Day 649 - Language Study Methods

I love reading Ask a Korean! because it's really easy for me to fall into the "Korea is wrong! My way is right!" mentality and The Korean does a good job of reminding me to be less emotional/culturally sensitive about things. Sure, sometimes American/Western society has some good points, but many times Korea has equally good -- if different -- ways and attitudes.

Anyway, I was reading through his blog, procrastinating my Korean language studies and generally pitying myself because it's so haaaaard to learn Korean and why does everyone make fun of my pronunciation and why can't they just see that I work so hard to learn their language and other very shameful selfish thoughts. In one article, The Korean describes how he learned English after his family moved to America. I figured I would share because I think it goes in reverse, too.

"It seemed obvious to me that without knowing words, my English would go nowhere. I decided that I should memorize every single word in my sight that I did not know. I bought many boxes of empty flashcards and wrote the words I did not know on one side, and the definition on the other side."

Suddenly my plastic shopping bag full of index cards doesn't seem so anal!

Working on one diagnostic SAT took weeks, because I was so terrible in the verbal section to the degree that it was comical.

The go-to study method for TOPIK that I took was to just print out all the past tests and take them. I would underline all the words I didn't know and circle all the grammar points I didn't understand. I guess that was a good choice, too!

To develop speaking and listening, I watched at least 3 hours of television every day.

I guess I need to watch more Korean dramas... it's hard for me to get interested in most of them and I'm not a TV person in general, unfortunately.

Then came reading and writing. I started by reading my favorite books that were originally in English -- started with Les Miserables, then Brothers Karamazov. Even after I built a decent-sized mental storage of vocabularies, I still had trouble reading a long sentence with a complex structure. Well then – you can guess what’s coming. Whenever I had trouble deciphering a sentence, I wrote it down and memorized it whole. Whenever I had a chance to write, I tried to incorporate the new sentence structure I learned, plugging in different vocabularies that I memorized.

I've been meaning to pick up some kind of young adult novel translated into Korean, but honestly it sounds so hard that I keep putting it off. Apparently, I should just suck it up and do it.

In other words, I went from basic English skills to college-level English proficiency in two years.

And with that, suddenly I feel like a lazy b*tch that should stop complaining and get back to studying, because I've been in Korea for two years now and I don't think I'm going to get a level 4 (college-level Korean) on the TOPIK. (cue womp-womp trombones)

The Korean continues in his article with a really interesting summary of why his method of rote memorization worked best, rather than "immersive" language learning methods. However, I'm going to go study so I don't have time to pull the most interesting quotes and then uselessly apply them to myself in a way that most of you find completely disinteresting anyway. To the books!