Hello hello! To thank y’all for 7k followers I thought I’d make this quick post about how I study Korean. I’ve been in Korea for around 11 months now and while it’s been really hard to keep the motivation going sometimes, I’m really proud of how far I’ve come with studying the language. I think I’ve finally found a way to study the language that is both fun and effective, so I thought I’d share!
For some context, I came to Korea knowing only the Korean alphabet (and it still took me a few seconds to remember it). On my first day of Orientation we learned 잘먹겠습니다 and I was like chal-mok-uh-what? We had six weeks of intensive classes before heading to our placements (more info about my Fulbright experience here) but it wasn’t very helpful because the class itself was pretty poorly structured. Essentially I’ve studied the whole language only on my own. Now I can understand a good portion of what’s said at my workplace (ok like 30%), can use enough Korean to fool people into thinking I’m Korean hehe, and most importantly just feel overall less overwhelmed about being surrounded by a language I don’t speak.
Vocab - you can’t really do anything without vocab. I use a TOPIK I vocab book because even though I’m not taking the TOPIK, I figured the words they expect you to know are probably helpful (they are). I talk more about that book here.
Grammar - Currently I’m going through the TTMIK books. I put all my grammar in one place because then it almost becomes like a grammar dictionary for me when I have a question. I try to write as many sample sentences as possible so I remember how to use them. Before TTMIK I used KGIU Beginner (and will soon move onto KGIU Intermediate). I talk about my grammar books in that same post here.
Writing sentences/daily diary - I then use the words in each chapter of the TOPIK book along with the grammar I learned together in sentences. That helps with me actually producing content using what I learned, instead of just memorizing everything.
**Just memorizing words will not get you anywhere. I saw a HUGE improvement in my Korean once I actually started to write sentences instead of only memorizing grammar and vocab**
Learning Korean songs - My new favorite thing to do. Everyone says that when you learn a language you need some connection to it to help you stay motivated. I’ve been going through a lot of popular Korean songs (prepping for dem norebang nights amiright) and doing the following: I define all new words that I see, explain all foreign grammar, and directly translate all the lyrics.
Note that some vocab in the songs is not commonly spoken vocab. Just like how poets will use a lot of words that might be weird to say in daily conversation. I recommend looking up the words in Naver dictionary and looking at the example sentences to get a feel of when it’s used.
Also note that song grammar is often not proper grammar. They take liberties. I don’t recommend you focus on the grammar in songs until your Korean is at a high enough level where you can sort of decipher that and google the right thing. For example, they’ll mush particles into words which might confuse you or mess up the sentence order for it to sound better.
Lastly, I use Color Coded Lyrics because it has not only the Korean lyrics to songs but a rough English translation. I only use the English translation to make sure I’m somewhat going in the right direction, but try not to refer to it that often. The purpose is to make sure that I can understand the song by myself first before checking the translation. (Also the link is to the first song I ever learned, Mikrokosmos by BTS)
Other resources I often use
TTMIK’s QandA videos. All their videos are good but their Q&A series is the most useful in my opinion because it goes through examples of things that are genuinely confusing about Korean, especially when you try to speak it. Hyunwoo always gives amazing (and numerous) examples. Here’s the playlist.
Anki. YAS spaced repetition is the key. Make sure to use it every day (I forget to and uh yea I should). As long as you need to absorb new vocabulary, Anki is great. But please please remember that just flashcards will not help. You have to actively use this vocabulary in conversation or writing to remember it. Also check out this hilarious article about how you really should not be using Anki.
Also I recommend syncing your deck across devices so you can use the web version on your phone (instead of downloading the app you have to pay for on iOS)
How to Study Korean. I used to use this as my only source of grammar learning but I found it a bit too dense. He really packs a lot into each lesson and as an early learner it’s a bit overwhelming. But from the perspective of wanting an in-depth explanation to a grammar point, it’s incredible. Usually I just google the grammar point I need and use his explanation.
Language Learning with Netflix. Listening skills are also super important so I use this Chrome extension to be able to see both the Korean and English subtitles at the same time. Especially in the early stages of learning, I definitely couldn’t tell you exactly what words the actors were saying, so seeing the English translation really didn’t help much. With the extension you can also have it auto-pause after each line if you really want to hard-study. I usually just pause and write lines down when I think I might say something like that in conversation.
Papago. This is a better alternative to Google Translate because apparently they have user competitions to find the most natural ways to translate things, so it’s not just based on machines. It’s also helpful because you can take pictures of Korean text and it’ll translate it pretty effectively.
Naver Korean Dictionary. This app is great because it has a “Conjugation” button when you look up verbs and adjectives, gives you samples sentences, and also lets you connect easily to naver.com if you need to search for a good cafe. More importantly though, this app also has Papago within it. While it doesn’t let you take pictures of text like the normal Papago app, it does list all the new vocab in the sentence you translated, which the Papago app doesn’t do. This is incredibly helpful when sometimes something is conjugated weirdly in the sentence and you can’t decipher what the base word actually was. Naver will tell you!
Let me know if you have any questions!! I hope this helps someone :)
