with this year I was so excited to be ahead of where I expected to be, and to be back on track for what I’d wanted and then to have this happen has been quite difficult to deal with.

Over the last month I had tried to tackle it, thinking it was the studying triggering it but I’ve had little to no luck (the fact I’m switching doctors right now probably isn’t helping). I tried making a studygram and that worked for about 2 weeks before they came back, but it’s at least something I’ve really enjoyed doing amongst all this so I hope I can maintain it.

I think until this point I’d wanted to believe I could still go on like I was well and fit to do so, but I’m slowly realising that I simply can’t. I thought when my concentration and memory began to come back everything would be fine but I’m still recovering so I need to be more thoughtful with what I’m doing. I need to find a balance between what I want to do and what I can manage because as much as I want to study, I don’t want to do it at the expense of my health especially when it’s already taken so many knocks. It may be that for a while I just need to take it as individual days instead of trying to enforce a schedule because it’s just not possible to say every day I’ll do ____ if I need to take 2/3 days to recover from these attacks.

This has been such a struggle for me this week, it’s almost ridiculous. While I’ve always said I’d love to learn other languages on top of Korean, I had been under the impression I’d get to an upper intermediate level before starting any other languages. Maybe it was in part I’d planned to learn some using Korean (textbook’s for Korean’s to learn other languages), but also possibly that I wanted to find a system that really worked for me to self study successfully since this is my first venture.

I know deep down I’m not well enough to be able to cope with it just yet, though I can slowly see some improvements so I can only hope it’s not too much longer before things are somewhat back to normal. Even knowing this though, there’s still a voice in the back of my head going “Oh go on, it’ll be fine.” which is getting increasingly difficult to ignore.

I know I want to try Japanese, because it’s such a beautiful language and even if the writing system is a little daunting I’ve wanted to learn it for as long as I can remember so it’d be a childhood dream fulfilled. Aside from that in the last month or so I’ve really wanted to take Spanish back up again, I haven’t done anything in Spanish for at least 7 years but I used to be able to write essays in Spanish now I can count and just about introduce myself and I’ve no idea why I remember that but apparently my brain deemed it important.

This has been on my mind for a while so I’d like to address this even though its a bit of a difficult topic. These are questions or comments I’ve had frequently and they’re not sincere questions they’re often demoralizing or demeaning so I want to try and explain why these questions or comments can be detrimental to a learner. Or at least answer them enough to offer some insight. Also these can apply to any language.

1. Ugh, why are you bothering to learn Korean?

If that’s the attitude you’re going to take, it doesn’t matter what my answer is you’ve clearly already made up your mind and you’re just looking for an argument. No one should have to defend themselves for learning a language whether its Spanish or Klingon, it’s something they enjoy, or they want to better themselves for whatever reason and you don’t get to decide why or if they get to do that.

2. What’s the point of learning Korean? You’ll never use it!

Again, this feels like the start of an argument but I’m more likely to answer this one. If I want to learn a language, that should be enough of a reason. However that rarely seems to be an acceptable answer so, it doesn’t matter if I don’t use it I have an interest in South Korea. I like the music, the television, the history/architecture, and if nothing else the people. They are so nice and if you show the slightest effort they re so kind about it and so encouraging. You cannot say the same for English most of the time, at least in my experience. Besides, when has learning a language hindered someone? It doesn’t hurt anyone, except maybe themselves because sometimes you can give yourself a headache trying to understand grammar points.

3. If you were serious about it you’d go to school to learn it.

This one reeeeeally irks me. Firstly, I am serious about it, you don’t get to decide what makes someone serious about their goals. Secondly, there is nowhere in my country that teaches Korean, so I’d have to go to school in another county which costs money which I don’t currently have. Don’t assume everything is available everywhere, that’s just not how the world works.

4. You might as well give up, you’ll never manage it on your own.

This is when you are no longer worth my time, and I know that sounds horrible but I don’t need toxic thoughts like that being spat at me from people who don’t care. I have depression that does that really spectacularly for me, I don’t need it from anybody else, especially since social interactions are exhausting enough on a good say due to anxiety without you make me feel even more worthless than I already do. You never know what someone is going through, never assume. People are good at hiding things, you will probably never know if you’re talking to someone who is socially anxious or depressed or even on the autistic spectrum (unless they tell you) because we’re good at hiding it. We’re used to trying to look, act and sound normal because we want to be included and welcomed and not feel like a burden even if we go home afterwards and have a breakdown, or fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion, or cancel things at the very last minute because we can’t cope with leaving the house that day. I’m fed up with this unspoken taboo about mental health, and honestly I’m fed up with people not being nice to others. You don’t have to understand, just don’t bring other people down because you have no right to do that.

5. Just.... why?

This one comes in a few different forms but they all basically come down to this. It’s from people who wouldn’t bat an eye if you’d told them you were learning German, Italian, French etc, the classic languages, but because it’s a language from a country they’ve never thought about they can’t understand why you would bother since they can’t see the use. Or maybe they can’t understand how you developed your interest in that country, although occasionally it’s both. It’s rarely malicious but it can still be quite hurtful especially when it’s prolonged and frequently brought up. Instead of one clean bow it’s like slowly chipping away which is just as damaging.