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!