2 years and (almost) 1500 hrs

I blinked and it’s been 2 years what the hell

Hour count 1,415 | Migaku word count 6061

Reading novels

I'm on my 9th YA novel so far this year. My word comp has been around 90-95% in them so there is still a lot of words to look up but the grammar is all fine and there’s plenty of good sentences to mine.

I’m really really enjoying reading and I have a whole (virtual) bookshelf of YA books to keep me going for the next little while. It’s still pretty tiring to read and I’m obviously much slower than in my NL (it takes me like 10-12 hours to finish a book in kr atm) but it’s really enjoyable and I feel so accomplished every time I finish a book. Vocab acquisition takes time but being another step closer to being able to do extensive reading is motivating me.

I’ve logged the books I’ve read so far on my Natively account if you’re interested

Mixing levels

I’m still really into mixing hard and easy content. I re-listened to the two 괴담 audio drama series because they are strong level 4/5 comp for me and mixed them in with harder ADs like 무공해 식당 and 라디오 극장 which are level 3/4. I’m rewatching some of my fave dramas w subs which are now level 4/5 and great mining material along with some non-subbed BLs where my comp dips between 3/5.

Audio content and close listening

Single person livestreams are my highest comp media atm. Usually around 97% known words. I probably do more pure listening of these than with subs coz I love to listen while I cook or do my skincare routine or whatever. There are still times I miss what is being said because someone spoke fast or slurred their speech or the info was a little too dense for me to fully grab who did what to who etc, but it’s rare. Ofc reading is always easier coz your brain looks at the word for much longer than you hear it spoken out loud, but in general I feel super comfortable listening.

A year ago I was struggling to get into pure audio content, I felt really stressed out when I’d miss things and lose the thread of conversation in the learner podcasts. I couldn’t help but feel a bit demotivated and overwhelmed by how much of a steep climb I thought building my listening skills would be. Happy to report it was actually pretty effortless. I just had to focus on noticing and not following 100% and stick it out for a few months and it basically sorted itself out.

Recently I’ve been listening to 10-20 mins of a livestream without subs and then going back and re-watching with subs. I pay close attention to all the bits I missed/didn’t understand/misheard and repeat them a few times before moving on. Sometimes I make a card but usually not. I really enjoy this close listening activity and because I’m using videos from a small group of content creators I’m able to really hone in on their specific idiolects and quirks of pronunciation etc which has been really interesting.

I will be so happy the first time I get to see a page of a YA novel with nothing underlined or get my first 100% known words stat on a livestream video.

I do the King Sejong Institute placement test for fun sometimes, lmao look at my listening:

Limitations

My attention span is short and I don’t love to sit around watching tv for hours in any lang. Paired with just being generally tired after work 3 hours a day is pretty much my limit but that’s plenty for me.

Anki doesn’t give me dopamine unless I’m doing it to pass time on my commute. I only end up doing it on days I'm working in the office which is like 3 times a week.

I worked out that I “learn” on avg 8 words a day regardless of how much anki I do so it doesn’t really matter to me at this point. The words I’m learning are still high frequency.

Output and class

I’ve been taking a weekly class for the past year. My prev update goes into it so I won’t spend much time on it but essentially I’m still attending. We had a break for summer so when we start up again in a couple weeks it’ll be interesting to see if I notice a change. We mostly do chorusing and guided roleplays so there’s very little freeflow output. It’s really nice to have a structured space to test out speaking and to get to speak to a native in a nice safe way 😂

Notes app prompts

Recently I have felt the output pull so I've been dabbling a bit by using an icebreaker prompt and answering it in my notes app whenever I've felt the urge.

It’s super hard to get myself to start thinking in kr and when I go back and read it over or self correct with papago there’s loads of errors or just weird phrasing where afterwards i’m like “no yeah obviously this is how you phrase it instead”.

So I know the lang I need is inside of me, it’s just not close enough to the surface yet for me to reach.

I’ve been thinking lately it might be good to take conversation topics from the livestreams I watch and use those as prompts. Since in theory I have so much passive vocab for them specifically already 🤔

Stage progression and output plans

I have been thinking I might be ready to move up and start outputting in the new year. If i’m not ready though that’s fine i’m not going to rush myself. I really hate being forced to speak knowing that I'm just frankensteining words together and it sounds unnatural as hell. So I'm happy to wait it out until the language is ready to come out more. I know it will still take work, but I think I'll know when I'm ready.

There’s a lot of simple phrasing that although I understand perfectly well, I'm aware that I'd never word that idea in that way at this stage. Some examples:

자고 가요 - “sleep over”

콜라를 먹고 싶다 - using 먹다 for drinks still makes me 👀 a little bit. Same with the think 싶다

재밌게 잘 보고 왔습니다 - “watched (enjoyed) it then came (here)” this is a compound of two phrases that still aren’t instinctive to me when I try to output. To 재밌게 verb and verb고 오다/가다.

목걸이 다시 걸고 있어. - “Put the necklace back on” (verb고) 있어 as an instruction just isn’t natural to me yet.

Long term vision goals:

Extensive reading of ya

Listening to narrative style audio dramas / audiobooks

Reaching level 5/6 comp of livestreams

Things I have on my list to try out:

Listen to an audiobook and read along

Transcribe some audio

Listen to some audio then pause and try to finish the sentence (i just want to see what my internal auto-complete is like)

For class sometimes I have to record voice notes and send them to my teacher. I actually really enjoy doing it altho I listen back and re-record 3-4 times until I'm satisfied. I miiight record some audio for a future update but no promises.

1000 hours (18 months)

My last update was 500 hours/1 year so as you can tell my immersion time has had a wee boost since then. After my last update a lot of things started clicking into place and I was able to get a lot more of the story out of freeflow immersion. I was familiar enough with a lot of grammar structures that it became easier to focus on them and work out the nuances.

At the start of learning Korean I didn’t enjoy kids media or comp input channels so the first 500 hours were all adult dramas which were mostly incomprehensible paired with graded readers as my main comp input. When freeflow started to hit level 3/4 comp after my last update I narrowed down and focused my time on the most comprehensive media I could find to get the most out of it. I’ve definitely felt a lot of progress over that time.

One of the best changes so far has been listening to pure audio. From the start of my journey I've always mixed hard/easy content together and that included watching dramas and livestreams without subs when they weren’t available but I wanted to watch the content anyways. The no-sub content was mostly a wall of noise last year but over time and without any deliberate listening practice I started to be able to notice words and sentences, then follow along with bigger and bigger chunks of livestreams and no-sub dramas. Once I could do that I started to mix in learner podcasts (TTMIK Iyagi/Bibimchat, Heeya Korean, 한국어 한 조각, Tayoni Korean). It was disconcerting at first when I would lose the thread of conversation, not being able to understand everything even when fully concentrating was a really uncomfortable feeling. I trained myself to focus on noticing instead of following 100% and it made listening a much better experience.

In the past few months I’ve started listening to audio dramas and it’s been a game changer. I mostly listen to horror audio dramas which are great because they benefit from having short episodes/audio context clues/simple plots/dialogue based scripts/repeat vocab. I’ve also listened to some romance dramas and a sherlock holmes adaptation but the horror ones are by far the most comprehensible. Being able to listen when I’m commuting/walking/gardening has made immersing 100% easier and it’s really enjoyable to be able to relax and listen to a story without having to grind through subtitles or word lookups. About 50% of my immersion time is pure audio content at the moment.

Apart from discovering audio dramas another new addition to my routine has been an evening class. I started going about 6 months ago to a class once a week and I’m really glad I did. The class is for complete beginners and covers things I've already acquired in immersion but gives me a chance to dip my toes in the output pool. The class is just 3 students and the teacher, the atmosphere is very relaxed and playful. We do a lot of guided speaking and chorusing work so I’ve gone from having no idea what I sound like speaking Korean to being very comfortable with my own pronunciation.

I don’t feel ready to speak speak yet but I can feel the itch building. (6 months ago I wasn’t really bothered about speaking at all.) I’m never pushed in class to use language I don’t understand and I can feel acquired language beyond what we're using in class starting to naturally trickle out of me more and more. I think for the next little while this will keep working well for me until I get to the point I can have conversations then I’ll likely move to private lessons.

Another win, I read my first YA book in Korean! It was a novel in the format of two girls sending letters to one another so more dialogue based than prose which made it easier for me. There were definitely sentences that despite knowing all the words I couldn’t parse easily and I used Mirinae to try and figure them out. But those kinds of sentences didn’t pop up on every page or even every chapter so the book as a whole didn’t feel particularly hard. The story itself was easy to follow and I was engaged enough to cry through the last couple chapters so I’m counting that as a success lmao.

Most YA books still aren’t quite at that level of comp for me though so I’m currently just focussed on reading fanfic/kids novels/blogs and chipping away at the vocab. My Migaku word count is 5000 words at the moment and I think I’m probably a few thousand away from a tipping point of unlocking another chunk of comprehensible content.

I’m still reading over a grammar chapter or two of the Tuttle textbook series every week. Browsing the pattern explanations gives me an opportunity to unpack the observations that have been swirling around in my subconscious during immersion and I enjoy checking the description against my acquired knowledge and spotting gaps that I know will be filled in over time. It gives me a sense of progress to re-read chapters and realise I've fully acquired the material.

A year ago the idea of listening to native content or watching anything freeflow and easily following the plot seemed really far off but it was only about 6 months away. Right now I can freeflow romance dramas with subs to level 4/5 and I can watch livestreams without subs with level 3/5 (depending on the topic). Simple horror or romance audio dramas level 4/5 but a lot of audio dramas have plots that require more specialised vocabulary than I currently have. At this point reading a native book for adults, listening to audiobooks or watching crime dramas freeflow feels very far off but based on previous experience it’s probably not as far away as I imagine.

My focus going forward for now like I said is mostly on vocab building so that I can get into more YA fiction and get a step closer to extensive reading. My anki cards are monolingual wherever possible but that isn’t always possible so I'll keep working on this. Hopefully I can expand the genres of audio drama I can follow since I enjoy them so much.

I’m extremely happy with the speed of my acquisition so far but it’s unfortunately true that the more I understand the more impatient I get to understand more. Even when I understand everything I generally don’t process Korean as automatically as English. Sometimes it feels really smooth and I can guess exactly where a sentence is going etc but there’s also times I hear a phrase and it takes 2-3 seconds to register or I know all the words in a sentence but it doesn’t mean anything to me on first reading.

The immersion learning process is definitely less walking in a straight line and more like expanding out in all directions at once at varying speeds.

I took a speaking class!

I took a 12 week speaking class this past autumn. I was 1 year / 500 hours into immersion at the time I signed up. I knew the writing system, phonetics and around 3000 high frequency words. Everyday grammar was familiar but not to the extent that I could reliably produce much.

I didn’t feel ready to have actual spontaneous conversations in the language yet, but I had been wanting to dip my toes into the water more and more. Plus I wanted to meet some other learners and have a bit of fun with the language.

The class was for complete beginners, one 90 minutes class per week in person. 5 students total and a native korean teacher. The school uses an immersion style whereby they teach the necessary classroom vocab up front (repeat after me, do you understand etc) and then try to use only the TL where possible during the course.

The content is for absolute beginners and started on the first day with phonetics before moving to simple grammar and vocab.

The teacher has us listen to very simple dialogues a couple times, goes over the specific grammar points and vocab used and then we do practise conversations with a dialogue template.There is a big emphasis on chorusing and focused pronunciation work throughout.

This class was the very first time I spoke in Korean out loud. It was so weird at first to hear my own voice after a year of learning. Even though it was super weird and I wasn’t happy with how I made some sounds it was fun and I found myself instinctively repeating after my anki cards out loud a lot in the weeks that followed which I had never done before.

After a whole year of watching korean people speak on a screen it felt very cool to be able to have a 2-way interaction with another person and have them respond to my korean.

Sandbox environment - because I was already familiar with the vocab and grammar covered in the course I felt super relaxed and could focus on trying things out and noticing what I found easy and what needs attention. I would see some of my classmates getting overwhelmed trying to practise the dialogues while having to hold new grammar concepts and vocab in their head that they just learned 5 mins ago as well as grappling with a new writing and sound system.

The class gave me a chance to hear what I sound like speaking korean for the first time in a safe non-embarrassing space. I could practise very simple repetitive dialogues to get the correct tongue and jaw positions down (build that literal muscle memory). There was no pressure to use language I hadn’t acquired yet because the course is only covering things I'd already acquired in immersion.

The guided dialogues we used certainly have their limitations. They are good for training tongue/jaw movement and intonation practice but they don’t encourage you to get into a natural conversation headspace. At the end of lessons the teacher would initiate very playful freeflow conversations based on the topics we’d recently covered which allowed us to test our conversational skills more.

The classroom was in general just useful as a shared space to be awkward baby ducklings in the language together and get over the cringe at hearing ourselves struggle to pin the sounds down to our own satisfaction.

At some point a couple of students gave up on the class so it ended up being 2-3 of us with the teacher which was pretty great. Everyone had a really open mindset about learning and the group really embraced the chorusing which our teacher did constantly throughout the lessons.

Looking through my notebook I had jotted down the few unknown words that popped up:

Post office, directly opposite, fox, stamp, some food names (edit: many food names 😭), day after tomorrow, to fish, bland,

Overall I’m glad I took the class. I am absolutely not ready to speak speak yet, but I have opened the door to it. Doing some traditional grammar practice has been useful in helping me map out what my active abilities are and identify areas where I comprehend easily but when I want to write/speak the structures don’t come to me instinctively yet. I have a lot more vocab and language in general to acquire before I think I'll have what I need to start having conversations but I have definitely set myself a good base in terms of pronunciation and intonation.