joseti.me

Korea and the Korean language have piqued my interest for a while, but I haven’t had the time to actually study the language besides a couple of more or less useful phrases.

Now that I have shifted my Japanese study to a relaxed “maintenance” mode, I thought I would try to see if I could apply both my Japanese language knowledge, as well as the skills gained through the years of language study to casually study Korean.

This “syllabus” is based on my personal situation, with Japanese proficiency and a non-insignificant Chinese knowledge and is thus in no way to be taken as a study guide, but rather as an inspiration for people in similar situations.

The “casual” part of the description comes from the fact that my Korean study will be slow-paced, without any pressure to reach a goal at a given point in time, but rather to enjoy the ride of gradually understanding more and more. It also means that I will mostly focus on free resources and that I will adapt existing resources and strategies to suit my purpose.

This “syllabus” is based on a couple of assumptions:

1. Chinese characters (known as “Hanzi” in Chinese, “Kanji” in Japanese or “Hanja” in the case of Korean) are not a problem for you. If you come across an unknown character, you know where to look it up and how to remember it for the future. The same applies to unknown meanings and readings of characters you already know. This means that Chinese characters will allow you to more quickly and reliably understand Korean.
2. You use some kind of spaced repetition (for example Anki) to maintain and extend your language knowledge. This is especially important for vocabulary/characters, as words and expressions are not evenly distributed in natural language. This means that you will be able to remember things more quickly and reliably, and if you forget something you knew, you’ll know where to find it.
3. You have no problem studying a (target) language using different (source) languages. This means that you will be able to use a more diverse array of materials to study and enjoy Korean, but also that you have more options to remember difficult aspects of Korean, no matter if they’re words, expressions, grammar or even cultural information.

Overview

Here’s a short outline of my plan, which I will adapt as I go along:

1. Hangul
2. Korean Crash Course for Japanese speakers
3. continuous study:
   • vocabulary bootstrapped using Chinese characters
   • grammar in more detail
   • word and expression mining using native Korean media

Hangul

There’s not much to be said about learning Hangul, the Korean characters. It’s impressively easy and unavoidable even if you just want to learn a couple phrases for travel.

I used the following shared Anki deck, which features pronunciations, so that one does not need to rely on the unreliable romanisation too much. The deck also has the Korean names for the characters, something that might be useful later on.

Even if you have studied the character components and names, there’s still a need for reading practice, but that’s automatically done every time you read something in Korean.

Crash Course to get a grasp of the language

The 超速修韓国語(日本人専用） is a crash course in the Korean language for Japanese speakers. The course is divided into the following parts:

• Overview over the course with an instruction on how to use it
• An introduction to Hangul, comparing it to the Japanese Kana
• An introduction to Korean nouns, how to translate Kanji-based words from Japanese into Korean, essential Korean nouns and how foreign loan words work in Korean Learning how to reliably “create” Korean nouns on-the-fly from Kanji is very useful, this can be used to compensate for gaps in your vocabulary.
• An introduction to commonly used Korean verb forms, how adverbs are used and a list of common Korean verbs Even though there are significant differences between verbs in Japanese and Korean, seeing Korean verb grammar from a Japanese perspective still gives you a considerable advantage to learners without this privilege.
• An explanation of Korean adjectives and a list of common Korean adjectives
• A list of Korean particles and their Japanese equivalents This is very useful, as it allows for an easier memorisation of particles with similar usage patterns.
• An overview of auxiliary verbs and the corresponding Japanese expressions.
• Equivalents of Japanese conjunctions and greetings in Korean
• An explanation of Korean politeness levels from a Japanese perspective.

The explanations are fairly detailed, especially the parts about using your Japanese skills to bridge gaps in your Korean knowledge by “approximating” Kanji expressions. Obviously this method isn’t perfect, something which the guide mentions as well, but you’re still better off than stumbling around blindly or having to rely on another language.

The weakest part of the site is that Korean text is presented as images (for the sake of compatibility), so anything you’d like to copy somewhere you’ll have to retype. This crash course also can serve as a measurement of how well suited this syllabus is for you, if you can read and understand it without any problems, then you will profit from the next steps as well.

Acquiring vocabulary

Ever since I have started using Anki to study Japanese, I am a big fan of using spaced repetition to learn and keep vocabulary, and I have expanded it to multiple foreign languages, and Korean will be no exception.

I share the common sentiment that no pre-made deck is as good as a self-made one, but I am also pragmatic enough to see the benefits of using an existing deck to start ones adventure into a language. In my case, I used the excellent Korean Vocabulary by Evita, which provides a foundation of nearly 6000 words ranked by usefulness for a beginner (based on a Korean-English Learners’ Dictionary). The deck not only contains audio for many cards, a useful tool to train ones listening comprehension, but also the Hanja for words of Chinese origin.

I figure that this deck is a good starting point for any learner of Korean, but some small adaptions of the note type make it even more suitable for this program. I am a fan of vocabulary cards without translations, but at the same time I understand that translations can be more convenient at a beginner level. I have modified the note type by replacing the simple recall card type with two more specific card types:

• Recognition: Hangul and audio at the front of the card, Hanja and (English) translation at the back of the card
• Recall: Hanja and translation at the front of the card, Hangul and Audio at the back of the card In both card types, the Hanja are only shown if they actually exist and the translations are shown on the condition of a separate Translation_Language field. This allows me to use one note type to be used for any kind of translated vocabulary, be it translations to a foreign language, or just Chinese characters. In cases where the Hanja definitions are sufficient, I can hide the foreign language translation by emptying the Translation_Language field while keeping the data. These modifications can be done on-the-fly, even when reviewing on mobile.

To account for this new note model, I had to split notes with multiple Hanja expressions for the same Hangul reading, I did this manually by looking up any cards with a comma in the Hanja field using Hanja:'*,*' in the deck browser and creating new cards for the “duplicate” Hanja. The manual process is a bit tedious, but it is not too long and can be seen as a “preview” words to come.

As for the daily amount of new cards, I have set a single-digit number because learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint, especially when it is done as a hobby on the side without any deadlines. I do however make sure that I insert words that I have deemed important into the review queue using a custom study session.

Studying grammar in-depth

While the crash course gives an overview of the Korean language, it is in no way a comprehensive grammar course. Talk To Me In Korean (TTMIK) offer their 10-level grammar course for free via the usual podcast distribution networks and their website. They also publish the lesson notes as PDF files that one can download for free after registering on their site.

Concurrently with the grammar podcast I use Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita combined with the other sentence decks by the same author. I use the deck by having all notes suspended and only activating cards once I have listened to the relevant grammar point being explained in the TTMIK podcast. I chose this approach because of the following reasons:

• I automatically review grammar points I have listened to on the podcasts
• I will not see any grammar cards with unknown grammar, in fact even most vocabulary will be known already as the cards are partially based on the TTMIK grammar course
• I can easily set a study and review pace. If I have time, I can listen to one or two podcast episodes and un-suspend the relevant cards afterwards, if I don’t have much time, there will only be reviews until I have time again.

The TTMIK grammar course is sometimes criticised for having a narrow selection of vocabulary, often giving example sentence using a small set of verbs. While this is a legitimate concern, it is not as relevant for this study plan, as vocabulary is studied separately and can be considered a strong point due to the pre-existing Sino-Japanese knowledge.

The format of the TTMIK grammar course as audio podcast also gives me a chance to improve my Korean listening and last but not least, I can listen to it without having to be glued to a screen or textbook, allowing some well-needed outdoor time.

Mining native media

To make sure that I get at least some minimal Korean exposure every day, I use a deck of cards that I have created myself from a Korean drama using subs2srs. The program creates Anki cards from subtitle files and soft-subtitled video files. Using timed subtitles from two different languages will therefore result in a small aligned bilingual corpus, if wanted one can also add a still snapshot for context (recommended), an audio extract for listening (also recommended) and even a video extract (not recommended unless you only review your cards on one device).

I use the cards to “read through” the drama one subtitle line a at a time. At my beginner level, this is still mostly reading practice, but using the parallel Japanese subtitles as helpful aid, I can also spot interesting words or expressions, which I can then enable or add in the vocabulary and grammar decks. It’s even possible on mobile by just marking the subtitle card during reviews and then processing the resulting queue during some spare time.

Although I progress through the drama deck at a very slow pace, it is still a motivator to start reviewing, even if it’s just to see the next turn of events within the deck.