Input = understanding

Antimoon has an extremely important article on why input has to come before output in language learning. Read it - I promise it will revolutionize your perceptions of language learning. It has also served to reinforce my belief that fill-in-the-blank worksheets are a terrible way to learn good French. Pressuring yourself to construct sentences and say phrases in your new language will encourage bad habits if you don't have enough input first. You can't actually learn anything by creating your own sentences, because there is zero new linguistic material entering your brain. You're just rearranging what you already know, and there's a good chance you're rearranging some of it wrong. Thus, it's important to listen to how native speakers talk - a LOT - before you try to say anything yourself. The same goes for writing.

If you listen enough, words and phrases will start to make sense on their own. I first experienced this phenomenon while watching anime. Often when a character said "I understand," "Yes," or "I get it," they would say "wakata" or "wakatimashita," or another phrase along those lines. Though I don't know the verb stem of whatever this word is, when I hear variations of this word I understand its core meaning. The same goes for grammar patterns. In one anime, one character said "Shinjiteiru" ("I will always believe in you"), and another said "Mateiru" ("I'll be waiting"). It wasn't hard to understand intuitively that the Japanese "teiru" ending implies ongoing activity or an ongoing state. It was a lot easier to pick this up from anime than a textbook - and I don't think I'll ever forget it, even if I never glance at Japanese again.

Remember that your brain was deliberately designed to make sense of language. The more you listen, the more patterns you'll pick up, and the more it'll make sense.

Pronunciation and romanization

I've successfully learned basic hangul in one week! I'm learning rules for whole word pronunciation now, thanks to BusyAtom. Words are a lot harder to figure out than individual syllables! Some words are written one way but pronounced differently because Koreans seem to be rather lazy speakers. For instance, ㅅ normally sounds like "s" or "sh" or "z" or "t" depending on the syllable. But in certain words for "this," "that," and "it," it's pronounced as "n."

I'm beginning to realize that Korean romanization is pretty useless because many Korean sounds are between English sounds. For instance, there are three different "p" sounds; the name of one Korean city is romanized as both "Busan" and "Pusan." It's driving me crazy that a lot of the "Learn Korean" websites I've found rely extensively on romanization. It distracts me from the hangul, and then I picture the romanized version of a word or letter combination instead of the correct hangul version. I must find a way to escape all this romanization.

Speech levels in kdrama

I've started watching the Korean drama "Full House" and I am hooked. Absolutely hooked. If you've never watched kdrama before, the best way I can describe it is like a very long, serial movie. It's not like American TV shows, because a kdrama usually only has one season, consisting of 16 hour-long episodes (sometimes more or less). There is a cohesive plotline and story arc, and at the end, it's the end. Some kdramas have second seasons or sequel movies, but most of them don't drag on for years like American shows.

Watching "Full House" is giving me a much better sense of spoken Korean. I'm starting to pick up on patterns of verb use, for instance. The seven politeness levels of Korean threw me for a loop at first, but now I'm seeing that in everyday conversation, only about three are normally used. It's very convenient that verbs are always at the end of the sentence, because it makes it easy to pick out the verb endings.

Perhaps more importantly, watching "Full House" is giving me a sense of who uses which speech levels and when. It's becoming clear that the prepackaged phrases in Korean phrase books are awkwardly formal to use in everyday speech. It really is important to learn all the commonly used speech levels so that you can speak appropriately to superiors, "inferiors," equals, etc. - and understand what they are saying to you. A typical conversation is distinctly asymmetrical, with the older or higher-status person using casual speech while the younger/lower-status person uses more polite speech. Also, it seems that most men use casual speech towards their girlfriends.

Aside from verb endings, the different forms of personal pronouns also play a significant role in politeness level. Though Koreans don't use personal pronouns nearly as frequently as English speakers, they often do appear for purposes of clarification or emphasis.

Typing in Korean and online flashcards

I downloaded the Microsoft Vista Korean Language Support IME. Now if I click a button on my taskbar, all my keys become Korean keys and I can type in hangul, and if I click it again the keys switch back to English. There's also a toggle button I can use to convert hangul to hanja (though I'm not learning hanja at this point).

Now that I can type in hangul, I can set up my SRS system. Dude... SRS is amazing. SRS is the Holy Grail. SRS is beyond my description! You can read all about it on AJATT. It's a spaced repetition system: basically, flashcards on the computer that are only shown to you at intervals depending on how well you know them - so it gradually shows them to you less and less often, so you don't waste time going through tons of words that you already know. You're the one who tells the program whether you totally forgot the answer, whether it was hard for you, whether it was good, or whether it was a piece of cake - and then it crunches the little equations or something. It scientifically determines how often it needs to show them to you to prevent long-term memory decay. It was probably developed by a bunch of Japanese INTJs.

I'm using Anki, which was actually designed for learning Japanese, so it's awesome. I'm starting with just the online version, but there's a free download option too. (The downloadable version has extra features and can synchronize with your online account.) There are other SRS systems too, like SuperMemo, but I like Anki best. Anyway, if you start using an SRS you will have no problems with long-term retention ever again. I promise (yaksokhae!).

Between Korean language support and Anki, I guess it took a couple hours total of computer setup (including some research, hair-pulling-out, and watching Anki's super-useful intro videos). I am not a technically inclined person, but everything works now. So it can't be too difficult.

All Japanese all the time

It really is hard to get my brain to work with a different alphabet. Good thing I have buckets of inspiration available at the amazing blog All Japanese All the Time. This is a blog by a guy who became fluent in Japanese within 18 months. By "fluent" I mean that he got a job at a software company in Japan, and when he talks on the phone to Japanese people, they can't tell that he's a foreigner.

Go to the Table of Contents on AJATT and start reading. Just do it. I think that it's AJATT that really inspired me to start Korean, because without reading what Khatzumoto has to say about language learning, I doubt I would've had the confidence to begin. AJATT has extremely helpful information on how to actually learn a language - rather than the dead, sanitized, stuffed version of language available in textbooks. I'm really excited about Khatzumoto's intense, immersive method of learning language through fun, native materials like books, radio, and news. It sounds far more effective than those awful fill-in-the-blank workbooks that I used in high school French.

My first real word!

Throughout this year I've listened to lots of jpop - specifically, Arashi. But I'm sure that listening to Japanese won't help my Korean. So I found a few Korean songs on YouTube and listen to them now. They all sounded like gibberish at first - a slushy mess! But I just learned "sarang," the word for "love," in one of BusyAtom's videos. This was a turning point. I listen to songs and suddenly I can pick out that word. "Saranghae, saranghae," they sing over and over - and I understand it! In fast songs and slow songs. I feel like this is the first word that I really know.

The beginning

This is the story of how I began to learn Korean. When I first started, I was struck by the lack of Korean learning resources. My library had one Korean textbook and two Korean dictionaries. The local bookstore had two Korean phrase books. Online, there was tons of information about learning Japanese, but only a fraction of the same amount covering Korean. I hope that you will find some of the resources I've gathered to be useful.

My first exposure to Korean media was the movie "100 Days with Mr. Arrogant," which I watched on a whim in spring 2008. At the time I knew little about Asian cultures (except extensive knowledge of feng shui). I felt like the movie was over-the-top and goofy, and I was very unaccustomed to the non-Western film style. Still, I enjoyed it and filed it away in my brain as a fun, foreign romantic comedy.

During the 2008-2009 school year, my Japanaphilic friend and I watched some anime. That spring, I saw "Hana Yori Dango" (a very enjoyable Japanese drama, with two seasons and a movie too). As it turns out, there's also a Korean remake and a Taiwanese remake. Just for fun I watched the first episode of the Korean version after I finished HYD. After becoming so accustomed to Japanese audio, it struck me that the Korean dialogue sounded... messy. It seemed they slurred a lot together, with awwww's and ohhhh's and lots of ch/j/ts sounds mixed in there. I thought that it didn't sound too pretty in comparison to the clean, distinct sounds of Japanese.

For quite a while I toyed with the idea of learning Japanese, but I couldn't get over the 2,000+ kanji (Japan-ified Chinese characters) that I would need to learn. I was unwilling to learn spoken Japanese yet be functionally illiterate. I also couldn't think of a practical reason to spend that much time studying Japanese, since I had no plans to live in Japan.

One day I was searching job postings and found an advertisement for teaching English in Korea. Intrigued, I began to research the prospect more and found that it looked like an excellent opportunity. There are jobs in hagwons (private English conversation schools) as well as public schools and universities. Though research is necessary to prevent getting ripped off by unscrupulous employers, I decided that this was a viable possibility for after graduation.

At the same time, I remembered how one of my Korean friends had told me that Korean has a very scientific alphabet, which a smart person can learn in just a few hours. Koreans also use about 1,300 Chinese characters (hanja), but only in newspapers and some books, and usage is decreasing. So this prospect was far less overwhelming than Japanese. If I could become literate in Korean, surely I could learn the spoken part. And if I did end up teaching English in Korea, it would turn out to be quite useful. This was my train of thought up until the first day.

On this first day, I thought, "Well, it can't be that hard. I'll just learn the alphabet and see how it goes. I'll give myself one week; that should be enough. If I don't like it, I'll quit." So I found this fabulous Introduction to Korean website and began to learn the alphabet.

Hangul looks like this: 그냥 쓸데없는 생각. You group letters into syllables, which are formed by stacking letters on top of and around each other. There are rules about how consonants and vowels can be grouped together, and the sounds of many letters change depending on where they're located in the syllable or what syllables come before and after them. Yet the alphabet is surprisingly intuitive.

On the second or third day, I began to use some videos to learn correct pronunciation - specifically, the videos available on the website of BusyAtom's Learn Korean Project. I figured that he knows what he's talking about, since he's Korean. He is very personable, and his website is extremely well-organized.