The ‘Five a Day’ Challenge!
It’s been a while since I’ve done a post on the Korean language but I reblogged a post the other day that talked about learning about 500 words (by the end of 2017) just by studying five words a day.
So basically, you learn five words a day (example: Monday - Saturday) and at the end of the week (Sunday), you review those words and practice the ones you had and difficulties on. Then you start the cycle again (on Monday) with a new batch of words on top of the ones from the previous week. And you keep doing this until you’ve finished the challenge or until you finished whatever word list you were using or you can just do it to improve your vocabulary so it’s never-ending.
So for myself, I think I’m going to start 500 Most Common Korean Verbs and then later do the challenge again with more verbs or maybe adjectives or nouns. I think this first round will take about 16-17 weeks.
Challenge Start Date: Monday, October 2, 2017
Challenge End Date: Sunday, January 28, 2018 (ish)
Okay, so where do I start?
First, I found a word list. The TOPIK Guide website has a lot of great resources for studying for the TOPIK which I know I’m going to have to take eventually so I thought, why not start here? They have a lot of vocabulary lists to use for this challenge so it made sense to me to start here. But if you have a Korean textbook or someone on Tumblr has like a master vocabulary list, you can totally start with that. Or you can make your own list. It’s up to you.
Next, I’ve been meaning to start a language notebook of somewhat. I know I already have own from when I was studying Korean in the classroom so that has grammar points in that notebook but I thought maybe I should start one for just vocabulary. So I bought some cute notebooks at Wal-Mart and I’ve designated one as my Korean vocabulary notebook. This way, I can keep track of the words that I should know and whatnot.
This is how I have my notebook set up. One the left, I just have the word and on the right, I have the definition and how to use it in example sentences.
Now, how to actually study the words. I’ve always been a fan of flashcards. But since I’m self-studying Korean and I haven’t really set a specific time for me to sit down and study, I thought it would be easier to make a Quizlet deck.It just makes studying on-the-go easier since I can download the app on my phone and I won’t have a giant stack of flashcards laying around. Plus, Quizlet has these really great options on how to quiz yourself, so like just like normal flashcards or you can do matching or writing.
Here’s the link to my “Five a Day” Challenge Part One deck, if you want to follow along with me.
