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!

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.