I speak Polish, German, Swedish and English. 3 of them are Germanic languages so they were easy to learn because they are so closely related. Polish and German I learned as a child so it was kind of automatic.
Now I have to learn Korean and struggle so much! After 3 months I have learned about 100 words. Any tips how to get to the first 1000 words Ina reasonable time? Especially in a language where none of the words seem to resamle anything from my previous languages.
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The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:
semantic map
As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.
So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:
You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.
It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.
flashcards
Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:
- a Korean word
- a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
- small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
- some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
- a simple example sentence using that word
- [optional] some simple drawing
Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.
I’m doing the flashcards but only with the word in Korean and English. Perhaps I should add more things to it.
The mindmap I’ve never heard of it, but it seems interesting because you make clusters of words in topics. I will try that out too.
Thanks for your practical tips!
Have you tried playing video games in the language you’re learning?
There’s a bunch of bilingual people in my life and they told me that’s how they learned English.
Menus.
I find a menu from a local place and learn everything on the menu, I try to find a place with disposable menus so I can take home, and once I asked the restaurant if I could take their regular menu home to study.
Food is going to be something I experienced daily anyway when I’m in a new country so it’s practical and helps me form a foundation.
Once I know the food items, common questions become natural extensions of the food items.
So menus are usually my base, and then I expand with a teaching app or YouTube videos and then I talk to people.
An incredibly effective method that is boring but quick is to choose one movie in the language you’re studying, and watch it once per day, really paying attention to all of the speech.
That boosted my Mandarin like crazy in comprehension, but it can be a slog for the four to 6 weeks it takes.
I like to do similar with recipes and songs. Find something I like the sound of and make it then you know all the vocab for cooking related things. With music I find a band I like and listen to an album until I know the words.
Another good one is watching sports in the language you are learning. It’s quicker because you can often infer what words are by knowing what just happened in the match. I find this a bit of a more natural way anyway. I appreciate that may not be easy for every language though.
Oh, nice. I have done the song thing before, but never a recipe. Good idea.
I don’t play sports ball much though so a lot of the advantages of your second suggestion might go over my head.
Watching a Kung Fu movie on repeat is a lot more my style haha
Well indeed watching movies helps. How about dodgeball! The best might be some comedy show you’ve seen before in your mother tongue so you even know what’s going to happen. When you get good you notice which jokes they completely change because they make no sense in the other language.
Yea, good idea.
Sorry, I was referring to this other thing I mentioned in a different thread.
I’ll take a movie dodgeball, any movie where the actors speak clearly is fine, and I watch that once a day for 4 to 6 weeks.
It boosts my comprehension like crazy, because I’m not just learning new words but my brain’s getting used to recognizing the rhythm and syntax instinctually, but obviously you have to be pretty disciplined to go through with it because it gets to be boring!
Effective, and pretty rapid learning, but it’s a real jog through molasses for a while there.
The first thousand, formal learning. The next thousand, informal learning. The remainder, conversation or light reading in the language.
This is true for both of my non-native languages, Spanish and Latin. I never got past the formal learning stage in Japanese and without reinforcement it’s mostly slipped away.
I’ve a smattering of phrases and pleasantries in French, German, Dutch, Lakota, and some Slavic languages, but that’s just from exposure to native speakers.
Do a lot of reading and listening to material you find interesting. The learning happens in the background.
But I need to look up every single word all the time. So even if the word shows up in the next sentence again I have already forgotten it and need to look it up again. If I knew say 50℅ of the words in a sentence then this would make sense. But just reading a paragraph takes so much time because I’m looking up every word.
I tried those websites where you click on the word and then it shows the translation. But I end up basically clicking on each word and practically just reading it in English :(
Also I am suspecting that it’s something in my attitude towards learning this language. I just can’t get over it and it makes it so hard. But I need to know it because I live in Korea already for 3 years and in the long run I will need to be able to work for other companies which don’t have English as their office language. And also my fiance has to deal with all paper stuff because I’m practically illiterate :(
That’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry about forgetting words. You will forget them, look them up again, forget them look them up again, eventually they’ll stick. Focus on the reading. Don’t treat it like a vocabulary lesson. Every day you’re here to read, as long as you reach the end you’re good, over months you’ll realize you learned a lot of vocabs.
At first because the text will be so dense with new words yes it will take a long time to read, that’s why I typically only read a short maybe half a page per day. Then gradually increase that as your vocabulary grows over months. The goal should be to encounter say 50-100 new words a day. Notice I said encounter not learn.
Those websites where you look up words are really useful. Make sure they have text to speech and read out loud in the language not in English even if you see the translation in English that’s fine.
Also do a lot of listening along with the reading. I usually get myself an audio book and its corresponding text, chop it up into 1 minute and half a page segments, for each segment listen once, then read looking new words up, then listen while reading at the same time a few times, trying to follow a long, looking up any words I forgot, then listen without reading a dozen or so times until I can follow along. Then movd on to the next segment.
That’s perfectly fine. Don’t worry about forgetting words. You will forget them, look them up again, forget them look them up again, eventually they’ll stick.
This is exactly what I tell people who ask OP’s question. Technology made this a feasible approach. In the era of paper dictionaries it was a different story.
Thanks, those useful practical tips. I’ll implement them into my routine :)
Sounds like you’re not ready for this stage yet. I thought I could do that with German and failed horribly. I recommend that you get some vocabulary or phrase books. Those are split into sections and you can add those to your list of vocab words. Learn introductions , food, body parts, household items, colors, numbers, etc. What do you often do? Office work? Learn the words for document, report, stapler, etc. Do you travel a lot? Learn airport, train, ticket, etc. Have you heard of Anki? Use it to fully memorize words. Don’t just use it for base verbs. Also include conjugations, honorifics, and small sentences. I don’t know much about the specifics of the Korean language but I know that it’s a difficult language and it’ll take some time until you can read native text. When you do, you should start out with music. Songs tend to be repetitive and use the same words so you will start noticing words more and more. Add these words to your vocab. You can repeat this process more and more until you get into websites and TV shows and movies. It will take time and you’ll feel discouraged but every language uses more words than others and by learning from these books, you should build up a solid base to the point where you’re not clicking on every single word
This might be a dumb question, but the answer you were given that compared to Chinese made me wonder, did you learn the alphabet? A lot of English speakers assume Korean is a symbol based language, like Chinese, and expect to have to learn a whole word by sight. But Korean has an alphabet, and words can be sounded out phonetically. “Reading” words, even if I don’t know what they mean, helps me recall meanings and decrease dictionary use for any individual word over time.
I know the hangul alphabet and can read it reasonably fast. I just don’t understand what I’m reading.
I’ve used the Pimsleur language programs for a couple languages. It’s audio based: you hear a recording, and you say it out loud. A great way to get started.
Does it explain it in your language so you know what the words mean?
Yes, and it’s very phrased based, so you sort of absorb the grammar without a lot of explicit rules.
How many minutes/hours per day did you use to do it?
They are 30-minute sessions. I did them in my car during work commute. Many public libraries have them. Here’s the first session: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eguDJPkjPwQ
Thanks for the link!
Yep, Pimsleur to start, and then try to find very easy material in the language to consume. For example, kids shows or any shows you’ve already watched dubbed in the language you’re trying to learn (e.g., Friends in Korean).
I think Pimsleur usually has 90 x 30min sessions, which gets you about 45hr of practice/comprehension. Then if you can consume about 150 more hrs of material, where you understand around 80-90% of what they’re saying, you should be about at a B1 level at that point.
At that point, you can start trying to consume more difficult material. Audiobooks, podcasts, movies, music etc.
Especially in a language where none of the words seem to resamle anything from my previous languages.
It’s challenging, but if you can get a handle on the etymology of the language you’re studying, that may help. I’m learning Chinese and the characters got a lot less intimidating once I learned about the radicals. Basically there are smaller characters embedded within all but the most simple characters, and often the character is telling some kind of story that uses all of the radicals to illustrate the meaning of the character.
For example 看 means “look”, which seems pretty nonsensical. But then if you know that 手 means “hand” and 目 means “eye”, then you can see that the “look” character is made up of the hand character over top of the eye character, like someone shielding their eyes from the sun as they look at something. And the hand and eye characters both look a bit more like the things they represent.
Similarly, if one was learning English, it may behoove them to learn a little bit about Latin and Greek roots, since a lot of our vocabulary comes from those. Maybe even read about some of the most common PIE roots. Once you learn about PIE roots you can start noticing them in all kinds of places in our language.
TTBOMK, there are 3 things which change-the-rules, significantly.
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Pimsleur. Get the Pimsleur app, get the all-languages subscription, & do 1 session per day.
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Flashcards, or Anki, to get the visual imprinted into your automatic-mind, for any language you are trying to learn
Later…
- Tandem, where you find a speech-learning partner, you help other people learn your languages better, other people help you learn your target-language better.
Begin with Pimsleur & with some yt videos.
( they have no Sanskrit, which is the one I want, unfortunately )
Do well!
_ /\ _
Anki is incredible for learning, it’s one of my favourite tools.
If you’re able to, make your own flashcards— it makes a huge difference. Bonus tip, if you’re making your own flashcards, it can be useful to use pictures rather than a language you already know for the answer. For example, if I was making a card for the word “apple” in French, I’d have one side saying “une pomme”, and another side with a picture of an apple. It makes it so that the new language isn’t mediated by English as much, and I’ve found I get better at thinking in that language much quicker (especially for languages with grammar that’s different to other languages I’ve studied)
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My native language is Cantonese. Our education system has English in the syllabus. I did think I was good at it, until I became REALLY good at it after consuming English YouTube videos for an amount of time.
If you use it frequently enough, you will be good at it.
Don’t know if the same applies for Korean, as the Internet is a very English-centered place.
Yeah, so my question is actually, how do you get to the point where you can consume content in that language? I’m trying to watch videos for babies and struggle to understand it, besides the point that it is so boring that I don’t want to do it :D
Subs are your friend. I studied Japanese got over a year, but most of my vocabulary came from animes and games. Try to find some Korean shows that might interest you. If you are into games, some mmos have Korean voice overs. Korean alphabet is simpler too so it should be a lot more effective for you. Still, if you need to practice reading Koreans make a lot of good webtoons. Finding originals may be a bit harder but give it a try.
Ah webtoons sounds interesting because you get the picture as context with it. Good idea, thanks!
It’s the basic English from school. I see you have started learning Korean for some time, so I just assumed you could. Sorry about that.
As for the content part, maybe try TV shows? Some are pretty interesting. If possible, turn on subtitles as well.
And if it’s still boring, don’t stress yourself out. Take breaks and do it slowly
Anki and some pre-built decks at my level. I’m sure there is something for Korean out there.
OK, so that is what I’m also doing but god damn it it’s so slow because I feel for some words I need at least 100 times of it showing up so I remember it :(
I had a quick look and found that yomitan supports Korean as well. This won’t help your reviews directly, but it will help with being able to quickly look up words when you’re trying to read something.
EDIT: And a dictionary to use with it.
Yeah, that’s annoying. You probably need some other resources to help things stick, but I can’t help you on Korean.
Using mnemonics of some kind can be helpful, even if it’s nonsensical (or perhaps especially if it’s nonsensical).
Are there any in-person classes you can sign up for? I found that to be a big help.
I had a online teacher for two month once a week one hour. It was OK, especially it kicked me in the but to really do my homework. But it’s somehow very expensive.
In person I found one but it’s during working hours so I can’t attend.
Babbel. Was not paid to say this.
I spoke Polish until I went to primary school as well as being a native English speaker.
