journey

notes on things I'm learning. currently: Korean

Agreement with Various Subjects

This came up in my German class today, it's about agreement or (Kongurenz auf Deutsch). It's what happens when you have two subjects, joined in a "koordinativ" way. (I'm not sure what is the correct way to translate this, and what are the correct concepts in English.) Examples include using: und sowohl... als auch weder... noch If you have 1st person and 2nd person, then it's 1st person plural: Ich und du gehen... (=Wir gehen) If you have 2nd and 3rd person, it can be either 2nd perso...
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Lesson 33 (Beginner 2B Lesson 1): This Lesson is Surprising

It's the same 6 people in this new term. At least for now. We are still having the lessons online until at least the end of July. Since the lockdown measures have eased, there was a poll to ask whether we'd want to have lessons at the school after June, but I chose (and apparently so did the majority) to have the classes online. I think apart from the commute taking time, it's the whole having to go out and being on public transport for an extended period, plus you still have to wear a mask a...
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Lesson 32 (Beginner 2A Lesson 8): Shall we go by foot?

We started the lesson with using Quizlet for revision. This is the first time since... well, the beginning of this term. It was still the groups competition (2 groups of 3), but since it's individual effort in that sense, it depended on your teammates. The first round I was paired with 2 people from my previous class (including my friend) and we won. The second round we also won, but this was a different group, with one person from my previous class (the same as in the first round, but not my fr...
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Lesson 31 (Beginner 2A L7): Ending Chapter 7 and Chapter 8 Vocab

We spent the first hour finishing up chapter 7, and the last half an hour going through the vocabulary for chapter 8. I realised after a week of Zoom meetings this past week (I had a couple of workshops for work), how amazing this teacher is at using Zoom. She switches seamlessly between screen share and then stop sharing, to share different files on different software (some are in MS Word, others are in Adobe Acrobat). The way she uses the annotation tools (okay, yes, that's not exclusive to Z...
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Lesson 30 (Beginner 2A L6): And (고)

We are finishing Chapter 7 next week since we covered the last grammar point. That's really fast. The lesson started with revision of last week's grammar, so with the help of the physical flash cards with pictures on one side and the verb on the other, we had to conjugate for both 지만 and then 습니다/ㅂ니다. There were a few variants. With the verb's infinitive shown or the picture side (which is harder), and we had to do both the present tense and the past tense. We also went through the textbook fo...
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Lesson 29 (Beginner 2A L5): Contrasting Clauses and Formal Speech

Today was an intense grammar lesson, covering 2 more grammar points after our word quiz. What was more interesting was that I found out from my friend, the guy who is still taking the class with me, that our previous teacher actually quit teaching at the school. Or, well, she quit at one point, but now she's back. Or maybe she never left (because of the Covid situation), I don't know. My friend thinks she may be teaching part-time. Her last day was the day of our last lesson before the break, ...
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It's Raining

It started with the teacher messaging us on KakaoTalk about the weather (as it was raining) a day after the lesson we had on the weather. Then she asked us what we are going to do today. I said I was studying and then exercising. I still have not replied to her follow-up question one day later on what I am studying (and I thought she asked what kind of exercise) I do because I forgot. (This post was meant to be posted yesterday when this happened but I forgot as well.) I feel like I was somewh...
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Lesson 28 (Beginner 2A L4): Beginning Chapter 7 with the Weather and One Class of Irregular Verbs

We finished chapter 6 and started on chapter 7 today. For chapter 6, all that was left was really the pronunciation, and then the self-check. There will be a word (vocab) quiz next week. Perhaps it means that the vocab quiz will always be one week after we start a new chapter? So today's post will have a lot of the vocabulary, from the chapter 7 list. We also covered the first grammar point, and it's interesting because this cleared up a question I had while doing exercises on Duolingo. (This ...
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Lesson 27 (Beginner 2A L3): Also (도), Kimchi

This post is really late because I've not finished my homework yet and for some reason I thought I should get the homework done first, since that's what I usually do after class. This week's assignment is taking longer because there is a writing component that involves creating a fake advertisement to sell some second-hand stuff. Me being me, I decide to try to make it legitimate and that means tons of research before I will get that part of it done. So, I decided that I should at least get this...
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Lesson 26 (Beginner 2A L2): Adjectives

This lesson was also conducted over Zoom. We had another student join today, so there is a total of 7 students (including me) in the class. 3 of them are from the same class that I used to be in, and the other 3 are not. It seems that this third new person knows the other 2. It's a guy, so at least my friend isn't the only guy in the class any more, but I don't think it really bothered him (the way it bothered the other guy that used to be in our class until he disappeared just around Christma...
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"What are you doing now?"

The Korean teacher initiated a chat about what we are doing now since it's a public holiday (Labour Day) today. Some new vocab: Korean English Notes 공휴일 public holiday 저는 두 번 봤어요. I watched it twice. Context was a movie. 당연하지요 of course Context was that the teacher commented that we were all at home (모두 집에 있어요), and this was the reply, given that we are pretty much in a lockdown. 대단해요 great; amazing 하나 더 있어요. There's one more. 구텐탁 Hello; Good day/afternoon (German) Guten Tag ...
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Lesson 25 (Beginner 2A L1): Learning from Home

Naturally since the country is in a state of partial lockdown, we can't go physically for class. This learning from home arrangement is good for me since, as I've said, it's an hour's journey each way for me otherwise. I've not left the house for something like... since 5 April. I don't buy groceries, it's messed up that my parents do it since they are vulnerable, but somehow that's the arrangment in my house. And with the new restrictions, it's just my dad since he's the main driver in our hou...
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Mindshift Week 4: Adopting a Learning Lifestyle

Why Should You Keep Learning? Some 1400 new neurons are born every day in your hippocampus. This neural birth rate doesn't decline very much with age, but unless your brain continues to encounter new experiences (e.g. by learning something new), your new neurons will die off before they can mature and hook into your exisitng larger neural network. New neurons allow us to distinguish between similar experiences and store them as distinct memories. This means that we need to help new neurons sur...
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Korean Alphabet 3 - Other Vowels

This is the last part on the Korean alphabet (at least for now). There's much more that can be said especially when looking at the history and its design, but I'll leave that for another time in the (far) future. Since vowels is a separate topic, I split this into its own post from Part 2 which covers the consonants. In Part 1, the 10 basic vowels were introduced. The Korean alphabet has a total of 21 vowels today, so we will look at the remaining 11. There are two classes of vowels: monophth...
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Korean Alphabet 2 - Consonants

An overdue post on the Korean alphabet with reference to Week 1 of First Step Korean. When King Sejong created the consonants, there were originally 17 consonants - but 3 have fallen out of use, leaving 14 that are still used today. Usually, the total number of letters in the Korean alphabet is given as 40, with 19 consonants and 21 vowels. These extra 5 (19 - 14 = 5) consonants are the 5 tense double consonants (ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ). As for the vowels, there are 11 complex vowelels that are formed by...
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Mindshift Week 3: Learning and Careers

Passion and Work There is often a kind of tension between what we want to do (our internal desires, what we think of as our passions) and what the world has to offer in terms of opportunities (external circumstances). We have to be careful not to fall into The Passion Trap, which is where we develop ourselves extensively in one skill (which usually comes out of our passions) without considering its value to the market (and hence whether you can get a job). This is made worse by friends and te...
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Referring to Older Siblings

I'm on Week 3 of First Step Korean and it's quite interesting because I'm learning new things (I honestly have no idea why I could possibly think otherwise... there's always things to learn, especially in language). Our textbook has not gone into the family topic yet, so I've learnt a lot of new words related to family. Also, this course introduced the first 10 native Korean numbers first, for counting the number of siblings that you have. (No Sino-Korean numbers in sight yet.) There are dif...
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Korean Alphabet 1 - Basic Vowels

This is about the Korean Alphabet, I guess about the history and how the letters were formed and whatever else I find interesting. The Korean alphabet (Hangeul) was created in 1443 by King Sejong (referred to as King Sejong the Great - he is highly respected). I've actually found it pretty fascinating ever since I realised that the consonants reflected the shape of the tongue in the mouth (in the case for ㄱ, ㄴ) when making that consonant sound. I think it's genius, and it also helped me to rem...
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Mindshift Week 2: A Deeper Look at Effective Learning

The Value of a Poor Memory We tend to discount certain attributes of ours as "bad". Last week, we saw the racecar vs hiker brain - we tend to value the racecar brain for its speed, but don't realise that it has its disadvantages too. We also think that having a poor memory is bad. But like how the hiker brain has its advantages (such as not jumping to wrong conclusions too quickly), a poor memory also has a valuable side. Research has shown (and this was covered in LHTL I believe) that the pr...
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Mindshift Week 1

Notes from the MOOC Mindshift. I've read the book some time ago. I'd also started the course some time ago but never finished it, but since Coursera is offering free online learning (that is, the certs) for selected courses due to Covid-19, I decided to give this another go. Mindshift You can do more and be more than you think. Aptitude tests (and your internal feelings) only reflect that you are good at at this point in time. But you can change - due to your brain changing (forming new con...
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Lesson 24 (Beginner 1B L8): Native Korean Numbers and Unit Nouns

Today (and probably last week) should be considered as Beginner 2A, as evidenced by the pop quiz that we got today. But more on that surprise test later. (The teacher calls it a test, same as the big test from 2 weeks ago, but these are always only written - in the sense of short questions - and last no more than 15 minutes.) Erica didn't come, apparently she was busy last week and this week as well. I hope she's all right, and it's not because she's sick. I know that she was sick a couple of w...
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Lesson 23 (Beginner 1B L7): And I Thought We Were Done with Numbers...

Test Results We got back the test today, and everyone did very well. We all scored more than 90 out of 100. This is apparently quite high (I guess comparing with their past classes, at least according to the teacher). The teacher commented that when she was marking our tests she didn't believe it because we were saying it was hard and stressing out about it. To my utter surprise, I got full marks for oral. Actually, I got full marks for everything except writing, which I lost 0.5 marks on, so ...
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New Flashcards, Covid-19...

The cards for chapter 6 were released today. Since we were on chapter 5 for so long, I forgot the extra effort required to import all the Quizlet cards into Anki. I do this because I want the spaced repetition for memorising the vocab. The deck (well, the Quizlet term is "set") is private to certain classes, so I first make a copy that is public and then import it using the Anki add-on. Then I delete the public set. Next, I add my custom tags since eventually I will throw all the notes/cards ...
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Lesson 22 (Beginner 1B L6): The First Test

The Test I'll do a rundown of the different sections of the test and how they were carried out, and some of my own notes for how I tackled it, and how to prepare better for a next test (for the sections where I feel this is necessary). There were essentially 4 parts to the test, if you think about it in that way. The teacher had said it was reading, writing, listening, speaking. All right, it's kind of like that. But I'll split it into five sections. We were first given the main test paper. T...
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Learning from Talk to Me in Korean

While browsing the Language Learners forum, someone posted something that led me to this site - Talk to Me in Korean. I didn't listen to any of their Soundcloud lessons, but I've started to read through the content and it's a good grammar revision for my upcoming test. I learnt that 이, 그, 저 can be attached before any noun to say "this [noun]"/"that [noun]", so for example 이 커피 means "this coffee". Plus, I learnt a new expression for expressing desires: -고 싶어요. (I want to...) You remove the 다...
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Listening Practice for Korean Dates

I had this idea the day before (after my lesson) to randomly generate a date, and then have some TTS software to speak it, and then test myself on how how well I can hear the dates from that. I found out about the Web Speech API, and got something working yesterday, done in React. I started with React JS but converted it to TypeScript because I'm more comfortable with that. I used Create React App, which is definitely overkill. I really don't need all those extra dependencies... What I made ha...
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Lesson 21 (Beginner 1B L5): Revision

Today was a revision lesson. We did not use the textbook. There was a new 4-page handout, where the vocab for the 5 chapters was on the first page, the grammar on the second, and the last 2 pages are for this week's homework. Again, the test is reading, writing, pronunciation and listening. I guess pronunciation is better than oral, or maybe it will be both. I don't know. But there will be dates involved, we will have to read dates out. The writing component sounds like it's an essay, so not a ...
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And and With, Formal and Informal

1. And, With When do you use 같이 (together), and how do you use it in a sentence? I was looking for example sentences on Tatoeba. I know that to indicate doing something "with a friend" is 친구하고 . Example: 친구하고 먹었어요. (I ate with a friend.) But we first learnt that 하고 means "and" for connecting nouns. And the formal version of 하고 is 와/과 (depending on whether there is a Batchim; this is the one with the "inverse" rule). I looked at Tatoeba and on the first page of results saw this sentence: 친구와...
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Maps

It occurred to me today that the Korean textbook doesn't have a map (of Korea)... or that we didn't cover it in class. I did a quick look at the book and there's no map at the front or end of the textbook. It is possible it is hidden somewhere... I know the French textbook that I had definitely had a world map because it was showing France and the French territories, basically la francophonie. (This is the textbook I can check, because I still have the very first textbook as I've never managed...
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Lesson 20 (Beginner 1B L4): Ending Chapter 5

This lesson was finishing up chapter 5 in the book. We had finished the handout last week, and the homework handout was completed as part of the previous lesson's homework. This week's homework is a writing assignment - 3 journal entries: 1 weekday, 1 for Saturday and 1 for Sunday. We covered the textbook, starting on p. 135 with the listening activity and until the end of the chapter. It's like déjà vu, you know, the listening activity which was to hear the dates and mark it out on the calenda...
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