Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

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Out of curiosity, what are the texts/resources you're getting vocab from? Where do you get shows to watch? Did you pick up on the basics like the alphabet and pronunciation first and study that together?

My husband's just like you and beyond knowing words for his favorite foods and some of the lyrics to Gangnam Style, he doesn't know much more. I would like to change that. Plus it'd be nice to practice my rusting Korean with him - there's few Koreans in SF and most assume I'm Chinese despite my Standard Korean dialect. I really want him to learn for raising our future kids fluent in multiple languages but no real stress there - between me (fluent in 2, conversational in 1, formerly conversational in 2-3 I could pick up again), my bilingual mother, and my polyglot father (former military interpreter, near fluent to fluent in 4 and currently learning 3-4 others or however many he maxed out on with his best friends Duolingo and iTunes U...) I think they will be covered.

I dug up some of my old books, AppleTV has KORTV and Crunchyroll and Netflix/Amazon have an okay movie selection (can't figure out how to get it to show/hide subtitles in multiple languages and sometimes english is just burned into the video itself -_- )...I also talked to some Duolingo people at I/O about contributing to "Korean for English speakers", but eh. I grew up with the language and my limited formal study was with a super nerdy polyglot linguistics researcher at Yonsei (Korean Ivy-level-esque university) so I have no idea where to start for new mostly monolingual learners for a less popular language.

I learned Hangul years ago from some website. It's impressively easy to learn and makes figuring out pronunciation way easier than writing Korean in a Latin alphabet.

There's actually a great list of resources here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/korean

and more specifically here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_b...

Right now I'm using Ankidroid and Anki for Windows and OS X (all free and they sync with Ankiweb, Anki for iOS is some small fee) for vocabulary. There's tons of "decks" (all free) available through Anki. I'm currently grinding through the "Korean 1000 most common words" deck since it also has a vocal pronunciation for each word for me to practice against.

You have to be a little disciplined with it: for each card, listen, practice the pronunciation and then when you flip the card the for the meaning score your result honestly for the SRS system to work right. You only ever get 20 new words a day, but it adds up really fast.

Right now I do a morning session (or I break it up into two 15 minute sessions), and then in the afternoons I use Ankidroid to generate a list of words I keep forgetting to practice against. I do this every day.

I'm using this textbook at the moment. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/korean/my-korean-1/

It's free, and I just upload it to my google play books account and read it on my tablet. I'm also entering every sentence and vocabulary word from this book into a new Anki deck so I can practice more as well as get some time learning how to type in Korean.

I don't have a Korean keyboard, so I took a screen shot of this one (http://www.branah.com/korean) and printed it out and just stick it on top of my cheapo $5 Logitech keyboard to help me. It's slow, but I'm getting steadily faster.

About once a week, I'll do an extended study session and sit down for a few hours and try to write all of the vocabulary I'm learning and what it means. This is giving me practice actually writing Hangul, which will help me later in reading people's messy handwriting. I'll probably start doing this as well to improve my handwriting since figuring out how to fit different syllables in a square is still a challenge for me. http://koreanvitamin.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/how-to-practic...

I've tried and struggled a lot with memorizing vocabulary in the past which is why I've put it off for so many years, so I can't say enough good things about Anki. If I have a criticism, it's that I'm much better now at remembering Korean->English than I am going from English->Korean. There's some decks that cover that as well though, and I'm planning on making a "1000 most common words in English to Korean" deck at some point when my Korean and typing gets better.

There's also a deck of every TOPIK vocabulary word I'm planning on moving to next. It's almost 8,000 words.

For videos, I'm not as much into those yet. But I'm planning on moving to start that in a few months to build listening comprehension. My goal is not academic/formal Korean, but more conversational/colloquial. So I'm thinking of shows like Running Man on www.dramafever.com might be good to watch, at least if you get tired studying you can be entertained.

There's also quite a few youtube channels at various levels of complexity. The people who make the videos usually put quite a bit of effort into them to make them at least entertaining.

In my queue for future studying:

https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ (he puts subtitles everywhere in Korean and English so it's super helpful to pause on each sentence and work them out)

https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos - mostly English, but she provides lots of entertaining background stuff and nouns for things

- Based on my readings from other people and what to expect, I'm expecting to get up to very basic conversational level in 6-9 months and be able to handle most typical daily conversational needs somewhere between 1-2 years of study. Korean is a very hard language for English speakers to learn (as I'm finding out).

Sorry to push my own side project but it might be useful to you guys.

http://www.toktogi.com

It's a popup dictionary extension for Chrome and Firefox that is based on an open source K-E dictionary (https://github.com/garfieldnate/kengdic). It still needs a lot of work, but I plan to open source it soon and hopefully allow people to contribute back to and improve the original dictionary as well.

OMG, this is amazing. I've already added it. Really appreciate it, this will definitely come in all sorts of handy.

Thank you so much for your response!

I don't know how I didn't come across r/Korean while I've been lurking in r/Korea for the last couple weeks (trying to find out more about dual citizenship)... I'll definitely have to check that out. I've been in the middle of creating an Anki deck while studying for the MCAT and I've used it in the past for learning Mandarin and I absolutely love it, just wondered if there were any existing Korean decks you particularly recommend.

Good idea on the youtube videos too. I was thinking straight up kdrama and rewatching some of my favorite Korean movies but it might be too complicated right now for beginning.

I'm surprised to hear Korean is supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn...I don't think fundamentals are that hard. It's really vocab that sucks balls and I feel like I can say that about lots of languages, but I'll never know in person how hard it is so :/

Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently.

The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study.

At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study.

Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English).

The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2.

To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.

Oh, I'm using Anki to learn Chinese, and it's actually not very hard at all to modify a deck to include English->Chinese as well.

Anki has a set of `fields` which you can embed in html templates to make each card's front and back.

Start studying from a deck, press "e" (or click the edit button), then click "cards" from the top. From that menu, you can adjust the card to make reverse direction cards, or even sound only cards. It's quite flexible.

I had to pull out all the English->Chinese cards and put them in a new deck to try and study them at the same time, but that it maybe fixable if there's a sort order.

https://translate.google.com/ is a great source for virtual keyboards if you want to practice typing. Select the source language and click the keyboard in the lower left.

I began some Korean self-studying and found that koreanclass101 and Talk to Me in Korean (ttmik) have pretty good audio lessons. The rest of the process was trying to get my hands on as much material as possible - practice with native speakers, children's books, dramas, readers, flash cards, etc. Anki is incredible for memorizing a huge number of facts (e.g. words), but can only power one part of the whole experience. Finding material can be hit or miss, so don't be afraid of spending small amounts of money here and there on books, etc. I will say that prepackaged courses like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur will not get one very far.

Just tell him that Korean's not too bad to learn once you already know English, Chinese, and Japanese - that'll really encourage him!

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