hansuuki

[hansuuki]

[Review] Clozemaster app

Now that I have a 100 day streak on Clozemaster I thought I should do a review. 

Clozemaster is a gamified vocabulary building app based off material from Tatoeba (a free database of example sentences). The developer said it aims to answer the question “What should I do after Duolingo?”. It seems best suited for intermediate learners so I have only been using it for Korean and not Japanese. 

Positives

More enjoyable than flashcard apps.

The free version doesn’t have ads and you can use it perfectly well. 

Wide variety of sentences and vocab - even swear words. 

Decent amount of content for Korean. 

Korean audio is decent (though a tad emotionless). 

Negatives

Most of the negatives come from the fact that everything is getting pulled from Tatoeba without any human review.

People’s names like 톰 come up as a key word or occasionally only part of a foreign word is used as a key word.

Occasionally get these ridiculously long sentences (like the screenshot above). 

Overall I think its worth a go - especially if you want to work on your vocabulary but find flashcard apps boring / dislike learning words without any context. 

[hansuuki]

202 day streak!

[hansuuki]

@thestudyingnightowl has very helpfully pointed out that Sungkyunkwan University’s A Bridge to the World lecture series is also on K-MOOC.

From the looks of it there are 8 courses in total in the A Bridge to the World series - Beginner 1,2,3, Intermediate 1,2,3 and Advanced 1,2. 

All 8 of the classes are on K-MOOC but only Beginner 1, Intermediate 1, and Advanced 1 are on Coursera. The ‘live’ classes on K-MOOC seem to be more interactive, while the ‘audit’ classes are similar to Coursera where you can just view content. 

[hansuuki]

[Review] A Bridge to the World: Korean Language for Intermediate

Sungkyunkwan University has a three Korean classes on Coursera at the moment - Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. 

There have been beginner Korean classes from other universities on Coursera for a while but more advanced content is rarer so I was excited to see this class. 

In hindsight I probably should have just done the advanced class because this class is very low intermediate. The class is taught in Korean though so if nothing it was listening practice. 

Positives

Free course taught in Korean.

Downloadable lecture notes and exercises. 

Review quizzes.

Negatives

Over focus on simple conjugation differences (eg, verbs that end in vowels vs consonants). 

Having to watch foreigners solve exercises for every grammar unit. 

Note

If you’re not paying for the certificate (which you 100% don’t need to) it won’t let you submit the assessment quizzes. So you’ll need to click around a bit to get into week 4′s content as it keeps trying to get you to upgrade. 

Overall its not a bad course. I would probably recommend Korea University’s Quick Korean series over this just because the lecturers seemed more comfortable on camera. 

[hansuuki]

102 day streak!

[hansuuki]

Some of the English translations in 연세 한국어 3-1 are kinda bad.

For example “미선 씨가 편지 쓰는 것을 도와주는 대신에 내가 점심을 사기로 했다” gets translated to “Instead of helping Miseon to write a letter, I decided to buy lunch.”

Similarly “일을 일찍 시작하는 대신에 일찍 끝낼 수 있다” gets translated to “Instead of starting work early, we can finish work early”

While 대신에 can be translated to ‘instead of’ in a lot cases, it doesn’t work for these sentences.

More accurate translations for these sentences would be “In exchange for helping me write a letter, I decided to buy Miseon lunch” and “(We) get to finish work early because (we) start work early” 

It’s also quite funny that very similar sentences appear in 외국인을 위한 한국어 문법 연습 (which is published by 연세) but the English translations a much more accurate. 

[hansuuki]

Hey saw your post about you learning Japanese. Great resources for hiragana and katakana. I'm debating learning and was wondering do you learn the Kanas at the same time or do you learn hiragana first. Also is hiragana enough to continue vocab and grammar learning?

Hi~

All the resources I’ve seen teach hiragana first and then teach katakana afterwards. I also learnt the basics of hiragana before moving onto katakana. Hiragana comes first as katakana is mostly used for foreign loan words. I wouldn’t recommend learning both from scratch at the same time as there are katakana equivalents of hiragana so it could be quite confusing! 

You can get started on very basic vocab and grammar with only hiragana. But you can’t hold off learning katakana for very long because to do a self-introduction like “My name is X” or “I’m from [country name]” you're going to need to know katakana (as most country names are in katakana). 

Side note: A lot of beginner Japanese resources will assume you don’t know kana well or at all and so put romaji next to all kana. So you could ‘learn’ grammar and vocab without putting much into learning kana upfront. I personally wouldn’t recommend this approach as it’ll hurt your pronunciation. 

I probably should have noted in my earlier post that you don’t need to go through all four resources before doing anything else. Rather these are the steps that I did:

Use Duolingo for a week or so to test my interest in learning Japanese. 

Continue with Duolingo but also start using Memory Hint to learn and test myself on a ‘row’ of hiragana and then review that row with HirKat. 

Use HirKat to teach the additional rows that Memory Hint doesn’t teach.

Start using Kanji Teacher to check that I can remember all of the hiragana.

Once I reached the ‘katakana 1′ unit on Duolingo I repeated steps 2 & 3 but with katakana. 

Then I fully completed the kana tutor tests of Kanji Teacher. 

After that, I completed the hiragana and katakana self-study courses on Minato.

After step 5 you’ll have a basic understanding of kana and can start using other resources if you like. Step 6 will help you recall kana quicker, while step 7 will help you read words (in particular the units on long vowels and small tsu sounds are really invaluable). 

(It's a bit hard to explain without a visual but hiragana and katakana can be divided into ‘rows’ - most rows have five characters so it’s less overwhelming to learn row by row rather than trying to tackle them all at once). 

[hansuuki]

Mastering kana

So I’ve started learning Japanese. I know from my experience learning Korean that getting familiar with the writing system is crucial, and relying on romanisation will only hurt your pronunciation in the long term. 

While there are a lot of resources out there saying they can teach you hangul or hiragana in a hour, realistically it’s going to take you longer to get comfortable with the writing system. 

Below is a list of the resources (all free!) that I used to really get comfortable with hiragana and katakana. Hopefully they can help you too ~~

Hiragana Memory Hint (mobile app) - this app teaches you hiragana using mnemonic pictures. I’ve never used mnemonics before so I was a bit unsure but honestly they helped me learn 80% of the characters. I like this app because they remind you of the mnemonic every time you do a quiz - even when you get the answer right. It’s important to note that the mnemonics they use focus more on the pronunciation rather than the associated romaji spelling.

HirKat (mobile app) - while the memory hint app is good it has some weak points namely the quizzes are too easy (they give you a second chance and the fonts used are ones that closely resemble the mnemonic) and it only teaches the base hiragana (it doesn’t go into が、ば、ぱ or any of the small　や、ゆ、よ sounds like ちゃ). HirKat doesn’t have these weaknesses so it is a good way to review your knowledge after you have completed a row in the Memory Hint app. 

Kanji Teacher (mobile app) - despite the name the app also has a kana teaching section. While Kanji Teacher uses some mnemonics the Memory Hint ones are much better in my opinion. What Kanji Teacher does that the early app’s don’t is that it will give you hard quizzes (9 possible answers), the quizzes develop over time so hiragana you have ‘learnt’ don’t show up anymore, and it will teach and test your writing (including the stroke order). I would note that the app has a lot of customization options and features so it can be overwhelming to navigate - my advice would be to use the ‘kana tutor’ button to walk through the tests. 

Minato - Hiragana A1 Self-Study Course (web based course) - this is one of the courses available on https://minato-jf.jp/Home/Index. You need to make an account to access the course but all of the self-study courses are free. The first half of the course will introduce hiragana and test your reading and listening skills. The second half of the course is the best part though - it will teach you small　つ sounds like きって, long vowel sounds and how to type hiragana on a computer keyboard! They also have some printable pdfs to practice your handwriting. 

As for katakana; HirKat and Kanji Teacher also teach katakana in the same app, there is a katakana version of Memory Hint called Katakana Memory Hint and there is a Katakana Self-Study Course on Minato which is similar to the hiragana one. 

[hansuuki]

While 목도리 translates to ‘scarf’ in English  스카프 and 목도리 are not usually referring to the same thing 

목도리 is a winter scarf that you wear to keep warm

While 스카프 is a thin decorative scarf which you wear for fashion not for warmth

[hansuuki]

The main usage of 만나다 that everyone knows is “to meet”. Like “바닷가에서 만나자” = “let’s meet at the beach”.

However 만나다 can also be used when focusing on the relationship/connection between people, rather than the physical act of “meeting someone”. For example in Korean you can describe “부모 잘 만나요” or “좋은 남편을 만나요”.

Below is a dialogue that always confused me before I learnt the wider usage of 만나다. 

가: 남자 친구가 있어요?

나: 네, 있어요.

가: 만난지 얼마나 됐어요?

In this situation 가 is asking how long 나 has been together with their boyfriend. Not when 나 first met their boyfriend.

[hansuuki]

Since COVID I’ve noticed more Korean teachers posting lessons on Youtube. A lot of them have criminally low views so I thought I would provide some links as I think they would be useful to many of you. 

While the lessons are mostly in Korean please don’t be put off. The teachers speak slowly and clearly so even low intermediate learners should have no problem understanding :)

아임달imdal Korean teacher

Grammar and vocab videos both TOPIK specific and more everyday content. Beginner through to high intermediate level.  I really like all of the videos I have watched. In some of her videos she sets ‘homework’ and asks viewers to post in the comments and she will personally mark it for you! 

현명한 선택,知好樂

Mainly intermediate level grammar comparison videos (ie, what is the difference between similar grammar points). She takes requests from viewers.

10분한국어 10min Korean

As the channel name suggests most of her videos are around 10 minutes long. Predominately intermediate and advanced grammar lessons but she also has videos on hanja. 

베이직 코리안 basic Korean

Beginner content from reading and pronouncing hangul through to basic grammar. Videos are in Korean but have English subtitles. 

PARKSSEAM OK-KOREAN

Intermediate level. It seems like she goes through a whole textbook in her videos. There are also TOPIK writing videos. 

[hansuuki]

Things I Learned the Hard Way

When they say 젤리, they mean the chewy things (think gummy bears, jell-o, etc). If you say “peanut butter and jelly” you will get the most disgusted looks.

알바 comes from the German word “Arbeit” which means “job/work” but it is not the same as 일. You are still considered a 백수 even if you work part-time.

친구 doesn’t mean “friends” as in the people you are closest with; it means people who are 동갑. If you refer to a 후배 or 선배 as your 친구 it’ll cause at least minor confusion about everyone’s ages.

간식 just means “snacks” but many people include 떡볶이, 라면, etc in this category, things I originally thought were considered “meals.”

치킨 usually refers to fried chicken (or chicken with sauce like teriyaki chicken). It’d be weird to refer to things like 닭발, 삼계탕, 닭죽, etc as “치킨.”

[hansuuki]

First time I have come across “no equivalent expression” on Naver dictionary.

[hansuuki]

Thanks @thestudyingnightowl, @unturnetbale & @wonhaemonimoni for the recommendations. 

I totally forgot that Quizlet existed! It’s exactly what I was looking for. 

[hansuuki]

Does any have recommendations for good flash card apps? 

I used memrise a number of years ago but its seems to have changed a lot so I’m wondering if there are better options out there. 

[hansuuki]

Ooh this was fun to try.

My results did go all over the place when I re-did the test a few times. I think it was partly due to the varying difficulty of the sentences (some had a lot of punctuation or were old style words I never use) but maybe the test itself has some glitches?

English (my native language). This was my best result but I dropped down to 50 on some of my attempts. 

Korean. Honestly a fluke result below. My other attempts I got around 40-50 with better accuracy. I benefited a lot from having a Korean keyboard though.

Test your typing speed: Korean

So my friend recently told me about a fun web browser where you can test your typing speed in both English and Korean! It doesn’t exactly help you language-wise to know how fast you can type, but arguably, the more you are using a Korean keyboard on your phone/computer, the faster you will be able to type so you can test your progress over time!

The web browser is called Typing Works and it can be used on both your phone and computer, though the computer version is much more sophisticated.

You can change the setting using the dial on the top left to either English or Native (aka Korean) and change the settings to test you on Minutes (how many sentences you can complete in a given time frame) or Times (how long it takes you to complete a set number of sentences). You can also fiddle around with some of the other settings to adjust the experience as well.

These are my results that I got when trying this out on my laptop keyboard (Left: English - my native language ; Right: Korean)

The OS (operating system) is kind of a fun way to look at how advanced they think you are, like for example, I tried the English one on my phone and the autocorrect kept messing my results up so it said I was ‘Linux’ - who even REMEMBERS Linux?? hahah! But I’m very impressed that I managed to get Mac OS for my Korean typing as well as my English.

My speed could be improved in Korean typing considering I’m hitting 20 words per minute compared to my 78 in English - but overall I’m not too disheartened by that result considering I don’t even have the Korean letters printed onto my keyboard so I have to go purely on touch typing.

Give it a go and let me know what you guys get!

[hansuuki]

are there any kakaotalk group for learning korean?

Hi ~

I know there was one a few years back but I’m not sure what happened to it.

Maybe one of my followers knows?