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.
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