I think at this stage I am in a position to look back and evaluate what I have done up until this point.
I think I have made a lot of progress. I enjoyed studying grammar. The book I used for it was very good. It went into depth but not too deep that it got confusing. It had a few exercises but not too many that it felt like a big chore.
I wouldn't do things too differently to before. Perhaps I would have gotten the Magic 600 vocab book earlier. Perhaps I would have used mnemonics earlier when memorizing vocabulary.
Perhaps I would have done more listening to the mp3 players.
I think I should have worried less about immersion. And I should have realized that the two different skills of reading and speaking require different modes of learning.
What I have done right now was concentrating on reading.
Reading is a valuable skill.
I wish I had done a lot more vocab before reading the WOW comics.
But I think I've done OK. Of course if I had done more intensive study I would be ahead of where I am now.
I wish I had thought of hiring someone who doesn't speak English to speak in Korean to me instead of wasting my time with language exchange.
But there really isn't that much I would have done differently.
I wish I had watched more contemporary dramas earlier on like Bulssae and Love in Heaven. But I got introduced to K-dramas through sageuks.
I wish I hadn't spent so much time trying to extract srt subtitles. It's impossible to extract Korean subtitles with the software I have. It takes all day to do it. So I should have just left it. Also there are many mp3 files that have Korean speaking and Korean words.
I wish I had gotten the Samsung Galaxy Player earlier. That's VERY good for watching videos. However, I should have gotten the one with a bigger storage space. I am running out of space. I can also watch movies in slow mo with that. I wish I had known that instead of spending like a week trying to slow down movies. What a waste of time!
No, there isn't too much I would change.
I watch what I like and don't watch what I don't like. I tried to watch Baker King but couldn't really get into it. I gave up on Coffee Prince and Boys Over Flowers too. I really don't like watching them. I guess I could persist with Baker King a bit more.
I think I should start increasing my vocab at this stage. If I just read all the vocab books I have and I have quite a few, I think I will make a lot of progress in the future. I have two books of Korean Made Easy. I haven't really spent any time looking into them. Perhaps they will be useful, perhaps not. I don't really like dialog books that help you "live" in Korea. I find a lot of the material is repetitive. I don't want to know how to greet anyone anymore. I don't want to know how to suggest going to a movie anymore. I think a few of them are too easy. I didn't think so at the time when I bought them but looking quickly through them they seem very easy. I can just listen to the mp3s for listening practice I guess.
The Essential Korean series haven't really been helpful for me. Perhaps I haven't spent a lot of time going through them. Probably the listening will be more useful. I think trying to memorize the phrases/sentences will be too laborious. I tried and find it a bit hard and didn't retain hardly any of it.
I am not concentrating on listening or speaking at this stage so the Essential Korean in Business isn't helping me that much.
I am glad I went to the children's section of the bookstore and looked at English language books. I think this made a big improvement in my Korean ability. Before I was looking at the Korean language section for foreign learners and found that the books from this section weren't that helpful for me. The main books that helped me from this section are Korean Grammar in Use, Using Korean and Surviving in Korean.
The phrase books aren't that useful for me at this stage. I learn vocab better by using dictionary type books or books specifically for teaching vocab. I wish there was a Magic book for 2000 words or something. The one I have is for 600 words.
If I learn 2000 vocab words, it will be very useful. I am prepared to spend the time memorizing new vocab. However, I haven't been able to find a book like the Magic one that has fun exercises to do. The exercises really helped as I was forced to write the Hangeul words several times.
I wish I had read the comics series like Jack and the Beanstalk earlier. I would have realized that reading isn't that hard.
I don't think studying St Marie at this stage is helpful. I wasted a day trying to study St Marie but I learned very little. The grammar was too complex, the speech was too colloquial and the vocab was too high-level. Trying to parse the sentences was really difficult. I could spend the whole day parsing just four or five pages.
So I am OK with the progress I have made. I am really pleased that I can understand a lot of the simple children's comics. It's probably not a big deal to someone talented in languages and studies them a lot but for me, it was a breakthrough.
I think I will just keep reading and reading. Words will stick in my brain the more I see them repeated.
I am not so worried about the different speech forms as I was before. I am still confused by them a little but I don't really pay too much attention to them - not as much as before.
I wish I hadn't worried so much about immersion and thought of the idea of hiring someone earlier. Then I wouldn't have wasted so much time trying to find language partners and being disappointed in them. I think I will give this up.
I think immersion IS important for speaking, not so much for reading. And that's why many Koreans aren't good at speaking. I don't like this about Korean teaching of English. The students prefer a Korean teacher over a native speaker for teaching English. If they had an English teacher teaching them EVERYTHING, Korean students would be the best English non-native speakers in the world. Goodness knows they have enough foreigners in Korea trying to find work teaching English. But they are underutilized. And some like me because I don't have an American accent aren't offered many jobs. Also, the hagwons abuse the teachers and cheat them and give them a hard time generally. The hagwons put the teachers into a bad situation where teaching is boring for them. They don't give the teachers a stipend so that the teachers can buy materials for the classes. If the hagwons did that, the classes would be a lot of fun and the children would learn a lot. I managed by just doing a lot of drawing on the white board and by creating a reward system for the kids. But it would have been better if they had provided me with a stipend so I could buy colored paper, crayons, colored pencils, silver stars etc for making crafts and so on.
Teaching children through crafts is a great way of teaching English.
I think I have done OK though. But I mustn't be complacent or over-confident. I have still a lot to study.
