It's kind of boring just studying vocab for a big block of time

I don't know whether it's useful to study vocabulary in a big block of time, say for several months. I think it's better to look at the vocabulary in context. If you have that context or if you see the vocabulary in reading or hear the word in a drama, the word will likely stick.

So I am in a quandary. Because I have heard or read some of the vocabulary elsewhere, these words are easier to remember. 

So I think I need to supplement the learning of the vocabulary with a little reading. 

I am going through the Voca Training book more quickly. I am not writing down the word each time in exercises; sometimes I am saying the word only. This saves time. Also I am reading the word aloud too. I think it helps to hear the word. 

So watching movies in the past has helped. I have heard the word in the past in movies and am familiar with the word; therefore it is easier to memorize. 

I think I have to supplement my memorization with some reading. 

I don't know whether to read easy readers or read the news at this stage. 

I don't want to overwhelm myself at this stage. I don't want to spend too long looking things up. 

I think if I like the topic, the words are going to stick in my head. For example, I studied an episode of King Gwanggaeto and learned the vocabulary. The words have stuck in my head but I don't know whether the words are really that useful. 

I might try all of these things and see what works best. 

The problem with studying newspapers is that I have to prepare a lot of materials and have certain materials at hand. I need to print off the article. I have to have a pad for making a list of vocabulary. I need to look up a dictionary. 

I think watching a drama episode I enjoy and watching with subtitles  and looking up the words in a dictionary and writing the vocab in a notebook, and then memorizing the words is the way to go to break the  monotony of learning from vocab books. This will improve my intonation and pronunciation as well.

Gradually, I will build up more and more words and improve my ability to read newspaper articles. 

Then I can try news articles and make my own vocab lists.

It really depends on the quality of the vocab books out there. If the high school/college level voca books are good - that is, there are vocab lists and translations - then I will use these voca books and move onto news articles only when I've exhausted the vocab books. 

Getting teachers to speak into a recording machine
This is an idea. You can ask a Korean teacher to read some passage aloud but slowly into an mp3 player. You can follow the passage and see how words should be pronounced, and what the correct intonation is. You will store this as an mp3 file. If you wish you can listen to the mp3 file again and again. You can also adjust the speed of the reading if you have a machine that does this. I have a Galaxy player and it can slow down (as well as speed up) sound files preserving pitch quite well. 

To become really fluent in Korean

One has to intensively study for six months. I think it can be done in six months. By intensively I mean study for 14 hours a day. In 14 hours, one can learn 200 vocab words. So, if you just concentrated on vocab words alone, you would learn 10,000 words in 50 days or 1.7 months. Just under 2 months. That's quite an achievement. Then you would spend a week learning grammar intensively. Then you would spend a week reading all the easy books. Then you should be around the 2.5 months' mark. After that, you could start on reading more difficult stuff. You would read news articles and you would break out the dictionary. You would have already learned a lot of vocabulary so you are just refreshing your memory or looking up uncommon words. Then you can do immersion for one to two hours a day. Then you would be doing listening and reading for 14 hours a day. Then you could spend another week reading harder grammar books. Then you would tackle a difficult book and go through that using a dictionary to translate. Then you would start writing a bit. First simple things like a diary and then moving onto forums. Then you would be spending your study time, reading, looking up words, conversing, watching movies without subtitles, watching TV and trying to understand. You would be concentrating on being fluent in the last month. You might increase the number of one-on-one lessons. You would start reading Korean aloud. 

You would then spend the rest of the year getting conversation practice, reading books for fun esp comic books, and learning to use banmal. You can then look at the more difficult "Using Korean" but a lot of the vocab will be familiar to you because you've done the vocab work.

At the same time, you will be picking up vocab and reading and watching media and talking with Koreans as much as you can. You are now talking in Korean. Your Korean will improve so long as you keep up with the reading and listening. Watch dramas you enjoy watching because you will understand most the words by now. You can also start reading manwha because you know more vocab.

You will actually be reading for pleasure. Your eye doesn't look away when you see Korean anymore.

You love reading and communicating and people are giving you praise. They admire your fluency and your language ability. They remember you could hardly speak Korean before and now you are comfortable conversing in Korean. Your pronunciation, intonation are very nice. You don't have an Australian accent. You speak loudly clearly but fluently. Sometimes you speak quite fast.  

It's a tall order

I might be a bit too ambitious perhaps. I think I need to relax a bit more. When I look at news articles, I feel completely intimidated as I barely understand a WORD. After two months' study I thought I would understand some words but I don't. My progress is so slow. I think it's partly because the grammar is so different to English grammar. 

This means I really have to work on vocabulary. Learning vocab might not be a cut and dried exercise as I think it is. Maybe learning vocab for a solid block isn't a good idea. I might lose a lot because I am not reading and seeing the words again.

I really have to start on reading news articles soon. I think I will do it as an experiment. I will get a translated news article and write the vocabulary down next to the article.

Then I will read the article and see if the article makes more sense than it did before. I won't stress myself if it doesn't.

I will then keep doing this a few times and see whether reading news articles gets easier. I might have to learn 10,000 words before I can read news articles.

My grammar has to improve by a lot too.

Maybe I am not ready for this. It might be too big a step up. I am still at the stage of reading fairytales. I am getting MUCH better at understanding fairytales and know a lot of the vocabulary for certain fairytales.

The Andersen's and Perrault's fairytale books though are difficult. And so is Aesop's fables.

It looks like I have to acquire a bigger range of vocabulary before I can tackle news articles. I will work on the vocab teaching books. They have a lot of vocab that appears in news articles. The fairytale books don't have that much vocab in common with newspaper articles.

I just have to keep learning and studying, memorizing vocabulary. I think it will be easy to find vocabulary to learn. One relatively short news article can yield easily thirty vocab words. I will have to write down the words, look them up, then memorize them, and then finally attempt to read the article. I won't worry about these articles too much. I will file them away and try to read them later. This way I can measure progress. If I find that I can understand the same news article much more easily at a later date, it means my reading comprehension has improved and some of the vocab I've learned has taken. 

I shouldn't be so hard on myself. It IS hard to learn such a different language as Korean. Compared to learning French, learning Korean is extremely hard.  

What I have to do

I have to finish the two Voca books. I have to go through the children's books on vocabulary. I have to go through the 900 word vocab book. Then I have to go through the children's manwhas and focus on the words I don't know. I have to go through the WOW books I have not read yet and learn the vocab that's new. 

I don't have a plan beyond that. I might try going through the vocab of a news article or an online celebrity article. But it will be hard.

However, I remember I got great benefits from tackling difficult books when I was young and studying English. I thought Wuthering Heights was impossible but after a while, I started to enjoy it.

I might do that. It will be a laborious process.

Or I might get suneung books  for high school students with readymade vocab lists.  

I can't make too many trips to the bookstore though as it takes a long time. The advantage of the vocab lists is that I don't have to spend time looking up the definitions myself. I have to dig out the suneung book from a box in storage. I hope I can find it. I might have thrown it out though I don't think so.

The problem is that these suneung books might not have translations. I think some books that teach English that I have used in classrooms in the past have translations.  I can use these books to learn Korean. I can't remember the name of the series now. 

I might also look into getting the Tintin series. I think I might try ordering from BookBank near Unhaeng Sageori near my home. I will just get one book, not the whole series. I have the English version of all the Tintin books except for a couple so I have ready translations there. This might prove to be fruitful. The language might be a lot easier than Saint Maire. Once again, I have to make vocab lists.

I wonder how I will organize the vocab lists. I like small pads because they are portable but they're not that easy to organize. I don't like a lot of small pads cluttering the area.

But then if I carry large notepads, it's unwieldy and takes up a lot of room in my bag. I need to get a wide bag like Mrs Lim's. It's not that tall but it expands very nicely but it's not too big and floppy that things get lost in there. For example, I can fit a computer, computer cord and a book in the bag. At the moment, if I put these things in the bag I am using at the moment, it is a real tight fit. I will keep an eye for a bigger bag. A wider looser bag that is not that tall in height. I will ask Mrs Lim where she got her bag. I might be able to find a similar bag at that place.

I really like to carry a lot of things in my bag. I carry umbrella, wallet, notepads, telephone and address book, pencil case, tissue packet, rolled up carry bag, computer and cord, books, phone, Galaxy player, subway map, keys, T-money card, and various other items I can't remember in my bag. So it's quite a lot.

I like carrying books with me to study on the train. I like studying on the train. I like reading books and watching videos on the train. I quite enjoy traveling on trains I realize. I like long train trips where I have a seat.

I love studying in coffee shops. I think I am using study as a form of escape though. It is necessary but sometimes I study when I should be doing other things. I wonder if I can ever be fluent in speaking that I impress people. Of course many people will assume I am a Korean national and should be able to speak Korean anyway. But those who know me and therefore understand that I speak very little Korean will be impressed if I ever become fluent.

I want to speak in such a way that I don't even think a lot about what I am going to say. It just comes out. I want to speak effortlessly and naturally. I don't want to translate in my head at all. I want to speak fast like I do English. I want to be on a show like Foreign Beauties and be the best speaker there although I am the one who has spent the least time learning the language. I want to have a good accent. I want people to go, "Wow!" when they learn that I wasn't able to speak Korean a short while ago. I want to be able to talk about any topic that I want to and have the vocabulary at my fingertips. I want to talk staccato-fast. I want to be astonishingly good.   

I should aim for fewer vocabulary

I think I should aim for fewer vocabulary words during the intensive vocabulary-learning period. I think that the harder words I will learn as I do more reading. If I am not doing any reading, I don't know how I can find new words to learn. And how do I know how many words I've learned? I don't even know exactly how many Korean words I know already. I am just guessing I know 3000 words. It could be a lot less than this, I am not sure. 

I think the delineation between learning new vocab words and reading is artificial. I don't know how I can find new words without looking for things to read, and then not reading the articles straightaway after learning the vocab is a bit unnatural. I should perhaps read quickly without aiming for 100% understanding, and seeing whether the words fit where they do. As I get better than the reading becomes easier. At the moment, my grammar is still elementary.

I think reading news articles is interesting. Today, I was reading over someone's shoulder a newspaper they were reading. I was just trying to understand the headings, which I couldn't make head or tail of.

But I was interested. I don't want to read overly long articles though. I think I should try and read the short ones. Maybe I can start doing this now. I will mix it up a bit because right now it's boring just reading fairytales. I don't really enjoy the fairytales that much. The stories are bizarre and a bit depressing. I can't believe they made those stories for children - the stories can be quite scary and morbid.

Aesop's fables are OK. The stories are short and they have a nice point at the end. It makes me feel bad reading some of the stories because I imagine I am the foolish creature in the story.

I think the higher vocab will be acquired after I do a lot of reading. The rate of vocab acquisition may slow down at this point, unless I am reading passages from vocab books that contain vocab lists.

I really have to check the higher level vocab books. They are for high school students.

I don't understand Korean students ... yes, I do. I would do the same as them - concentrate on reading and grammar and vocab and not on speaking or writing. The last two skills aren't examined in the uni entrance exams. So I guess I will be like them for a while, with good vocab but without speaking fluency. But unlike them, I will be good at writing and be fluent at speaking. I will learn speaking by watching lots of Korean movies and interacting with native speakers. But I will do that later. At the moment I am focused on picking up vocab. I am not thinking about fluency. I will become fluent I know. But I want to sound like someone who knows the whole language, the writing, the speaking - everything, and not just the speaking.

So today, I don't feel so bad compared to the 3D workers and similar people. I won't think about them so much or compare myself to them. I can be the same as them but not as early. I will be studying Korean properly so will achieve fluency in all four areas and this takes time.

I think it was bad to have thought so much about these migrant workers. There is nothing special about them and probably if I were a native Korean speaker, I would find their Korean had lots of mistakes.

I am also rather pleased that I can understand a lot of King Gwanggaeto without reading the subtitles. This is a big milestone in my case.

I am really interested in Korean history. I might do the vocab for an article on Korean history.

I think I will do the vocab for a translated online news article for fun. The main downside of this though is that I have to look up the words in the online dictionary and this takes a lot of time. I am not fast typing Korean words. I might also look up words on my phone too or the Galaxy player.  

I really admire those who can translate back and forth between two languages. I think doing translations like these is a hard way to learn a language but some polyglots use this method to learn a new language.

All I can do  in the initial phase is learn vocabulary.  I am happy with that. I feel that I am supplying myself with tools by studying vocabulary. 

If I learn on trains

and other places like that taking advantage of any free moments I have, then I think I can learn fifty words a day. If I learn that many a day, then I will need about 120 more days to learn all the vocab I need. 120 days is four months. At that point I will have reached the six month mark. Then I can spend the next six months refining my learning. I don't know if I can do that for the next four months - ramming down vocab. I think it will be difficult to do doing purely that. I will be tempted to read and so on. Maybe I should break it up a bit. It will be hard finding vocab without doing some reading. I might have to hunt down and learn vocab and then do some reading. Otherwise I might forget to read the material at a later date. I think it's artificial to just learn vocab for months at a time. I think I will have to do some video watching and some reading as well. I think that's OK so long as you learn the vocab beforehand in the case of reading. And I shouldn't stress out if I still can't understand the reading well - the reading might have grammar that I haven't learned yet.

And I also need to spend some time learning colloquial Korean. St Marie is so hard. Even with the English translation, and looking up the vocab in the dictionary, I still couldn't make sense of the dialog. 

I think in St Marie's case, I should just make a vocab list and not attempt to understand the reading. I will just learn the vocab. When my grammar and understanding of colloquial Korean improves, I will return to St Marie and that time, try and understand the sentences. 

I think on a two hour train journey - going to the destination and coming back, I can learn about 20 words or even more. The longest part involves making mnemonics for the words. It's getting harder these days. I am not getting good ideas for mnemonics. I recall it was easier to make mnemonics before. It could be that the Voca Training gives synonyms so I have to often memorize two Korean words for an English word and this is quite hard. Sometimes I have to learn THREE Korean words for the one English word. The good thing about the Magic book was that there was only one word to learn for each English word. 

I would like to start learning advanced Korean words especially the ones you find in news articles. I think it's much more interesting to learn words when they are in context such as in a news article. 

Learning without context as in the Voca Training book is really boring. I can't wait till I finish this book. I hate the revision exercises in this book as I have mentioned before, and now I skip them. 

I will have to keep making mnemonics. Mnemonics and repetition (seeing the word elsewhere) are helpful memory aids. 

I have to be creative. 

It's interesting to learn a new language

I didn't think it would be so interesting to learn a new language. I like the challenge of it. I am presented with a task and I have to use my resources to complete it and do it well. it's interesting to be engaged in such an activity. I have to think of strategies and best practices. I feel a sense of satisfaction when I realize I've made progress, though I have a long way to go, of course.

I am starting to understand a little why some people become polyglots. It's really enjoyable when one starts to "get" a language.

Korean still sounds unfamiliar to me but I am starting to get used to the some of the peculiarities of the grammar of that language. 

And when I watched King Gwanggaeto on the train today, without subtitles, I understood quite a substantial part of it when I concentrated really hard. 

So once again, learning vocab is important. If I hadn't done vocab study, I wouldn't have been able to understand most of it without subtitles. 

I have made progress

Before, about four months ago, I couldn't write a very good telephone text message. Today I was able to write an SMS message that was mostly correct. I am pleased with that sort of progress I have made. I can't fully understand some of the text messages that people write still. This is because of lack of vocabulary. I really need to learn as much vocabulary as I can. Without vocab, I can't do much. With vocab, I can work out the gist of sentences.

I really need to learn vocab. I wish there was an easy way of learning vocab. 

I find that when I come across vocab I've already spent time learning, the word tends to stick in my mind. So repetition is quite good. I might not be able to recall the Korean word if you had asked me what it was, but after seeing the word for the second time somewhere else, I might be able to say the word at a later date if you asked me. 

I think this is very good. So I will have to just force the vocab into my brain. Jam it in. Push it in. Some vocab will stick this way. Some may not. Just keep finding more and more sources of vocab. I have quite a library of books now. I might alternate between serious and lighthearted books. But I will finish a book before I move onto the next. I am sick of the Voca Training book I am using at the moment. I will try the Phoenix book next. I won't read it as such, but just look at the vocab lists or make my own. 

Gee, learning vocab is boring

I am really bored with learning vocabulary! Maybe it's the book I am learning from. I didn't feel bored when I learned from the Magic 600-word book. The book I am learning from doesn't have any pics and the exercises aren't fun.

I am going to be really bored learning vocab - just straight vocab for the next few months! 

I want to find some interesting books to learn from. Not dry boring vocab books. I think I will learn vocab from the illustrated books. They have a lot of vocab I already know. So it's kind of like review. I will check out the WOW comics. They have interesting pictures in the comics and a vocab list beside them. I will also look at the fairytales and look at the vocab list at the bottom of the pages. Then I will try and find some high level vocab books. I will try and find books with translations if I can. 

When I run out of those, I will move onto newspaper articles. I find reading newspaper articles not too bad. It involves looking up the dictionary a lot. The newspaper articles with translations are useful. I will use them for vocabulary not for reading practise. I will have to make vocabulary lists. I will need lots of small notepads for this purpose. I will make lots and lots of lists! 

So look for vocab books from the bookshop and then go from there. If there aren't any, you will have to move onto newspaper articles. This is after you exhaust all the vocab in the WOW comics and other similar books. 

So I will be hunting for ways to reach the 10,000 figure. Some vocab books have the most boring drill exercises though. But the drill exercises are better than nothing I guess. 

I will forget a lot of what I will learn I know, but there might be sight-recognition of the words  I have learned. I hope so. The vocab I learn from watching the sageuks isn't really useful. They have to do with war and royalty. 

I think news articles are a good source of high level vocabulary. Just read and read for vocabulary. There is a translated news article every day. Just glean the vocabulary from that. Write on the printed paper the vocab list. Then later you can read the article and try and make sense of the words.

There are also the Essential Korean series. They have translations underneath the sentence. You can use these books for the vocab. So be on the hunt for new vocabulary all the time. Just keep looking and making lists. Learn the vocab lists that are already in books. Try and reach that magic number of 10,000 words. 

You will have reached that point when the search for new vocab becomes harder. You will be able to recognize 99% of the words in a newspaper article. Be careful with names. It's hard to tell proper nouns from common nouns because Koreans don't use punctuation. 

You can also print off articles from the Internet and make vocab lists from that. Anything with a translation is good for making lists. 

You can print articles that interest you - for example, articles on baewoos, and make vocab lists from those. Then much later, you can return to the articles and read them. This is when your language ability has improved. 

You will probably encounter vocab you have already learned during your hunt. That's OK; it will be like revision for you. 

Remember, you have to know about 10,000 new words. That's a lot of words. 

And it's still not final. After more study, you have to acquire another 10,000 words. And then you can say you have arrived. 

But the last 10,000 words is a different sort of level of study. It's advanced study. It's when your Korean is quite good and you understand most of what you read. The last 10,000 words are the icing on the cake, to make you fluent as a college graduate. It will be difficult and you will need some special dictionaries perhaps. It might be worth paying for a really good online dictionary. The book dictionaries are hopeless. I don't know about electronic dictionaries. The phone dictionaries aren't too bad. 

So really hunt for more and more words. If you read things it will only be coincidental. Try to limit your active reading. You can do that after you've built up your vocabulary. 

First vocabulary, then everything else. Probably grammar next. Then reading skills, then listening skills, speaking and writing. 

But vocabulary is the key as I keep saying. The vocab is the secret code that unlocks the safe. Without knowing the meaning of words, sentences look like jumbles of words.