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.

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.