Best resources for advanced intermediate

Learning Korean Forum - Ask a Tutor
1

I am Korean studies major and prior to that I lived in Korea for over 3 years. I just finished a semester at Yonsei (level 4) and am relatively confident in my ability to understand Korean. To give an example, I can use a Korean only grammar dictionary to look up unknown grammar patterns fairly effectively and have a vocabulary of approximately ~5000 words. I still find myself in a situation where I can’t acquire enough usable material for CONVERSATIONAL korean. I could easily pull up material from Korean wikipedia or Naver news, but the problem is that the style doesn’t reflect language that is used in conversation.

Are there any resources out there that:

  1. Are extremely extensive (meaning I could use the resource for at least 12 months without exhausting all of the texts)
  2. Are conversational (not excessively formal or professional)
  3. Don’t require an excessive amount of formatting to input into lingq, eg: too many symbols, not in plain text format, etc…

any help is appreciated.

2

The obvious answer would be to point you to http://www.talktomeinkorean.com/category/shows/iyagi-intermediate/ even if its too easy for you its pretty much the best natural conversational material you can probably find online that actually has audio and formatted transcript ready to cut and paste… but if you already know about it and aren’t using it i guess it’s either because you dont like it or its too easy for you… they have 144 episodes on different topics. It probably wont last you very long if you have time to do 2-3 of these everyday…

And yes, I agree with you about using news/ website/ novels / alot of the sources out there Do not help with getting used to conversational korean…

Even if the TTMIK Iyagi stuff is easy for you to understand… these should be good for you to study in terms of how 2 koreans might interact with each other and what kind of patterns they use. After studying a bunch of them the way they speak and the grammar they use to piece sentences together is limited and gets quite predictable which is very good for us learners…

Theres lots of korean content out there. But as you’ve realized , its hard to find content that has both audio and text. Theres lots of natural conversational korean content. ( ie : korean reality tv, documentaries, some less formal radio shows etc… ) Just no transcripts… good to train your ears though…

Otherwise , at your level, find yourself a group of koreans and try to blend in =).

3

Yeah, the TTMIK stuff really is the best resource out there, but like you said, it is kind of basic and predictable after a while. I’m not even too worried about the availability of audio (I can just have a friend read it for me or, even worse, use mac tts voices).

The best thing I could think of (give the lack of availability of other materials) would be a source of Korean movie scripts. Even with that, I have been having trouble because they are all poorly formatted or are translated to English, which makes it difficult to input.

Has anyone had luck finding TV / Movie scripts online?

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drama scripts are pretty easy to find… Just google “korean drama script” you’ll find a crap load of people who are into dramas that type up korean drama scripts…

For movie scripts just search for “한국 영화 대본” or whatever movie you want + 대본 … I’m sure you can find something…

Although very easy to find, subtitle files are not ideal to study from =). I’ve tried it. too time consuming and just not fun.

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Wow, I swear I did that search 8 months ago and came up with nothing but Korean translations of American dramas. This time I’m getting much better luck. I’ll give this a shot and see how I like it. Thanks!

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well… I just did a quick search on naver for korean movie scripts like i mentioned above…

You can find websites like this

http://blog.naver.com/c8_youfuck?Redirect=Log&logNo=20087886409

click around … theres other scripts… Or you can just naver the name of the movie you want + 대본 …something should show up…

scripts are out there…

Goodluck

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I actually recommend drama scripts over movie scripts, if you can find them. While movie scripts are easier to find and provide variety from movie to movie, a drama will provide much more consistent content, meaning you’ll be regularly exposed to the same patterns and words over a longer period of time. That frequent repetition will likely help more in retaining the new words and phrases that come up.

Of course, if you can’t stand any of the dramas that have scripts then you’re much better off defaulting to scripts for movies that you like. In any case, good luck to you!

8

I’ve found that Korean comedy talk shows like 안녕하세요 are good even if there’s no subtitles available, because a) it’s 100% unscripted colloquial, spoken Korean, and b) they pop up a bunch of cheesy captions on the screen to emphasize what the participants are saying, so you can catch words you don’t know and look them up. Here’s an example clip from the show: - YouTube I’m not sure if you can download these online, since I live in Korea and just flip on the TV when I’m in the mood for this kind of stuff.

RE: Drama and movie scripts:

In general when you’re searching, they usually use the word 대본 for drama scripts, but 시나리오 for movie scripts. In my experience though, it can be pretty difficult to find the specific movie or drama script you’re looking for. It might be a better option to browse what’s available first, then choose what to watch :wink:

http://vod.sbs.co.kr/tv/tv_index.jsp SBS VOD site that has transcriptions. Click on a title, then click “자막보기” on the right side for a transcription. Other networks might have this as well, haven’t explored for a while.

http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogTypeMain.do?blogid=05L9p#ajax_history_home Korean blog that has a lot of drama scripts, but it’s kind of random and hard to find what you’re looking for. Click 드라마 대본 halfway down the left menu, then click 목록보기 at the top for a list view of titles. Might be useful for “shopping” for a new drama to watch.

HugeDomains.com has a couple and is easy to browse.

필름메이커스 커뮤니티 - 한국영화 시나리오 Korean site where you can download movie scripts.

Also, if you can’t find a specific drama script by searching, try just browsing around the official website. When I was watching 마왕, I couldn’t find scripts for searching. However, just searching “마왕”, clicking through to the official site, then clicking 방송보기 > 다시보기, there’s a 대본 column with a link next to each episode. Not all dramas will have this, but it’s worth checking the official site and digging around.

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