- May 14
- 9 min read
Since I started learning Korean in 2021 this is the first time I’ve gone more than 6 months without writing a reflection post and it’s due to the first real dynamic change I’ve had in my learning. Without going into tedious detail, compared to the lockdown era when I first started learning, my life is now much less conducive to language learning. I have family responsibilities that eat up most of my weekend, people and things demanding my time during the week and am dealing with a frankly dante-eque work environment that in all honesty I should be a big girl about and quit already. Not to even speak of the mental drain of living through world events each more soul destroying than the last.
Living crisis to crisis
Journey to 100 books
Fuzzy Listening
Output (speaking type)
Output (writing type)
I haven’t stopped Korean, but I have had to adjust. I have burned out completely at my job which has forced me to make some big changes.
Even while I was having an extremely bad time at work, barely sleeping more than a couple of hours a night and struggling to stretch my ever-thinning energy across all of my responsibilities, I was still stubbornly determined to not change any aspect of my language learning routine. That included getting 2-3 hours of high comp input a day, doing a few hours of class a week and reading at least 2 books a month.
In hindsight that was a bad decision. 🙃
By March this year I was basically just haunting my own life. My concentration was so fried from no sleep and extreme stress that I could barely focus for 5 minutes straight. Whatever content I did painstakenly manage to consume I doubt I was processing it at any real depth, and crucially - for the first time - I wasn’t able to enjoy any of it.
I think it was difficult for me to change any aspect of my learning at this time because:
I know that getting ‘good’ at a lang is an hours game, and it already takes years as it is. ‘Slowing down’ in any sense felt like creating distance from some imaginary joyous ‘next level’. And I desperately wanted to bank on that imagined joy because god knows I wasn’t getting any day to day.
Korean has been my primary hobby for years and my biggest daily source of fun. I stubbornly didn’t want to let that be ruined by whatever else was going on in my life.
I had felt such a source of pride in my consistency in learning 2 hours a day for 4+ years, and didn’t want to lose that. I really didn’t want to slide into exhausted inertia and feel disappointed in myself for not continuing to be ‘as good’ as before.
But well, turns out you can’t grind your way out of burnout.
So I made a lot of changes. For language learning the big ones were that I pulled my attention away from a lot of things like social media, discord, youtube for the most part, following the music groups I previously did, listening to livestreams, trying to meet a daily goal, my reading schedule, goals etc. All of the things that made me feel like I had to be constantly refreshing or looking out for the next update or keeping track of or ticking off boxes.
It wasn’t easy, I’d gotten to a point where I felt stressed out by silence. My brain was so frazzled that it needed a constant source of numbing noise otherwise it felt like it was caving in on itself. Pulling myself away from the refresh cycles and figuring out how to relax again continues to be a bit of a work in progress. But it’s better now at least.
I might have made it sound like I've taken a break from Korean at some point in this process, but I actually haven’t. I have to admit I am still logging my immersion activities each day. Feels embarrassing to admit after saying I am trying to get away from the pressure mindset but it’s honestly such an ingrained habit, and I log some non-language things daily as well so it’s a general part of my lifestyle.
Unlike the past I am absolutely not working to hit any kind of target per day, regardless of logging it. And as much as I’m still logging what I do, I am not calculating how much time that is adding up to. Similarly I purposefully don’t try and fill in dead time, dead time is kind of sacred for me right now.
Okay now the life-is-chaos update is out of the way, on to actual language things…
Reading update
I’ve just finished reading a book called 나의 완벽한 남자친구와 그의 연인 which was the 85th book I’ve read so far in Korean. I had around 96-97% comp from the jump, it’s a contemporary romance a bit ~a la sally rooney so very straight-forward content. I’ve really noticed how much this period of stress and burnout has made reading especially feel painful as hell. In this book for example the prose is very straightforward, but there were days, especially in the middle of the week, when my head was buzzing with work stress and I could feel parts of my brain grinding against one another just trying to focus. Then there would be rare days where I'd managed to avoid the stress headaches and insomnia etc and I’d fly through the pages.
Outside of tiredness/environmental factors, the things that are noticeably harder for me in books right now are usually speech. Not all or even most of the time, but very colloquial turns of speech can still have me feeling lost.
Although reading is generally still slow, and nowhere near as relaxing as in English, it gives me hope that once things are less stressful the tired haze will slowly lift. I noticed that when I'm struggling to follow prose reading out loud for a page or two can be so helpful to lock back in.
I was hoping to get to 100 books read by the end of this year as a little personal milestone. Maybe that will have to wait or maybe it’ll still happen we’ll see. I’m not thinking about it for now.
Listening on the other hand is just so much less energy consuming than reading so I naturally do more of it. Having said that, it's not perfect. Similar to what I said about getting lost a little in colloquial speech in books sometimes, I’m still not always catching turns of phrase out loud. It’s just a lack of familiarity I know, but it’s just interesting to observe what is still hard outside of unknown vocab.
Another thing I notice is not catching words I would consider ‘known’ when reading. For example 저점 for low point popped up and I absolutely didn’t catch it when it was said, though in reading I can parse it just fine. Obviously because I’ve heard it being said so little the spoken word isn’t very ingrained yet, but when reading I’m able to subconsciously rely on recognising the morphemes/hanja in context. (This also goes to show why I still read so slow. I might read it easier than I hear it, but I'm still looking+parsing as opposed to just recognising the word on sight).
I still have words in this semi-cooked state popping up regularly enough to feel the static of them.
Listening to 귀담 stories or general lifestyle podcasts by natives is generally low friction but there will be parts I miss sometimes, and I still feel like it’s got that layer of ‘fuzz’ that I never get if I listen to something in english. Which again probably just speaks to automaticity and depth of acquisition, like with 저점.
Sidebar - You know one thing I’ve noticed is my general listening skill being so much better after 4 years immersion in kr. Nowadays when I hear other languages that I’ve studied before, I feel like I’m able to hear the words much clearer than I was able to in the past despite not having studied anything other than kr this whole time. I think doing immersion from day 1 has really trained my brain to listen in a different way.
Speaking Output
I’ve been doing some freetalking with my tutor along with some more structured talking sessions designed to help me activate more of my vocab. One thing I’ve enjoyed has been storytelling lessons where she preps various materials (people/places/situations) and we mindmap vocab > imagine some kind of conflict > describe the outcome.
I can always get my point across but sometimes I really struggle to get some words out. Often I either remember roughly how the word sounds, or at least the first syllable, or I think of it but can’t be sure it’s 100% right and not just a word my brain has completely made up so I don’t say it. (My brain has never done this idk why i think it’s going to happen. I wonder if it’s because I acquired almost all of my words from immersion so sometimes words feel fake?? iykyk).
My tutor is very immersion pilled, we often talk about language learning methods and I really respect her feedback. She has mentioned that I obviously know a huge amount of vocab from reading books but the only way to activate all of that is output, and essentially that I should start devoting much more time to output than input at this point in order to capitalise on all the Korean I've learned. I don’t disagree with her but my life is currently not in a state where I have the time and energy for that. I guess I do have a growing desire to focus on output so when it becomes more possible maybe it's a thing I'll do for a period.
Even though I am not speaking fluently because I can be slow to remember words and sometimes have to pause or reword a sentence, I can still keep the conversation going for an hour without issue which is not a bad stage to be at.
My tutor has commented that despite my current output level I have a noticeably natural rhythm which makes it clear that I have consumed a lot of content, and similarly that I often express things in a way that makes sense to a Korean speaker. Of course she’s comparing me to a lot of traditional learners who lack aizuchi, exposure to common phrasing or intonation, conversational rhythm, and who have an overall low level of comprehension so probably struggle to follow what she says. But it feels good to be told that she can hear things in my speech that I've picked up from reading or listening to natives. Feels validating. Those 85 books have been fuel for something!
In terms of my accent I honestly don’t ever really think about it at this stage. I like how I speak. It sounds perfectly non offensive to me, and I know I'll keep getting better over time as well. Sometimes I hear myself say something like 한 가지 as '한 가지' with an unvoiced ㄱ instead of '한가지' with a voiced ㄱ the way it's really said, but if I'm noticing it then it'll fix itself.
If someone mishears me I feel exactly the same way I would if it happened to me in english, just that they didn’t hear me or maybe I mumbled. I just repeat the word clearly and trust they’ll understand me. This is in direct contrast to past foreign language experiences. Having someone mishear or not understand me when I spoke was mortifying. It felt like I was being exposed for being a big fakey liar who didn’t really speak the language after all and was always a blow to my confidence. Can't tell you how glad I am it's not that way with Korean.
Writing Output
I’m back on my diary writing shit a couple of times a week. I’ve often resorted to using prompts in the past to do self-directed writing in kr because otherwise I have no idea what to write about, but recently I’ve just started telling anecdotes from the past or writing about books I've been reading. So I guess I’m more confident in getting thoughts out and have expanded past the ‘describe your day’ type content.
And that’s you basically caught up on how things have been going. My stats are sitting somewhere around here -
4.5 yrs
3300 immersion hours
220 class hours
85 books
12,000 known words
I did have some other things I was going to include in this update but I’ll save them for the next one. Look out for me havering about the TOPIK, language fluency measuring systems, goal setting and unrelatable learner experiences.
Lastly, advice that has stood me well to this point: When things are easy - keep a note of what’s still hard/out of reach/confusing. This will be gold for measuring your progress against later. When things are hard - do the easiest possible thing, even if that’s nothing.
