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.