Experiences learning Korean

[iopq]

What worked:
1. At first learning enough words by just forcing myself to memorize them. That's probably the fastest way to get started.
2. Learning a tiny bit of grammar to start so I'm not confused with all the conjugations and honorifics and whatnot.
3. I can then listen to things in Korean like Muzzy in Gondoland and understand it without a translation

What didn't work:
Trying to learn words by learning their English translations. It just introduces an intermediate step. Besides, I can learn that a certain thing means "turn" in English, but what does "turn" mean? My turn to do something? A turn in the road? What am I gaining by drilling exactly knowing the English translation instead of the meaning?

Patricular problems with apps/websites:
Pimsleur
You need to lexicalize common phrases since annyeonghaseyo is just so common, you don't NEED to understand the grammar of it to just remember it. Besides, grammatical variations of common phrases are not used anyway. You don't hear annyeonghae or a lot of possible conjugations, so it doesn't matter. You can teach common phrases before the learner can grasp their grammar. But they go further and teach phrases that are not common. Do you really need to know "yeongeoreul hasil su isseumnikka?" That's actually the first phrase they teach. Awful. It's actually useless to say that, you can just say "do you speak English" and they will say "yes" in English if they speak it. Similarly for Korean, you don't need to ask "hangugeoreul hasil su isseumnikka?" you just start speaking in Korean and if they don't know it you'll know right away. Besides, there are a million ways of saying it, this isn't a set phrase. You can also teach "... hal jul ara yo" or whatever. Doesn't matter, that's not the point. You need to first teach the copula and Korean verbs, not jumping straight into participles just because it's one of the things you want to teach first.

Duolingo
1. Requires translations that are way too precise and sometimes doesn't allow perfectly valid translations. That problem actually makes me think translations are a stupid way to teach language.
2. Wrong choices betray the correct answer, they are too stupid. You could not learn any material and guess the answer every time based on intelligent guessing.
3. Entering words by hitting boxes lets you just assemble the correct answer without knowing some of the words by just guessing.

howtostudykorean
Teaches grammar in a lot of detail giving a lot of description of it and examples... but that's not how people learn languages at all. In fact the Pimsleur approach is more correct if they didn't start with the stupidest things to teach since they start with a conversation and break it down during the lesson

Memrise
1. Problems with homonyms (unless they fixed that already, but the course I'm using has to manually disambiguate a lot of words)
2. Gets tiring because it's the same thing over and over again, while at least Duolingo has funny sentences (of course I could pick a different Memrise course)
3. I would want to use some of their paid features, but they bug me about them so now I don't want to

talktomeinkorean
1. Holy shit they just babble forever, maybe 5 minutes of content in a 20 minute lesson
2. The dialogues are the most important thing, but they use vocabulary that was never covered (???)

To summarize:

It would be good to start a lesson with a video that shows a situation where the learner can guess what the dialogue will be about without any prior knowledge.

The best way to learn would be some kind of a flash card system that uses pictures and only the target language. That way you would associate actual objects with Korean words instead of with an English word. But instead of just flash cards that you turn over, it would be in a quiz form. I really enjoyed doing apps where I select the correct answer. It also solves the issue with homonyms: sometimes you'll select "i" that has a picture of teeth and sometimes you'll select "i" that has the number two on it. As long as the system realizes that those are homonyms and doesn't display both of those options at the same time.

Then listening exercises where the learner has to transcribe the sentence. Then show pictures that reinforce the meaning of the sentence. Don't just skip after it's correct, there has to be a little bit of an explanation. Some apps have this feature, and it's pretty good, but I want longer sentences since those are harder.

More abstract concepts could be done with full sentences.  Naneun yeohaengeuro kaseo ____ sewosseo. Then the person has to write kyehoik. No English necessary, just fill in the blanks. It's good to force people to write since they'll learn correct spelling. Give partial credit for misspelled words as long as they have correct pronunciation.

Then you can show the dialogue again and amaze the learner with how much they understand a second time. This is the best part I learned from Pimsleur. That's the most satisfying part about that course.

In this way the learner can just learn grammar and vocabulary through exposure and example. If you throw enough material this way, you can get someone to speak a language fluently in three months. This cannot be done by just learning the grammar, since you need lots of practice as well. But you actually don't need the grammar if you JUST practice. You may need a quick reference to see "oh this means that" and then you'd understand it on an intuitive level after hearing 7-10 times in context and being used.

So there should be a part of the course that is interactive learning and a part that is testing the knowledge after you just learned it. Then testing again in a little bit as part of a spaced repetition program.

[iopq]

Another interesting idea is to structure lessons so they are a graph.

So introduction would be a mandatory first lesson. But country names could be a separate lesson where you can go as far as you want in it. To advance to the next lesson you may need to learn a few country names, but you can learn many more if you're interested. So country names 1 is mandatory, but country names 2, 3, 4, etc. is not

There are lots of things I wish were not mandatory in Duolingo like animal names. I think dog and cat can be enough for the first few months of learning a language. In Korean, cow and pig are nice to know since cow-meat is beef and pig-meat is pork. But when learning English you can just skip it and learn only "beef" and "pork" to start.

Same thing with dish names, I personally would go in depth on Korean cooking and study all of them, but for some people this isn't necessary since they come to Korea and just eat McDonald's.

[iopq]

Right now my strategy is to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYunDz1IoUA&list=PLKOFawUskk6b--T-jZZBEfT645pU2_Vgt&index=1 and just listen to conversations and "shadow" them - repeat what is being said.

I'm ignoring the explanations and just looking up meanings of things I don't understand. Then I watch again until I can repeat everything that's being said.

[iopq]

The problem with using translations like in Duolingo is that sometimes the word order is correct, but not the same as the answer, the article is different or absent like "according to forecast" vs. "according to the forecast"

There are too many problems with that approach to make it convenient or efficient. I can frequently guess the correct answer without understanding a lot of the words.

An alternative approach would be to have a short text in Korean and question/answer session.

A: 뭐 드릴까요?
B: 사과가 있어요?
A: 여기에요.

사과가 있어요?

• 네, 사과가 있어요.
  [ ] 아니요, 사과가 없어요.
  [ ] 멀라요.
  
  
  this tests a student's comprehension of Korean and you can even do it completely with audio as well to make it harder
  
  I have to admit it's a bit satisfying to rearrange blocks to make a long complicated sentence in Korean, but there are downsides. For example, you can just play lego until all the pieces fit without knowing the meaning of each word. You just have to know the OTHER words are not correct. The verb has to go at the end, etc.
  
  but maybe some kind of variant of this exercise without the downsides can be used - I want to be able to make people generate sentences and to check that they are correct, I just don't know how to make it so the the options are limited enough that every option can be checked, but also hard to guess only based on these options
  
  maybe just forcing people to write out singular words in hangeul is enough (fill in the blank)
  also maybe making someone to actually say the word might work if the voice recognition software is good enough to pick up Korean

[iopq]

Важно себя тренировать воспринимать гласные и согласные именно как они произносятся

Транскрипция в Сеульском диалекте

한국 (хангук) [hаҥгүк] - Корея
삼성 (Самсонг) [самсъҥ] - Самсунг
평양 (Пхёнъян) [пhйъҥяҥ] - Пхеньян
제주도 (Чеджудо) [чеджүду] - Чеджудо
만두 (манду) [бандү] - манты
뭐 (мво) [бу] - что
누구 (нугу) [дүгү] - кто

Чем более дикая транскрипция тем лучше. Помогает слышать правильно.

[iopq]

When I completed the Duolingo course, it was a bit boring, because the grammar in the last sections was very plain, so it was only new vocabulary. So I guess extra vocab topics should still follow the latest grammar someone learned. The YouTube video course is so far the best, since it has an active listening component of actual sentences and has a lot of new grammar every lesson.

[Hellerick]

What worked:
At first learning enough words by just forcing myself to memorize them

What didn't work:
Trying to learn words by learning their English translations

How you're supposed to learn words without their translations?

[iopq]

What worked:
At first learning enough words by just forcing myself to memorize them

What didn't work:
Trying to learn words by learning their English translations

How you're supposed to learn words without their translations?

My idea is with pictures at first, explanations in the target language later. In between you can learn from context.

So at first we have a video conversation where we establish A-neun B (y/i)eyo as A = B. Each person says jeo-neun [their name] (y/i)eyo.

Then we show some flags and establish that miguk is the United States. Then we show a stick figure drawing of a person and write saram under it.

We quiz the learner to make sure he can match the word with the picture.

Jeo-neun miguk saram ieyo

He should understand this, but then you can throw them a curve ball and introduce

Miguk-eun nara yeyo

When they click on nara it will show a list of other nara like Japan, Korea, China. Can you guess what nara means?

[Hellerick]

Sounds like teaching experiences rather than learning experiences to me.

Yeah, people should be taught to avoid making translations, which is a hindrance they don't really need. But it does not mean they shouldn't be given translations at all.

[iopq]

I've never taught anyone any language, I've just been frustrated. It's hard to do translations on the one hand. Duolingo often marks correct answers wrong because they are not in the database.

It's also not clear. What does "turn" mean? A game turn? Turn to talk? A turn around the corner? When I learned vocabulary, the flash card apps were like this. They just gave an English word and you figure it out.

[iopq]

Как раз Drops мне нравится. Запоминай картинки и анимации для глаголов.