Learning will get very easy once you reach the advanced level.
I think you've done well learning by yourself.
You got spooked and derailed reading the "How to" site. Reading what other people do can make you go off-course down unproductive paths.
So just stick to your game plan.
That's the key. You KNOW you have to learn the vocab in IL.
You know at some point you will have to complete the IL workbook.
You know that you have to memorize the grammar terms the same as if they were vocabulary to be memorized.
You KNOW ... and so on.
So the way I'm going about things is very systematic.
I don't think it will harm me to study grammar first. I have a basic idea of pronunciation. I will do shadowing of the KGU book to get my pronunciation up to speed.
But I won't do any more than that.
I also did that as an experiment too.
So I am glad my curiosity was satisfied. And I solved a problem - of how to get separate tracks for each sentence.
So that's that. I can set that aside.
You can't learn fluency, grammar, reading skills, vocabulary, writing skills ALL AT THE SAME TIME. It's just not possible.
And writing skills - I mean formal writing skills - are learned differently to speaking/conversational skills. There is a lot of OVERLAP, I have to admit, but there are differences. With writing skills (I don't mean online chatting with friends), you have to use a formal register. You need a very large vocabulary and you have to be familiar with MANY collocations. And you have to be very good at grammar. And you have to have read a lot of formal writing such as is seen in news articles.
So don't compare yourself to others. The ones you see that are fluent on Youtube may not be able to read the paper fluently. Or it may have taken them years. And their writing and spelling may not be crash-hot. They might be limited in the vocabulary they know. You can hide your lack of writing and reading skills with fluent speech.
So just remember that all the formal stuff you did, such as learning grammar and vocabulary from the IL book, is NOT WASTED.
And remember, just do one activity at a time. Don't be hassled by others who try and make you feel inferior or inadequate because they can speak well.
You can too. Just stick to your plan.
Chunks are great for SPEAKING FLUENCY. But they're not that great for writing and for reading.
You've got to know grammar and you've got to know many words before you can read fluently.
I think you can hold off the speaking/fluency part a bit longer. Finish the grammar study. Do vocabulary study - getting the vocab from the IL book first. Then move onto news articles.
Then after you've done a few news articles - maybe about ten or twenty - move onto speaking. Speaking involves doing the chunks, making recordings and shadowing a lot.
People might say that you are doing things backwards but you've always wanted to read stuff from the beginning. That's kind of more important than speaking really. I think picking up speaking will be easy. If those migrant workers can do it, then I can too. It's just a matter of shadowing a lot.
So I estimate it will take about two more months to finish the grammar study. Then it will take about one month to do the vocab from the IL book. Then it will take three months to translate and learn the vocab of 100 news articles.
Then it will take six months to do the chunks and the shadowing and become super-fluent, knowing slang and everything. So how long? About another twelve months.
That's the order of doing things. So don't worry about immersion and stuff.
If you learn another language, you can learn to be fluent first by translating the chunks. Then you can learn grammar, vocabulary and other stuff.
But you do need to learn grammar. If I hadn't learned English grammar and vocabulary, I would be semi-illiterate, like many Aussies I come across on the net.
And those learners become lazy. They just stick with speaking and don't do study of grammar, reading and vocabulary-building and formal writing.
I think it's easy to pick up speaking fluency. You can do this any time. What you can't pick up is ability to read newspapers and communicate at a high level. You can only do this by studying grammar and studying lots of vocab. Once you have enough vocab and grammar under your belt, it becomes easy to listen and understand Korean. Already you are understanding a lot of what you hear. You are picking up grammar particles and stuff like that. What is limiting you is your lack of VOCABULARY knowledge. The sageuks you enjoy watching actually have high level Korean words/vocab. They're not like the modern dramas.
So ... once you pick up enough vocab, learning to be fluent by listening will be easy.
So don't drift away from your game plan. I'm afraid that going to that language site made you deviate from the original plan.
So don't really worry too much. Just go at your own pace. And don't worry about what others say too much.
When you do the KGU shadowing you understand it better and get more out of it this time around because you know grammar much more than you did before and you know vocabulary much more than previously.
So don't worry about chunks too much. Just add to your collection every now and then when a good chunk comes to you. But the chunk study is for later.
In the future, when studying another language, you should focus on translating your own material. Instead of translating a news article, you should translate some pages you've written in English. Looking up words and so forth. The stuff you've written should cover a wide variety of things. And you should look up grammar books and get collocations from the dictionary.
An excellent dictionary is a must. I wonder if there's a better dictionary than the Player. There might be some very good electronic ones out there. I think I might enquire about electronic dictionaries. I might have to buy an expensive one. Probably have to go to TechnoMart. I'll bring my Galaxy dictionary to compare with. If the electronic dictionary I check out compares favorably with the Galaxy one, I'll get it.
The Galaxy one is good but 3 out of a 100 words I look up the dictionary for I can't find.
So, yes, I think I will follow that approach: go from English to the TL. It's a counter-intuitive approach but a very helpful one. You waste less time learning stuff you don't need. You go and learn the stuff you really need and will likely use in the future.
So I've got to think about this approach to learning. I think it's a revolutionary way of learning languages.
Most people go from translating TL to NL. But NL to TL I think bears a lot of fruit. But you really need a teacher for this. A bilingual teacher.
Most of those polyglots are good at both directions and they practice translations in both directions.
Tintin is good for those sorts of NL to TL translations but not 100%. Sometimes the dialogs are very different. You can only trust the material if the translations are EXACT. The Essentials books are good for that.
Sometimes though exact translations sound funny. So you might have to know the idiomatic phrase in Korean. This is hard. You really need a Korean bilingual teacher for that. Movie scripts might be good.
So there are lots of strategies for becoming FLUENT. But just stick to the original game plan and you will reach the fluency part soon. Just be patient.
