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Unlocking the Korean in my head? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 5818 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 9 of 16 27 October 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
The interesting thing was that I was actually living in New Malden on the outskirts of London for a year, until I recently moved. The place is like a mini-Korea, I really enjoyed eating freshly made Korean food :) but I never pursued any learning there. I feel I need to develop myself a bit better before trying. Plus I was seen as a bit of an outsider and not really Korean, I feel. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| howtwosavealif3 Newbie United States Joined 4297 days ago 16 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 16 29 October 2012 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm sorta in your situation....
I don't believe that you're fluent subconsciously or whatever part of your brain and you'll unlock it. I don't believe that that was gonna happen to me. I remember an AJATT blog entry about frequency and contact with the target language. He mentioned some old Japanese guy who only used japanese for the first x number of years of his life and then went to america and stopped using japanese for 20 years and then by then he strugled to say a simple japanese phrase. That's what happened to me so I WAS fluent in Korean when I was a kid... Age 0 to 8 was all korean all the damn time since I lived in korean lol so I was definitely fluent at the time. I remember what fluency feels like that I knew what everything was said/described/called in Korean and all the nuances and all the possible meanings of a certain verb/phrase/word and how in this situation it could only be interpreted in this way etc etc. So I know involves a lot but it's only natural I knew all this and was comfortable using it and understanding just because I was surrounded in Korean and ONLY knew korean. So once I learned my English and forgot Korean in the process I knew that to get myself back to that level would take an insane amount of time and effort to get back to that level so I'm not aiming for that high level of fluency (ie when I understood 100% of the dialogue of any any any television program in korean). Like you, I know my simple stuff and my output turned to 0. I'll hear whatever word/phrase/adjective and know what it means but if i were to output it from my brain out of thin air then I wouldn't be able to or i would struggle with my brain for 5 minutes and finally output it... and even if i output it, I can't conjugate the verb or adjective to whatever I want it to bc I don't speak korean lol. I say learn about korean grammar: parksguide.blogspot.com/ (it's written by a korean person and he knows what he's talking about it and IT's FREE! even if you don't want to study/memorize it, at least look at it. I personally am not memorizing it persay I just read it through and then digested native korean media and go oh it's that verb being conjugated like that etc etc. Even if you memorize the conjugation it really is not going to hurt you in the long run or anything as far as being stuck thinking in an analytical manner. It's because you'll have to immerse yourself in Korean to get any good at it in the first place and once you do you'll see the same stuff over and over again and you won't be conjugating anymore just becuase of all the exposure/repeition. Anyways in short what I did was age 0-8 = korean,age 8-18 = English, age 17- to now = Japanese, 20 to now is Japanese + Korean. So I'm not recommending you to learn Japanese, this is just what I did to ensure that there's no way I give up with learning Korean. As you may or may not know a majority of koren words are based on chinese characters. I'm going to ballpark it as 60% or 70% or soething words like 은행, 감정, 희망 銀行 感情 希望 respecitively (this is Japanese chinese characters) and I wanted to take advantage of that because to me it's really arbitrary if something is ㅓ ㅏ ㅜ ㅗ or that the bacchim is ㅇ or ㄴ or ㅁ (it's difficult to rememeber/retain vocabulary just from thinking about it I just guessed that's gonna happen. So I thought if i have this hanja clutch i won't give up). Also there's bacchim and double bacchim and korean grammar is complex compared to Japanese (there's just so many more ways to say stuff). Plus I think korean is more specific with the adjectives and the verbs which I htink makes it harder to learn. so for these reasons I was leaning towards Japanese because it seems so much easier (the kanji thing is just no big deal because I know about RTK and whatnot). Obviously adjectives likes 쓸쓸하다 or verbs like 구르다 aren't based off chiense characters so learning hanja won't help you remember that. What I also thought was learning hanja is a waste of time simply because they do not use it and they didn't simplify it (it's traditional characters since they never simplified since they're so busy with changing it back and forth from no hanja to all hanja. right now it's no hanja minus 北 日 etc etc). So basically even if you learn it, you'll never see it so it doesn't help you learn/solidify what you're studying in that sense but it still does help you figure out patterns and expand vocabulary. I personally have interest in Japanese as well as so I thought it's definitely more efficient to learn Japanese and THEN korean as opposed to the opposite order. I thought wouldn't be more efficient to learn japanese with all the kanji (since 75% of sino-words cross between Japanese and korean and they actually write their words down with the kanji in japanese) then transfer over my vocab i built in japanese with kanji to korean to the words that are made up of chinese characters. so I found this site http://korean.nomaki.jp/site_j/kanji.html and I was so glad I didn't go the other way because if i went the other way i would've never found this site and i would've wasted mad time and effort. At the time I didn't feel like re-learning korean due to the genetic obligation or whatever just because I was fluent at one time and I knew a shitload of words and I thought it's going to take forever to get to that level. Also I hate kpop and korean dramas especially the bitching and the whining done by the female cast. I just didn't have much korean stuff I had interest in. I felt like I wanted to start something new then something that's really broken. Also I appareciated that Japanese has a barrier with the Kanji becuase I'd prefer to know what something means then know how to pronounce it because that's the opposite of korean where you can read everything but you don't know what it means/ you don't know what the hell is going on in the sentence (Japanese is easy to break down bc of the 3 ways to write while korean is all hanguel so it's like sometimes you have to ask someone who's fluent in korean so figure out what's going on there). I was just sick of THAT feeling that I felt in korean that i'd rather struggle early on and feel all good once I passed over that mountain. So in short I studied Japanese using AJATT, RTK and tae kim's guide to grammar and watching lots and lots of JApanese talk/variety shows and some dramas (only the good ones, there's lots of shitty ones) as well as listening to lots of Japanese music (that I like, not me trying to force myself to listen to something just because it's #1 on some stupid chart). In the beginning I really did not even know about the wonders of Japanese TV so I didn't progress that much but I'm so glad that now I know. But by this point I got myself so deep in with japanese that I don't have time for korean anymore lol. There's so much I want to do in Japanese like read books, interenet, watch tv shows, jdramas etc etc so when I did start learning korean I just could not dedicate as much time as I did for japanese and I'm just busier now than a couple years just because. So for learning korean I started learning the common words based off chinese characters, reading the grammar guide blog that i linked here, and googling grammar points in Japanese, ask questions on chiebukuro about korean phrases/words to ask the people fluent in korean and japanese what it means and what nuances it has, watch korean talk/variety shows that I like and look up words (I relaly HATE some of them so i was surprised when I actually found some that I actually like) and I listen to korean-indie (this is my drug lol) and sometimes I learn from the lyrics (I usually don't look up the lyrics). I 'm just using my experience learning Japanese to learn Korean. And also just from learning Japanese I just figured out what learning a lanaguage involves that you can't force yourself to be fluent you have to actually have some connection to the language (ie for memusic, tv) otherwise you'll never spend enough time to get good at understanding it let alone speak it. I prefer learning about korean grammar with japanese than English for obvious reasons. I 100% agree that "why didn't your mother teach you English" - seriously, it's the most stupid and offensive question I hear." is as offensive as "are you from the north or the south". So I suggest that you do stuff you like to do in korean and look up stuff that you don't know that comes up during that. like other people's suggestion of reading stuff that's more challenging is fine it's just don't force yourself to read something you don't care about. FOCUS on common stuff like everyday conversation stuff because once you get that stuff down you can more easily branch out but like I said you should just figure out why you want to know korean and do what you enjoy in Korean. And if you don't have much stuff that connects to Korean then go on youtube or whatever and explore and find stuf you're interested in. I personally have no interest with speaking korean. I just want to watch and enjoy the talk/variety shows in Korean that i like and understand song lyrics more than before. also check out this thread~~ http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=28128&PN=1 the last post is by me....... links to korean crap i like ↓ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJFQnzjWcA http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=H8UZy d__hIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSl4JdZRxn4 Edited by howtwosavealif3 on 29 October 2012 at 10:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Spinchäeb Ape Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4281 days ago 146 posts - 180 votes Speaks: English*, German | Message 11 of 16 29 October 2012 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi, Rolf. Others have already offered some excellent suggestions, so I'll keep this brief. There's intuitive learning and there's analytical learning. My advice is don't be afraid of either. Both learning methods can help you. Others have covered intuitive quite well. I would say get your hands on some Korean language movies if possible. Listen to Korean radio via the Internet. If at all possible find some Korean people to converse with. That will be huge. Make sure they're people who won't judge you for making a mistake. Most people are understanding about language learners.
You had expressed concern that analytical learning will corrupt your natural abilities. Don't worry about that. Learning some rules of grammar won't harm your Korean. For example, I learned American English as a native speaker as anyone else would. I was taught the parts of speech in high schools (and was bored and didn't give a @#$% about them). Later I re-learned the parts of speech with keen interest because I was learning German. Learning these things did not cause my English to suddenly sound foreign. I naturally know that the following sentence is not in proper English word order:
However, it is correct word order for German. If you understand the English parts of speech and how they differ from those of Korean, it will help you. It will not erase anything that you've learned intuitively through natural listening. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 5818 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 12 of 16 29 October 2012 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! Thanks howtwosavealif3! Awesome post! I will consider your advice.
Tell me though, how did your parents/family react to you learning Japanese??? I think my mother would kill me if I tried! lol. I totally relate to your feeling. That you were once fluent so you just feel behind the curve if you relearn it. Plus the whole genetic/cultural "obligation". At least if you do another language then you're doing it 100% for you. It's one reason I learned and continue to learn Dutch, because I love that country, I learn it for me and for nobody else. I enjoy it too. I guess I wanted to have some kind of nice belief that language could be "unlocked" in the brain. Who knows, maybe it can be one day. But probably I am thinking too poetically and the knowledge and connections are just lost. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4679 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 13 of 16 29 October 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have no idea about the unique challenges and advantages heritage learners face, but I thought I'd point you to a couple of links you might find useful both for immersion and looking up grammar. I'd also like to stress that learning more Korean will probably be hard work, even if you have a definite advantage over learners who start at zero.
For immersion I definitely recommend the 이야기 podcasts from Talk To Me In Korean. They talk about a different topic every week, entirely in Korean. They also give you a script, which is nice - if you only know spoken Korean this might be a good opportunity to get more used to the written form. That's how it worked for me - watching too many Korean dramas gave me pretty strong listening skills and the podcasts helped with linking words to their written form. I'm not sure about your level of understanding, so they may or may not be useful for you. Besides that, you can find a lot of Korean dramas, movies, shows on the internet. I recommend that you do some form of grammar study (after all, Korean kids also have to do this in some form), but you may not necessarily need a coursebook for it. For looking up what unknown grammar patterns mean or how they work roughly, I find the Korean Grammar Database incredibly useful. Talk To Me In Korean also have an overview of their grammar lessons that conveniently lets you pick a certain topic you want to focus on. You'll probably still need to learn a lot of vocabulary. I've found that the most intuitive way to learn new words is either to read a lot intensively and extensively or to repeat sentences in Anki (audio sentences with some unknown words are great, as are cards that ask you to fill in one word in a sentence). You could take these sentences from various sources. These are just some suggestions from my journey of Korean study. I hope some of it will be useful. Good luck and have fun! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| howtwosavealif3 Newbie United States Joined 4297 days ago 16 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English* | Message 14 of 16 02 November 2012 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I kept japanese a secret because if i didn't I don't think I would've gotten good and there's no Japanese people around and I don't have much interest in speaking Japanese. Also, I didn't want to deal with all the bs questions people ask people learning japanese let alone a korean person learning japaense, let alone a korean person learning japanese before korean. Even if my parents knew or found out, I'm sure they'd just be like wow you're so smart lol.
I'm sure as of now if I immerse myself in thousands hours of korean tv shows/read articles online (I can since there's so many I want to watch. I find enjoyment in it) while looking up words (learn vocab, idiom etc. It's all about getting used to it) I'll get better, and eventually to fluency as far as comprehension is concerned since i've stregthened my foundation on korean with the internet sources and making the most out of my Japanese knowledge. However, I don't have the time to do that because I have a life and I like a lot of japanese stuff too. I wanted to give you links to korean drama/movie scripts there's a bunch here: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7211 <- also there's links to more resources also you could just try googling title of show/movie etc and 대본 From the looks of the OP, it seems like you were never fluent in Korean so you shouldn't have the the issues that I had. Edited by howtwosavealif3 on 02 November 2012 at 6:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6408 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 15 of 16 02 November 2012 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my experience, the unlocking definitely exists in some form. But you can't really unlock an entire language at once:) What you need is input and confidence.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5343 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 16 02 November 2012 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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This may sound a bit weird, but I promise it has a point.
If you look at it right, anybody who speaks English is already 75% of the way to speaking French. What does this mean? Well, the two languages share thousands of words of vocabulary, their grammar is roughly similar, and even some of their idioms and metaphors are surprisingly alike. In practice, this means that an ordinary English speaker can learn French in 25% of the time it takes to learn Japanese, Chinese or Korean. For example, the US Foreign Services Institute (FSI) takes 23–24 weeks to teach diplomats French, and 88 weeks to teach them Japanese. This isn't because Japanese is harder than French, but because an English speaker gets a huge head start on French grammar and vocabulary. Now, does this mean that when I started learning French that I already understood 75% of what I heard? Hah, no way. No, what it means is that for every hour I spend studying French, I get 4 hours worth of learning. I had to start at the beginning, but it's much easier to make progress in French than in ancient Egyptian. Sometimes on HTLAL we'll hear from somebody who forgot a language, and had to relearn it. They say something similar: They often need to start over from scratch, but everything's a lot easier the second time around. It's possible, rolf, that your Korean might work the same way: There's probably a ton of knowledge locked up inside your head, but it that doesn't necessarily mean that it will all come out at once. Instead, all that knowledge and intuition may give you a huge boost at every step along the way. The only way to find out is to start taking those steps. … As for speaking, I know some heritage learners who can't do it, even though they understand almost everything. The thing about speaking is that it isn't automatic. You've got to practice it some. This past February, I could understand almost everything that my wife said to our kids in French, but speaking was really hard for me. So I decided to start speaking French full time. The first two weeks of speaking were agonizing. I felt like my brain was melting, and I sounded like a 3-year-old. After about two weeks, though, things got a bit easier. And after 6 weeks, I could speak without thinking about it too much. I still don't sound especially brilliant or intellectual in French, but I can say anything I need to say, and on a good day, a lot of it's automatic. I'd be really surprised if heritage learners couldn't do the same thing. If you understand your language fairly well, then find somebody really patient to talk to, and start practicing. It's OK if you sound stupid at first. Try to push through the wall. Give it a few weeks. See how far you make it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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