Help on progressing in Korean at beginner2

Hello dear tutors,

do you have some advice for me? I really struggle getting into a learning flow with Korean… the main problem for me learning with LingQ seems to be simply looking up words and finding definitions - often I can’t even find a definitions of conjugated simple word structures in the Naver dictionary. Often there are contracted forms that are impossible to look up and so many ambiguities, even with one syllable words… The fog is hardly lifting after 3/4 months on LingQ, the known words of 773 also seem to reflect a very slow progress…

Could you share more about how much and how you learned in LingQ? Maybe the contents in LingQ is not a panacea for any language at all. But you have invested already a month and I think that is already a good start! (plus, actually that is not so much investment that you have to worry about your progress… considering my past German learning for several years and how poor my German is)

Welcome to the world of Korean :slight_smile:

Unfortunately it’s a tricky language, so getting even a little bit of headway seems to take a really long time. However, it will get better :slight_smile:

I remember back when I’d only been studying Korean for two or three months. I was with a Korean friend and found a Korean newspaper somewhere. I asked him to read the article on the front page so I could record it and listen to it later. I then went through the article and got excited whenever I came across a word I knew. I initially had no idea what the article was about, but it was good practice nonetheless.

Years later, I tried to find the article again. I didn’t remember much of it, but I remember trying to memorize the first line from listening to my friend’s recording over and over. I typed those words into Google and up popped the article. I gave it another read, and this time the experience was completely different. I didn’t really have a good sense of how much I had progressed, but after seeing how much more I understood it was clear to me that my hard work had paid off.

When I first saw the article, I circled all the words I knew. I think this amounted to around 10-15 words. I just read the same article again and only found one word that I had to look up: 창호지

Here’s the article by the way: [매거진] 박명수 교수 교회 이야기 (17) -언더우드의 신혼여행- < 기사 및 칼럼 < 부흥관련 자료/사진 < 평양대부흥 < 기사본문 - 평양대부흥

Anyway, all this to say that, especially for Korean, it’s a rough road at the start. The bad news is it never really gets “easy”, but the good news is that it’s a really rewarding language to learn. :slight_smile:

Thanks for the motivating talk :slight_smile: I’ve found out of my slump for now with Korean…

I’ve brushed up on Japanese a little here on LingQ, and got to compare the experience with Korean. The experience in Japanese is much better I have to say, for me mainly because the user hints are a lot better (hardly having to open the external dictionary) and also more content. The Japanese LingQ Podcast with Steve is great (for my level), I wish there were one like this in Korean! Have you thought about making one Alex?