Lesson 55 (Beginner 3B Lesson 7): Start Chapter 15

This is way overdue, but due to last week being a busy week at work and things spilling over into the weekend (personal work as well as work at work), this was pushed back... and things are a bit better this week but still... Even up until now I've not done the homework for this week, which isn't great at all, given that the lesson is in 2 days and my personal deadline is usually Thursday... so... I'd have to get to it, but writing assignments take longer.

I thought to get this post out first because it's been causing me some mental clutter, seeing it every day on the task list. I'd already gotten the "hard part" done, which was listing all the vocabulary. It's tedious because when I add them here, I also have to add the new words to Anki and find audio for them on Forvo. I try to do these together, otherwise I'd need to track what progress I've made. There's the added complication also of the vocab words from the handout that usually are in the Quizlet deck which I can just import into Anki, and those I have to make sure to include in the list I keep here.

Yesterday, we got the notice to start preparing the gifts for the gift exchange. This year the names have been drawn and we've been given the instructions on how to send the parccel (the cost paid for by the school). I got the new student (not the one that joined in this last lesson - later in this post I'll mention it) but the previous one.

Also sometime last week (before this lesson) I got the invoice to pay for the next term. Interestingly, the next term is only 7 lessons long. Or rather, the first lesson of that term seems to be next week, the last lesson of the previous term I paid for. So this time, I paid for 7 lessons. No idea why there's this change.

So this lesson... wow, it's been almost a full week. I went out in the morning to buy something and was almost late for class. It did not help that I ended up not using the usual computer I use because of panic (which resulted in I think the wrong password) and I resorted to my other laptop. Fortunately the battery lasted, but I had to log in to Zoom again (since I'd not used that computer for Zoom for so long, it logged me out, even though it's a different account). The computer is also... beginning to show signs of... breaking down. The trackpad has started to become less responsive since yesterday, but that's not really relevant.

We covered the rest of Chapter 14 in the textbook and even started on the vocabulary for Chapter 15. (Chapter 15 is mood, it's titled "I want to go on a trip"... and right now I do want to go on a trip since it has been some time.)

As I mentioned, there was another new student in the class. I thought I was late (I was, by 5 minutes), but about 2-3 minutes later, this new student joined the call, and so we had a short digression for an introduction. This time we had to additionally say that we liked (not just name and occupation, which for most of us was just 회사원). I really couldn't think of anything so I said what has been on my mind these days: horse riding.¹

As it turns out, my friend was later (around 20 minutes late) - and so there was another round of introductions. He was also late the lesson the other new student joined 2 lessons ago.

We went through the textbook and it took actually quite a while to finish up because there were quite a few things to discuss. Both the reading and writing sections were homework.

Culture Note

The culture note was about gifts to your significant other, and about taboo gifts. The example had a text where a guy gave his (Korean) girlfriend shoes, and in the culture you shouldn't do that because it means something like the girlfriend wear the shoes and leave you for another guy. Because we were short on time, the teacher read the whole passage (to my surprise).

However, we did discuss various holidays where we typically send gifts under the Listening and Speaking section. I've added these to the vocabulary section below, along with the relevant notes.

Pronunciation

The pronunciation has to do with how to pronounce syllables with two final consonants.

In order to find the symbols of the double consonants because typing ㄹㄱ is ugly and I wanted it to be ㄺ, I had to hunt for a site with the symbols. I found this site, which is pretty cool.

I know this topic is also not exactly new, so I went in search of old posts. While searching for the posts where I've mentioned this, I chanced upon Lesson 25 and realised that was the lesson that we started with this current teacher. I did not even realise that I've had more lessons with her than with the teacher I started with. Actually, it's coming very close to a year since I started this practice of posting my own summaries after each lesson. Time flies! 😱

I found something related way back in Lesson 11 I addressed this briefly. We'll take a look at that later.

The textbook gave two rules:

1. Only one of the double final consonants is pronounced as the representative sound for the pair.
2. When the final double consonant 'ㄺ' is followed by 'ㄱ', 'ㄺ' is pronounced as [ㄹ] instead of [ㄱ].

For the first rule, well, that's... obvious isn't it?

The teacher mentioned (following the examples given in the textbook) that in most cases you read the first consonant of the two, as in:

• ㄵ: 앉다 [안따]
• ㄼ: 짧다 [짤따]
• ㅄ: 없다 [업ː따]

However, for 'ㄺ', you normally pronounce the 'ㄱ':

• 읽다 [익따]

Rule 2 says that if it's the next syllable is 'ㄱ', then you don't pronounce it as [ㄱ], but [ㄹ]:

• 읽고 [일꼬]

Rule 2 isn't all that new; I saw some weeks ago because of one of the example sentences in the handout for Chapter 12. (It's lesson 45, since the example in the handout belongs under the V-고 있다 grammar point, though I don't mention pronunciation at all in my post.)

Now, going back to my post from lesson 11, the general rule given was:

The consonant to pronounce on the bottom is the one first in alphabet order

For reference, here is the alphabet order:

ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ

In all the cases above, you'll notice that the consonant that is pronounced is the first one in the alphabet order.

Of course, the point is that the general rule isn't very useful to people learning Korean as a foreign language because we don't have to know the Korean alphabet order. I didn't memorise it, for sure.

Even for the English alphabet, it's not as though I know (without running through the sequence for most letters in the middle) whether a given letter goes before another letter. This is even though I know the order of the entire alphabet.

Though in the time since the lesson and doing all the vocab, I have a question: What about 닭갈비 (one of the new vocab words from Chapter 15)? It's pronounced as [닥깔비].

Why does it not follow Rule 2? Is it because the word is a kind of compound of 닭 (chicken) + 갈비? Does Rule 2 only apply to syllables that belong to the same "word", meaning they stick to syllable with the double consonant because they are grammar particles, or are another syllable that make the same word? I don't know.

Vocabulary

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Duolingo Bonus Vocab

Since I've been doing more Duolingo again I've got more vocab that I want to add to Anki to aid my efforts. (I have a love-hate relationship with that app, the newest way it has succeeded in its gamification efforts and suck me in is to provide a 2x XP boost each time I complete a level which makes me use the app longer than the 10 minutes I normally would.)

The translations in bold are what Duolingo accepts, the others are from Wiktionary. In any case, I suspect the usage of the adverbs require more context to figure out what is the most appropriate.

Tinycards

For some random, completely unrelated reason, I decided to click on the Duolingo Help Center today and found out that Tinycards was shut down on 1 September 2020. I've never really used it for vocab, but I did enjoy the country mapping, 50 US states, Russian alphabet, and Egyptian hieroglyphics official decks for a while. I think at some point just before they released, they let me test one build on Testflight... that was really a long time ago.

Listed Subscription Function

I accidentally hit the email subscribers button while trying to update the post... this is the first time it's happened. I did subscribe with my own email before, so I finally get to see what happens when that button is pressed. I wasn't quite expecting the full post in the email. (And the footnote link in that is the same, and is just as broken—or more—depending on how you look at it.)

That aside, the button changes to "Subscribers Emailed" with a tick, and it seems that pressing it again doesn't send another email too. I do wish there was a way to test all these out more easily, but anyway, I'm not really using that feature. It was a misclick.