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.
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