3.5yrs / 2600 hrs

Hi...

In the last 6 months my personal & work lives have been um… challenging. I have much less time and mental energy for my hobbies and the stress has affected my learning a lot. I have noticed myself getting exhausted super easily and often physically struggling to follow the words on the page in my book. At times like that there’s nothing I can do but put it down and go rest. Korean isn’t going anywhere and eventually the things that are causing me stress will be resolved. 

Having said that I’m still fitting in 2 hours of kr a day and I’m still making progress. Here’s the topics for this update:

How has writing been going? 

Am I ever going to Korea? 

Is it possible to learn words without Anki? 

Am I still using papago to read books? 

The Intermediate Plateau is a lie Big Language uses to sell you youtube channel subscriptions  

Is output the final boss?

How has writing been going? 

A year ago I started outputting by writing in my own little google doc and also completing prompts set by my tutor for review. I colour code the corrections into spelling or spacing errors / grammar errors / suggested better wording so I can get a feel for what kinds of mistakes I’m making and how often. 

I often write diary type entries ranting about things that have annoyed me at work lmao. I also challenged myself to leave a comment on every yt video or podcast ep I listened to but lately I have not been keeping up with that. 

I’m not fully focused on output right now. Previously I was doing a nice little 1-2 hours a week of writing but I’ve fallen off a lot lately while chaos has reigned in my personal life. 🫠

I’ve only done something like 20hrs writing in the last 6 months due to ~life but despite that I have gained a level of confidence in writing. This time last year just putting any of my thoughts to paper was painful, but now even though I still make silly mistakes it's a lot smoother and I can always figure out some way to say what I want and be understood. I have a long way to go but I can see a lot of progress with the little time I've put in so far.

I want to keep my main focus on immersion for now because I think stronger automaticity in parsing the language is going to help a lot with my ability to know more that what I've written sounds correct and increase my comfort level and confidence. 

Am I ever going to Korea? 

Yes this year for sure! (아직 비행기표를 사지 않았지만…) In September 🙏 

Is it possible to learn words without Anki?

I stopped using Anki back in June last year because it wasn’t fun any more and reading books was much more enjoyable. I have no regrets and no plans to start using flashcards again any time soon. When I was doing Anki I was marking words known at a rate of about 8/day, and since i’ve stopped using anki: 

https://kimchi-reader.app/

Do I still use papago to read books? 

I mentioned in a previous update that when I started reading native books 2 years ago it was a very uphill grind. I often used papago to help me figure out chunks of text then I would go back and try and work out what I had missed or misunderstood in the original that was blocking my understanding. 

In the 2 years since I started reading I’ve read 57 books (a mix of Young Adult and regular novels) 

Source: my natively acc https://learnnatively.com/user/bizoo/kor/ 

My reading speed is still slow compared to reading in my NL english but the details/tone/emotions I glean from books are much richer now than even 1 year ago and I rely on dictionary and papago support much less. 

To give you an idea of how the process has felt along the way: 

Book #1 세계를 건너 너에게 갈게 first book, totally puzzling each sentence out. Used lots of machine translation.

Book #10 당연하게도 나는 너를 first time I felt any kind of flow to my reading instead of each sentence feeling like little puzzle pieces put together. 

Book #21 피치 오브 타임 felt a sense of confidence and ease for the first time, like I was reading at my level and not missing depth.

Book #34+35 죽이고 싶은 아이 + 뒤틀린 집 started to freeflow a bit without any popup dictionary for the first time. There was still a layer of fuzz and a lack of confidence, but I realised I could do it.

Book #45 용의자 X의 헌신 started to feel like when I wasn’t understanding sentences on the first pass I should 100% be able to re-read and get it instead of assuming there was a piece of grammar I didn’t know. I was getting more confident in my reading ability I guess.

Book #55 우린 그림자가 생기지 않는다 rarely using papago and when I do I dislike having to do it. More often than not I’m able to re-read the sentences I didn't get on the first pass and figure out what I missed. My grammar knowledge and confidence is miles stronger than even 6 months ago.  

Book #57 죽이고 싶은 아이 2 - sequel to the 34th book I read. Compared to the first volume I was so much more confident and at ease in my reading. When I was looking things up it was generally slang or turns of phrase, as opposed to straightforward vocab or grammar.

My vocab is only around 10500 words so there are still a lot of words to look up and if I only want to focus on books where I have a minimum of 96% word comp then the options are still limited. I feel like I am hitting another tipping point with reading though which is exciting. 

I also graphed my reading speed over time (counting 자 per hour) and you can see how slow the improvement in reading speed is going haha.

(i should probably have worked it out as cpm but here we are)

Take this with a pinch of salt but apparently the reading speed for a native is 30,000-42,000 자 per hour. I got a ways to go lmao.

The Intermediate Plateau is a lie Big Language Learning uses to make you click on youtube videos  

When people talk about ‘hitting the intermediate plateau’ I’ve never known what they were talking about. So far I’ve never had the feeling of hitting a wall or making no progress. I’m always learning new words and, as you can see in the book section above, even if it’s not been visible week-to-week, I’ve clearly hugely improved every year that I’ve been learning. Here’s hoping I never get that feeling but maybe I just jinxed myself. Guess we’ll find out in a future update. 

Is output the final boss? 

I’m not a particularly output-orientated language learner and I never have been. Most of my free time is spent reading and listening to podcasts. I do love to yap at times though and being able to express myself is a goal but not one I’m in a rush for. Because of all that I don’t think I’ll change my routine much any time soon. 

I dip my toe into writing and speaking at least once a week with my tutor so I’ll be ready when I decide I want to get serious about it. I’m not scared that ‘putting it off’ will cause any issues. I’m just much more motivated to work on more reading so that reading books becomes easier and faster (therefore less work and more fun) and also on developing more automaticity when listening to spoken kr. I have no idea how long it will take for reading to be anywhere near as relaxing as it is for me in English but I'm excited to find out. 

In the long term I’m curious about how far I’ll get with speaking, the is the kind of progression map I imagine for output ability:

Tourist conversations - order food/buy tickets. Be understood regardless of the errors you make because people understand you are a tourist 

Office smalltalk - what did you do on the weekend? What will you eat for lunch? Have you seen this movie before? Was it good? Short shallow (& repetitive) convo with people who know you and forgive mistakes. 

Home conversations - telling your partner/parents/roommate a story about the embarrassing thing that happened today, ranting about the colleague that pissed you off, arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes, making detailed plans for your weekend. Long conversations where you express your personality. But still with people who know you and aren’t bothered by mistakes or some limitations. 

Business communication - use of official and professional tone, few to no real language mistakes and high stakes, if you blunder there are consequences like making your company look bad or losing a customer.

Academic communication - Ability to explain and argue things with precise accuracy and detail related to a very specific domain. Generally no space for language errors or limitations beyond what a native would have. 

Creative language - Strong command over all aspects of the lang needed. Writing novels, poetry or lyrics. Performing spoken word. Making TV or movie scripts. 

I don’t imagine I'll get even as far as business communication, but if I could get comfy in home conversations I’d be pretty satisfied I reckon. (💀 famous last words, when are any of us ever satisfied.) I feel instinctively that speaking will be easier further down the line than it will be if I switch my focus to it now. Based on other peoples’ experiences this will not be true, but it’s how I feel right now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Final thoughts

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is that I don’t see this learning korean thing as something I have much control over. Sure I can choose what to immerse in, how much time to invest and what tutor to work with et cetera. But I can't choose what my brain actually acquires or how fast it does it. It feels more like observing a natural phenomenon happen, something like the tides going out and in. At the end of the day the tide is going to come in when it comes in, it’s not really up to me and to be honest I don’t even really understand all the science behind it, I just know it's happening.

3 year update

2226 immersion hours (currently ~2.5 hours a day/72 hours a month) 

58 class lessons (87 hours) + 31 independent writing practice hours 

44 books read 

~9000 words mark known 

A brief reflection on the past 3 years and some updates:

Year 1: 500 hours 

I started on hard mode, immersed in native dramas for adults from day one with an anki deck and graded readers on the side as my comp input. 

By the end of year 1 I knew about 3000 words, recognised common grammar and could at least tell whether a word was a verb/noun/particle etc and how to deconjugate. 

Reading shows with subs I could get the gist but had to pause constantly to understand the story. 

Listening without subs I only caught words and phrases. Even with the easy learner podcasts I had to focus a lot to follow what they were saying. 

Year 2: 900 hours, 8 books

TV shows with subs suddenly started to become a lot easier. I could follow the story and only had to pause for the details. 

As things started to get more comprehensible, I started to lose a lot of my tolerance for ambiguity because now low comp content felt like a waste of time. 

I started listening to easy audio dramas and idol livestreams as well as the learner podcasts. Although my comp wasn’t perfect and sometimes details would slip by me, generally I understood these well and enjoyed them. 

Half way through the year I stopped reading tv shows and started reading native books, starting with books for teenagers. Reading was an uphill climb and very intensive. When starting I had ~4000 known words, and the books were 90-94% comp on Migaku. In terms of reading skill it felt like progress was very very slow at the start. 

Since reading novels means being exposed to higher density language than tv shows, heaps of new words plus grammar that you have to pick apart in order to understand the details, it was a lot of information to process all at once so it makes sense that it took a long period of time for my brain to digest it all and for me to start to notice progress. 

Ended the year with about 6000 known words on Migaku 

Year 3: 800 hours, 36 books 

I kept reading as much as possible and about half way through this year books suddenly started to feel a lot easier and I became able to confidently freeflow easier books with v minimal lookups if I want. Still mixing Young Adult and easy adult novels. Comp around 96% on migaku. 

I tried audiobooks, but those were still hard because of so much unknown vocab. Plus a lot of vocab I’ve picked up from reading isn’t very deeply embedded yet so I don’t parse it well at speed. Started reading along + listening to audiobooks of books I have previously read instead, which is easy in comparison. 

Youtube on a familiar topic is generally comfortable without subs although I’ll miss words here and there. Sometimes I have to pause because ppl talk a bit too fast for me. Idol livestreams and learner podcasts are very straightforward. I’d say  Refold Level 5/6 comp.

Variety shows are hard. I can follow what's going on but fast overlapping speech, background noise and lots of cultural references make it hard to follow the details or the rules of games etc. those are around Refold Level 4 

I’ve been listening to 디바제시카 lately (a true crime podcast with a single host narrating cases) and I can usually follow the story but there’s often enough unknown vocab that some of the details are fuzzy. Level 4. 

I haven’t watched a drama all year, so no idea how they are for me. Wait no scratch that, I rewatched ep1 of 좀비 탐정 just for this review. I first watched this show about 6 months into my journey. It didn’t have subs but I just watched it freeflow coz it was cheesy and silly and fun and i wanted to. I understood p much nothing the first time. Now I can follow the story and some details, but other details are still fuzzy for me because I lack vocab. There’s a character with strong 경상도 사투리 and I struggle to understand him. Level 4/5 

Ended with about 9000 known words on kimchi

Some Notes: 

At least half my day is spent doing pure listening but I don’t listen to a big variety of accents which I want to change. 

I have never been to Korea and have no Korean friends and don’t watch much in the way of movies or TV. I miss so much cultural context when it comes to places/people/history/food/etc. Food in particular is a blank spot for me and it comes up constantly. The only solution is to go to Korea and try all the dishes I think. 

A lot of the vocab I know is from books so it skews heavily towards descriptive prose. I am really lacking in terms of news or academic vocab. 

Even with the vocab I have now, I feel like I have a really long way to go until it’s properly deeply embedded. I don’t expect to make particularly good output for a good while. I just generally don’t have expectations of this process being over any time soon. 

Output 

I’ve been going to a once-a-week class for the past 2 years now. I’ve had the same teacher the whole time who graduated from Yonsei with a degree in teaching Korean and she’s wonderful.

Up until January we were mostly just chorusing, playing games and reading out dialogues. This year our teacher decided we were ready to be pushed into proper output and changed the lesson style to more spontaneous freeflow conversations. 

The first few months I just let myself speak and make mistakes. I tried to notice what was coming to me easily and what wasn't, what sorts of mistakes I was making and whether I was able to fix errors in my speech over time. 

Meanwhile at home I started writing diary entries a couple times a week and having chat gpt rewrite it more naturally for some kind of basic comparison. 

It was a lot of just trying and noticing this year. I colour coded the chat gpt corrections into spelling/spacing corrections, better wording, grammar corrections to be able to get a visual overview of the type and frequency. 

At the start just thinking up sentences to write was hard. It got easier over time as I started to activate some of the lang but I have a long ways to go. I notice lots of times I try to use a structure and I won't be exactly sure how it goes so I'll get it close but wrong. Then a few entries later I'll spontaneously use it again, this time correctly. But then there's plenty of things I still repeatedly get wrong. I'm just bad at spelling in both en and kr apparently. 

I use Slowly and I exchanged some letters in kr this summer which was nice, but I haven't gotten properly into real life output yet. 

Weekly Group Class

I'm still really enjoying this class. Each week is taught around a functional topic (calling a repair guy, attending a job interview, going to a meetup event etc) both working with a textbook and having freeflow conversations. The benefits for me are getting time with a native teacher, meeting other learners and having a comfortable space to output. There’s 1 teacher and 3 students total so it’s a nice environment. Most of the material we cover is generally easy for me but there is sometimes vocab from practical domains that I’ve not come across yet in immersion. It’s a good way to polish the production of structures I know but stumble over in output and get to a stage where they flow easily. Looking back over my notes a piece of grammar I hadn’t at all acquired in immersion for example was the adj-을 것 같다 / adj-은 것 같다 and the distinction in the degree of certainly being asserted by the speaker between them. When the teacher explained it I was 👁👄👁. It was such a simple thing but I just hadn’t ever needed to focus on it before in immersion.  

Reading 

So I said above when I started reading native books it was a complete grind. I knew about 4000 words on Migaku at that point and I had to pick apart almost every single sentence using the dictionary and papago. Even when I knew all the words I’d still often not understand the sentence and I’d have to translate it and figure out what I had missed or didn’t understand in the original. At the beginning I was frequently just unconsciously skipping over particles or ignoring inflections. It was a long slow process to train myself to read. Partly I just wasn’t used to having to parse such dense pieces of text and pick up on every little part, but also I was learning tons of new vocab and grammar at the same time and we can only learn so much at once. 

After the first 10 months (20 books) it did suddenly feel a lot easier and I realised I had a lot of Young Adult and easy adult content (like japanese crime novels) available to me that I had around 96% comp in. By this point I’d honed the kind of fundamental flow of reading in kr and built up enough vocab to get closer to extensive reading. 

Now when I’m reading something ≥96% comp I rarely have to run sentences through papago although I’ll still do it if I know all the words but can’t figure out the meaning. Often now this ends up being turns of phrase that I’m not familiar with or very long sentences that I get lost in. 

Reading still isn’t as easy as English but it feels like it’s improving a lot faster now. 

Things that helped with reading: 

Not expecting it to be like reading in my NL. I accepted it would be a grind at the start but trusted that if I invested enough time into it then it would get easier. 

Using Migaku (and then moving to Kimchi Reader). Being able to check your comp level and prioritise higher comp books make the process much easier. 

Switching to Kimchi and being able to read on my phone. 

Having a big collection of books and starting from the easiest. 

Having other people rec things they’ve read and found easy. Shoutout Natively. 

안녕 안키

I stopped using anki in June. Before that I was doing it during my commute to work, but once I got Kimchi Reader, which has mobile support, I started to resent spending that time on anki when I could be reading the next chapter of my book which would be way more fun. 

I don’t miss doing anki or mining, although I might go back to it again in the future. I never felt like anki hugely helped me with vocab retention. Words that I remembered easily were going to acquire either way, and words that I struggled with in anki I struggled with because I wasn’t seeing it enough in varied contexts in real life. Seeing words in lots of different contexts is really key for me. Repeating the same anki sentence card was simply not enough to make much of a dent in my acquisition for most words in my experience. I might feel different in the future when I’m trying to learn less frequent words. We’ll see. 

Other things I noticed 

I used to really struggle with using the correct politeness level in speech. I understood them, I would just speak wrong without thinking. This is muuuch less of an issue now and I catch and correct myself if I do do it. Embedding -(으)시 etc is also starting to come naturally. 

If I see hanja in the wild I fully just read them in Korean in my head first now as opposed to in jp or zh. 

Some practice test results to see number go up/triangle fill in 

2023 Jun

Mock TOPIK II Listening 31/50  63% 

Mock TOPIK II Reading   16/50  32%  (I didn’t even finish, I was cooked by Q21 and quit) 

2024 Aug

Mock TOPIK II Listening 39/50   79% 

Mock TOPIK II Reading   32/50   64% 

Path forward

Put more consistent hours into writing practice to build some more confidence and automaticity in basic conversation.

Ban myself from using English in class, if I wanna yap I gotta do it in kr. No more crosstalk.

Continue my current reading pace and read another 12 books before the end of 2024. Keep growing my vocab and working towards increased speed and comfort at reading. Hopefully get to a proper extensive reading range for some material. 

Book a trip to Korea for 2025 - go and try lots of food and explore lots of places. 

I am hoping that my increased comfort in freeflow reading will translate to some listening gains soon and make audiobooks easier. Planning to move from reading+listening to books I've previously read to trying reading+listening to something I haven't read yet. 

I like recording myself speaking and listening back. Generally I'm reading out something I've written but recently I recorded myself watching a video and chorusing a little here and there which I could do more of in future. 

2.5 year update

2.5 years

Migaku: 7600 known words 

Hours: 1800 

For the last 6 months I’ve been heavily focused on intensive reading, listened to a lot of livestreams and just recently moved up to stage 3. 

I don't watch much TV at all. Mostly I split my time between freeflow audio and intensive reading. Livestreams have been good for extensive exposure to pretty banal everyday conversations from a range of speakers. Whereas I push my listening limits with audio dramas. 

In terms of livestreams, for speakers I'm familiar with I can follow quite comfortably but this is very high frequency vocab for me. I listen to around an hour or two of livestream content per day from a small group of speakers that I’m familiar with. There are still times in the day that I don’t understand something or I miss what was said, but it doesn’t happen super often. 

My overall vocab acquisition pace has been so fast and I've been learning for such a short time still that most of my acquired vocab still isn't deeply enough embedded for me to be able to follow a lot of fast paced convos between natives. I often still struggle to catch words in their weak forms because my experience with that word in text/audio is still so shallow. 

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Refold stage 3, classes and output:  

I moved up to stage 3 this year based on a few factors. I feel the pull to output a lot more nowadays. I’ve been going to an evening class once a week since I hit 500 hours. The class was for absolute beginners and started with phonetics and a lot of chorusing and then each week introduced grammar and vocab on a topic which we practised using guided roleplays.

When I first started going to the classes I wasn't anywhere near ready to actually output. I had around 3000 known words and could get the gist of TV shows freeflow with subs but missed a lot of details. 

For the first year I went to the class it was super simple, i always knew the grammar and vocab we were going over. All I focused on was: getting used to hearing myself speak, getting feedback on my pronunciation and fixing things I wasn’t satisfied with (I remember I wasn’t happy with my 어 or 오 at the start), and getting familiar with physically speaking. 

Before I went to class I'd never said anything out loud in kr. So it was super weird to just…start speaking. But after a while I got really used to hearing myself and found myself reading the sentence on my anki cards out loud to myself in the mornings. 

There was plenty of grammar that I understood in immersion but couldn’t produce because I knew how it roughly sounded/looked, but I didn’t know it well enough to say it myself. 

For example I understood 할 것, 한 것 and 하는 것 in immersion, but because the context always gave away the tense, i was never forced to make the distinction of which was which. Focusing on them for an hour with the tutor where we had to use the correct one in context helped define the vibe of ㄹ and ㄴ in these kinds of structures for example. Similarly I remember the tutor having us drill the conjugation for the verbs like 맵다 아름답다 etc into 매운 and 아름다운. I already understood them fine, but practising them helped sharpen my focus and activate my ability to produce them in speech. 

The classes have been a money and time investment obviously, and I didn’t necessarily learn much new korean from them, but I did normalise speaking, get to meet other learners, get regular feedback from a native speaker and got to periodically test out my freeflow output skills to see how close i felt to actually moving on to level 3. 

Last year freeflow outputting via speech or writing was painful. The last month or so it’s felt much easier. Our tutor is pushing us towards freeflow output instead of guided roleplays and it’s lined up well with my own personal goals for the year. In class we do freeflow conversations on a theme and the tutor types as we speak to show us corrections or more native wording after we finish speaking. I really enjoy that style. She also sets writing tasks and gives us corrections which are super valuable. 

At the moment I’m just throwing out whatever language comes to me, not caring how crap I sound, and noting down whatever I’m messing up/blanking on/getting tongue-tied with/etc. In a month or two  I want to review these notes and make a plan for the rest of the year. 

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Reading progress

It’s now been a year since I started reading native books. I started with young adult books and have mixed in adult books as well. Feb 2023-2024 I managed to read 26 books total which would have been crazy to think about this time last year. 

I definitely couldn't have done it without migaku. The first book I read was about 90% word comp but there was so much I was fuzzy on or needed to skip over because it wasn't at my level. 1 Yr and 26 books later my reading itself is much stronger and I'm getting to see words so much more often. 

Natively is great and I think it’s a really useful resource for people starting to get into reading. Everything is organised by difficulty (when you read something you just play a “which was more difficult” game and rate it against everything else you’ve read and everyone's answers are amalgamated) and you can see what other learners are using. I (as always) did it the hard way and just grinded with materials above my level until things got easier because I don’t love graded readers and little kids books but I think had I had Natively I would have tried out more things just because it is so easy to browse and and get a gauge of difficulty. 

Reading books is a whole lot easier now but I still have a long way to go. Lots of style and imagery goes over my head because I'm still trying to understand the words. I have a ton of books hoarded so I just go with whatever I have the highest word comprehension on and keep working down the list. 

From the first novel I read last year being an absolute grind and having to rely on papago as I went, recently I was able reading the second volume of 피치오브타임 (a BL romance) freeflow on the ridi app while i was on the train and it was super chill. There were one or two unknown words per page but they didn’t get in the way of understanding and it was easy to stay engaged in the story. Most books are not this easy but I can definitely feel everything moving in the right direction. 

Vocab

Vocab has hit 7.5k. it's enough to free flow romance dramas and livestreams without subs and follow level 4 or 5. It's not really enough for me to comfortably free flow read outside of super simple romance novels yet.

I switched my monolingual dictionary to the top of migaku sometime in the last 6 months. I use it a lot of the time but whenever I don't understand the mono then I throw the en on as well. I don’t put any effort into understanding the dictionary. Might in the future but isn’t where I want to spend my time atm. 

Hanja 

I make a lot of Hanja connections as I learn words automatically. Like I learned crude oil 원유 and immediately coffee bean 원두 came to mind. I had read a book a year before based in a cafe where 원두 came up a lot but I never bothered to learn it at the time since it's not a v useful word. The 두 was easy to recognise as bean (두부) but at that time it was one of those words that was pretty fuzzy and never stuck. But I guess I'd just seen it enough to remember it deep down and when I learned 원유 it was obvious that 유 was oil so the 원 clicked into place as the same morpheme in 원두, 원어 etc. The hanja 原 didn't come to mind, but the meaning did. 

I think the only real benefit I have with Hanja familiarity is that I am 

1. Aware of the existence of morphemes in general 

2. Familiar with a ton of specific morphemes and can bring to mind words that use the same morphemes in jp/zh (And then check if the same word exists in kr) 

1 is much more important than 2. My vocab in zh and jp is mostly super passive or faded these days. But my brain is very tuned into noticing the meaningful chunks that make up a word in Korean. Anyways all that is to say that as much as looking up Hanja is fun I don't think knowing characters gives me a huge benefit in vocab learning compared to a learner who isn't familiar. imo becoming aware of the existence of morphemes and getting into the habit of noticing etymological connections is important. The Hanja themselves as in the form of the characters are not useful for a kr learner outside of the ones you are seeing in your immersion. Which is probs v few unless you love the newspaper. 

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Things I’ve noticed 

My instinct for being able to appropriately produce or switch between 반말/존댓말 didn’t exist before this year. I would always 반말 in class without realising then get corrected. Last few months I’ve realised I’m not doing that any more and switching isn’t difficult. 

Little sentences come to me easily like 먼저 씻는 게 좋겠어요. And I think practising producing structures has been super useful because often the little details like “is it 씻을 or 씻는?” have been blurry to me until I’ve had to pay attention to them for output. There’s been a lot of things click into place the last few months, for example getting hit with a “ohh -ㄹ really has a feeling of imminent future” etc and I’ve noticed the corresponding improvement in my reading as well.

It’s a very weird feeling when I realise I can recognise the sound of words I don’t know the meaning for yet. For example I read 살금살금 for the first time in a book recently and immediately heard the line from that one cursed skz song in my head. Somehow my brain had remembered the sound of the word and just…made the connection? Brains are spooky fr. 

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Future Plans 

I want to keep reading a ton because it's fun and I get to reinforce lots of the language. Books at 96%+ word comprehension are comfy. I want to continue to read more at this level of comp and in order to continue to get closer to extensive reading in at least one domain. 

I’ve shifted my mindset for now away from being as focused on new vocab acquisition more towards focusing on what I do know and strengthening grammar knowledge. This includes forcing myself to do grammar lookups instead of relying on content (hi im lazy :)) and making grammar cards just for a bit more exposure to them.  

For output I’m speaking for a couple of hours a week in class and having my teacher correct a piece of writing. Outside of that I’m freeflow writing one or twice a week to get the feel for it and running it through chatgpt for some quick and dirty feedback. In a few months I’m going to make an output plan for the rest of the year. 

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Also just for fun here’s some words i collected bcos im normal  

Spicy konglish: 힐링, 엑셀, 린스, 컴백, 화이팅, 티엠아이, 맨투맨, 니트, 멀티탭, 패딩, 멘트, 팬티, 모자이크, 핸들, 점퍼, 백미러, 캐럴, 브로마이드, 샤프, 바바리(+ bonus  바바리맨), 비닐하우스, 커닝, 미라클 모닝, 엠티, 메뉴, 폴더폰, 링거, 캣맘 (not that spicy but deserved a spot), 개그맨, 뮤비, 포크레인, 

Not konglish but should be: 독백 獨白, 아름 from 안다, 

Btw I log all the books I read and my reviews on my natively account if you’re interested. Come join reading gang!