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Thank you so much for your response! I don't know how I didn't come across r/Korean while I've been lurking in r/Korea for the last couple weeks (trying to fin

Thank you so much for your response! I don't know how I didn't come across r/Korean while I've been lurking in r/Korea for the last couple weeks (trying to find out more about dual citizenship)... I'll definitely have to check that out. I've been in the middle of creating an Anki deck while studying for the MCAT and I've used it in the past for learning Mandarin and I absolutely love it, just wondered if there were any existing Korean decks you particularly recommend. Good idea on the youtube videos too. I was thinking straight up kdrama and rewatching some of my favorite Korean movies but it might be too complicated right now for beginning. I'm surprised to hear Korean is supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn...I don't think fundamentals are that hard. It's really vocab that sucks balls and I feel like I can say that about lots of languages, but I'll never know in person how hard it is so :/

bane 12y ago
Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently. The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study. At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study. Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English). The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2. To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.

bane 12y ago

Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently. The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study. At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study. Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English). The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2. To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.