journey

notes on things I'm learning. currently: Korean

Lesson 16 (Beginner 1A L8)

For this final lesson, everyone was here, all 7 of us. I got to talk to 2 of my classmates on the way back, which I documented in the post before this. The new person who joined has 4 (after this, 3) lessons more, so it seems like the school allows people to join in in the middle and count the term from there. I guess that having a fixed 8-lesson cycle for payment is more straightforward. I was feeling vaguely irritated this class as I didn't have my pencil case and had to borrow a pen from a ...
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Self-Study and Commitment

Some of my thoughts (that were originally) about commitment and self-studying, even when you are taking a language course from a school. I'll get the post for the last lesson done soon, but my head hurts, and I've been feeling sapped of energy since Friday. It was pretty bad yesterday. I don't think I am sick (at least not in the usual you-have-a-cough/cold/flu sense), but I did get an MC for yesterday. Today, I'd decided to work from home, since, anyway, I didn't think anyone will want me to s...
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A Farewell to Lingvist

This is my farewell to Lingvist. I received an email from Lingvist yesterday, saying that they had sent an email 3 weeks prior announcing changes in 2020. No surprise that the changes were that they were doing away with the free tier entirely. I had seen this coming, even back in 2015 when it was still a new app, its UI much less refined. I first used it to revise my French vocabulary, the only course they had. This tool was too good, too polished, to be able to sustain itself if it remained ...
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Lesson 15 (Beginner 1A L7)

The 7th lesson of the term. This lesson was where I paid my fees for the next term (another 8 lessons). I got the reminder and invoice on the 6th lesson. The final lesson will be 2 weeks from now, because of Chinese New Year next week. I did some calculations. If I intend to continue until I finish the intermediate syllabus, it will easily be another 2 and a half years at minimum. The estimate is 1 year for beginner, and 1.5 years for intermediate. I've just about finished only the first set of...
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Lesson 14 (Beginner 1A L6)

In this lesson, we finished chapter 3, and started on chapter 4 in the last half an hour. We continued practising making sentences about what you are doing (오늘/지금 뭐 해요?) - both today and right now. Naturally, all of our answers to 지금 뭐 해요? ("What are you doing right now?") was some variant of 한국어 학교에서 한국어를 배워요. (I'm learning Korean at the Korean language school.) Some omitted the location (like I did), but others included it, with the actual name of the school. As for what I'm doing after (그리고...
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[DE] Subscription Services

Since this was always meant to be a language blog, and not just a Korean language blog, and I had to do some German homework (a writing assignment-turned-presentation that spawned out of some stuff I mentioned to my teacher after my last class), here's something I wrote about subscription services and why I generally don't pay for them. The mention of Netflix, Spotify, and Audible is something specific to the conversation that we had, as they were explicitly mentioned. There's probably some mi...
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Lesson 13 (Beginner 1A L5)

I have decided to add the lesson number within the course to the title for this and all future posts. This will make it easier to keep track of in future. I don't imagine I'd stop taking the lessons for a while. I'll continue to increment each lesson by 1 still for each post. I'm currently on the second set of 8 lessons, which is Beginner 1A. Before this, the first 8 lessons were classified as Foundation. In this lesson, there was a test on the conjugation for the verbs and their meanings. Las...
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A New Year Greeting

I forgot to include this in the post for the last lesson. We did a gift exchange for Christmas and so apart from wishing each other a Merry Christmas, we also did a New Year greeting. (The next time we will see each other is in the new year.) "Merry Christmas" is... Merry Christmas: 메리 크리스마스. To wish someone the best for the new year: 새해 복 많이 받으세요! Bonus (German, since my teacher made me say this the day before for my German lesson): (Ich wunsche dir) einen guten Rutsch ins 2020! Literally, ...
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Lesson 12

There was no lesson this week because of Christmas and New Year's, but since I was a post behind, I still have something to post. Plus, this also serves as revision. This lesson was where we learnt two main things: Conjugation for the informal polite present tense Direct object marker Conjugation (Informal Polite Present Tense) The teacher emphasised how this is the most important thing for the entire Beginner level. I'm not sure if she meant the entire Beginner level, as in the set of ...
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Losing My Memrise Streak... Again

I lost my 140+ days (at most) Memrise streak today. Today I was greeted with a 0-day streak on half of the courses I usually do (it's only 8 now). Initially I thought I had forgotten, because of all the events yesterday. Having to go to the hospital early in the morning, and afterwards, the work (post-)Christmas party... which I also ended up leaving early to go to the hospital for another visit. Then I remembered that I did finish it, early in the morning, while waiting at the cafe in the hosp...
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Lesson 11

Merry Christmas! Since I've a day off on Christmas Eve too, I figured I should finish this post. Now, this is for a lesson that was more than a week ago... In which I learn that the verb for "to work part time" in Korean (아르바이트하다) comes from the German Arbeit, which simply means "work". We started on Chapter 3 of the book. It's the Seoul National University book. Basically this lesson was an introduction to other verbs (apart from "to be" and "to have" which was covered before). Lots of verbs...
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On Learning Languages

I don't know, felt like writing some non-technical (not really technical per se) stuff, so this is partially more reflective. Or more like a regular journal. Really a text dump of my rambling thoughts. For Korean, I started to learn it because I had two friends mention that they were going to take a Korean class in September. It was an arbitrary statement about signing up that one made to another at a gathering, that it was the last day to sign up for a discounted price. I went home and immedia...
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Lessons 1-10 Vocabulary

This is overdue because there was some resistance on my part to list out everything. Here's some vocabulary from the first 10 lessons. There's more, but I doubt there is point documenting them here, since I already have them as cards in Anki. The only point for documenting is to see the weekly progress, and this is a dump of 10 lessons' worth. Vocabulary Words Countries, Languages, Nationalities Korean English 나라 country 지도 map 한국 Korea 한국어 Korean (language) 한국 사람 Korean (pers...
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Lessons 1-10

I've been learning Korean for 3 months, and I thought it would be good to document my progress. But first, I should write down what I've gone through so far, so that in future I can just build on it. It's always interesting to see how my language learning process changes from language to language. Part of it has to do with the language itself, and part of it has to do with the methods that I use, and perhaps, it might also be me. I hope I did not make any typos; I'm still not used to typing wi...
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