Korean in KuwaitRandom link: sweetcherry.kr

In the beginning of my Korean study, the single biggest obstacle for me was my inability to find the definitions of Korean words. If you see a string of Korean characters like ‘하나님께서는’, ‘드문’, ‘땜에’, ‘나았거든’, or ‘잔디남’ you will not find a single one of them in the dictionary. So if you want to figure out what they mean, you need some search strategies. Below are all of the methods that I use when looking up Korean words.

Strategy 1: Chop off the ends

Korean is “agglunative” (I had to look that word up), which means several words/endings/particles often get stuck together without a space when they are written. So while in English you might see:

I went to the store for Eric.

In Korean it would look more like:

I tothestore wentforEric.

So what? Well ‘tothestore’ is not a word in English, nor is the Korean equivalent a word in Korean. So if you want to figure out what it means using a dictionary, you need to pick out the individual words before you can look them up. Things get stuck on the front and the back of words in Korean, so you can try any combination of consecutive characters. For example if you are searching for ‘하나님께서는’, you will find entries for ‘하나’, ‘하나님’, ‘님’, ‘께’, ‘께서’, ‘서’, ‘는’, and a few more. You will have to compare the context to the definitions to decide which ones are actually being used in the string, but it should be pretty obvious most of the time.

Also, there is a cool thing about Korean-Korean dictionaries in that just about every grammar structure has an entry. So you can read about the thing and all its variations in the native Korean without having to go look through a grammar book. This helped me a lot when figuring out the older Korean found in the Bible and some historical dramas.

Strategy 2: Change the spelling

Some words, especially verbs, change spelling in various situations. And when you chat on the internet, pretty much anything can change spelling. But in general, if it is a verb, then usually the changes happen at the bottom of the last character. Also, every verb ends in ‘다’ in the Korean dictionary. So if I looked at ‘드문 ‘and didn’t know better I would play with ‘문’ and try looking up ‘드뭇다’, ‘드묻다’, ‘드뭅다’, and ‘드물다’. One of these is the correct one, and again, you would know from comparing the definition to the context.

In the case of internet Korean, if it’s a spelling change, then things are usually shortened or spelled as they are pronounced. But usually this is done to very common words, so you can brainstorm similar sounding words and figure out the original. In the case of ‘땜에’, it sounds like the extremely common word, ‘때문에’, which is your culprit. If you are chatting with someone though, you could save yourself some trouble and just ask your chatting partner what the heck they are talking about!

Strategy 3: Double-auto-translate

Ok, so maybe you can’t figure out what ‘나았거든요’ means, even with the first two strategies. Well I have a secret weapon for you, double-auto-translate!

Step 1: Use an internet service like Google to translate the string or parts of the string into English. In this example, ‘나았거든요’ comes out funny, but ‘나았거든’ turns into ‘do better’, which is useable.

Step 2: Translate the English or parts of the English back into Korean. In this case ‘do better’ translates poorly, but ‘better’ gives you several examples that resemble the original: ‘나아져가는’, ‘…보다 나은’, and ‘보다 낫게’.

Step 3: Go back and use strategies 1 and 2. By applying strategy 1 to ‘낫게’ you can get the correct dictionary entry, ‘낫다’, which in the Korean-Korean dictionary also explains the conjugation change that got us confused in the first place.

Strategy 4: Search engines

Using the auto-translator you can find just about anything except for slang and dialect, but those aren’t in the dictionary anyway, so what do you expect? Still, you probably want to know what the word means, so we have to resort to other methods to figure it out. If you do a search on Naver/Daum/Google/Twitter, then you can find examples of the word in real Korean sentences, and if you are lucky you might find someone explaining what the word means in Korean. If you are really lucky you might find someone explaining what it means in English. But my results have varied wildly. For a good example, try looking searching for ‘잔디남’.

Strategy 5: Save it for later

Then again, maybe knowing what the word means right now is not all that important, or not worth all the effort it would take to figure it out. And if the word is important, you will certainly see it again, so you can always try to solve the riddle another time. In this case, just forget about it and move on with your life and your study. Certainly, do not beat yourself up over it!

There are five strategies listed in this article, but not all strategies are created or used equally. I would say that when I come across words I don’t know, I use Strategy 5 (save it for later) about 98% of the time, and only really look words up when I start to get bothered that I don’t know what they mean. Still, that 2% of the time that you are looking up words can be very frustrating if you don’t know what to look for, so I hope these strategies are of some use to you!

About ten years ago, a friend invited me to sit in on a modern spiritual service in our hometown, and I remember the content even today over countless other lectures and sermons that I have heard through my life:

Imagine you are in line in to check out at the supermarket. There are already three people in line ahead of you, and then someone cuts in front of you when they can clearly see that you were there first! What is your initial reaction? Is it to get annoyed at the person or to speak up and tell them to get behind you? I wish I had a button I could push to eject them from the building! I can’t stand it when people cut in line!

Now imagine that you are in line in a different supermarket. This time you are too busy to count how many people are in front of you, and while you are looking through your items, someone cuts in front of you. However, you don’t notice them, and when you eventually look up and around you there are a total of four people in line ahead of you. Of course, since you don’t know that someone cut ahead of you, you would have no reason to be angry with them.

What is the end result of each of these situations? In both you are in line at the supermarket with four people in front of you. However, while in the first situation you are burning up inside, in the second, identical situation you are calm and relaxed! The only thing that is different between them is you. But what is different about you?

In the first situation we have the reality that four people are in front of us in line and we reject the reality on the basis that it is unfair, a judgement we have made, consciously or not. In the second situation we have four people in front of us in line and we accept the reality because it is fair, also a personal judgement. Though we usually unconsciously decide whether our situation is good or bad, we can also consciously choose how we want to view it, and our reactions will follow.

This means we have a choice to be content or disgruntled, happy or sad, calm or offended all the time. We just don’t always make that choice. Emotions feel very powerful when we are experiencing them, but believe me when I say that they are always optional. At first it is difficult to see these choices and even more difficult to make them, but this is what we are going to work towards…

At the time I heard this I was seventeen and thought I knew everything, but this really, really simple lesson changed my life. My thought process went from “If only bad things didn’t happen, I wouldn’t get upset.” to “If only I didn’t get upset, I would be happy.” The first of these dumps responsibility onto the world around me, while the second one allows me to take responsibility for myself and do something about it! Though the shift seems small, it has made a huge difference for me.

At various times in my life I have applied this concept to broaden my worldview; while interacting with college professors who had “strong” personalities, while adjusting to life overseas (especially Kuwait!), and while adapting to the corporate environment, to name a few. And while it can be very difficult at times, I found that it is always possible to choose your reaction to situations no matter how “unfair” they may seem.

But this blog is about learning Korean, so why am I writing about philosophy and spirituality? Well, I speak Korean so well primarily due to the fact that I’ve learned most of my Korean through genuine cultural experiences. I was only able to have those experiences because I integrated into Korean culture, and the grocery store lesson has been key to my integration! Without it I would be clueless, upset, and probably would have given up on learning Korean long ago. I believe that the frame of mind suggested by the lesson is also essential to anybody crossing a large cultural divide.

To illustrate, imagine you were with a group of friends and someone you knew only loosely said any of the following to you:

• “You need a haircut.”
• “You look tired.”
• “You’re too pale.”
• “You’re too skinny.”
• “You have a pimple.”
• “Drive XXX home.” (when XXX lives much closer to the person asking)
• “Drive XXX, YYY, and ZZZ home.” (while the person asking drives nobody)
• “You need to talk to XXX less.” (whom you like)
• “You need to talk to YYY more.” (whom you can’t stand)
• “Eat the rest of your food.” (and it’s a dish you don’t like)
• “Eat the rest of my food.” (after finishing yours)
• “Go make me coffee.” (at someone else’s house)
• “Go buy some coffee powder.” (when you reveal that there isn’t any coffee)
• “This coffee tastes like shit.” (the coffee you just bought and made)

Pretty funny when you read them, right? But maybe not if they were said to you when you were still trying to break into a foreign social circle. How would you react? Most Americans I know would be furious or offended, or at the very least would decide to ignore the jerk! After all, why would you want to be around someone that is disrespecting you?

All of those sentences above have been said to me since I’ve joined the Korean community, and they were all said to me 100% sincerely (and 100% in Korean, of course). And to be completely honest, I have had American reactions to most of them as well. It’s only been through looking back at the situation and applying what I learned from the grocery store lesson to them that I was able to adapt and have Korean reactions the next time around.

Now, every item in that list above is shockingly inappropriate to say to someone you aren’t close with. However, they are only inappropriate from a Western point of view. They can absolutely be appropriate under the correct circumstances in a Korean context, which means the standard American reaction of taking offense would not be acceptable.

What’s important is to understand that all of these “inappropriate” phrases have hidden meanings in the Korean context. For example, you may have to make coffee because you were misbehaving towards someone several hours ago. Now someone older than you is putting you in your place to allow the originally offended person to feel more at ease. You need to show your humility and regret through an act of obedience, but all of this will be done without ever addressing the original offense directly. How un-American! Also, you may not ever know what you did wrong, but you have to either accept the outcome (like at the supermarket) or risk never being treated as a full member of the community.

Regardless of culture, whenever someone says something to you there is very likely a reason. Very few people, if any, are simply nuts, so if your goal is to understand and become closer with a person, you are well advised to try to empathize with them before taking offense.

Understanding someone from a different culture though can be tough, since it feels like they are wired differently. However, in my experience the following practices have helped me understand better the thoughts and actions of Koreans:

• Paying careful attention to how and when Koreans speak to each other
• Paying careful attention to how and when Koreans don’t speak to each other
• Noticing when Koreans have body contact
• Noticing when Koreans don’t have body contact
• Taking note of when Koreans get emotional
• Taking note of when Koreans don’t get emotional
• Watching Koreans’ body language when they speak
• Watching where Koreans position themselves in a group

and the following things that I have been tempted to do have not helped me understand Koreans:

• Asking Koreans about Korean culture
• Asking Koreans why they are doing something
• Asking Koreans what they are thinking
• Asking Koreans how they feel
• Comparing anything to American culture
• Complaining about anything
• Protesting anything
• Getting upset about anything
  

These tips are all very indirect ways to learn that require patience and humility, but that is the Korean way. Through them you are bound to have some misunderstandings, but the good news is that you can make mistakes and be forgiven, especially since you are a foreigner. I certainly have made lots of mistakes, and thankfully, the people I know have forgiven me, even if they didn’t understand what I was thinking. However, if you do not improve your cultural acumen eventually, the Koreans around you are never going to open up to you fully, and are very likely to drift away from you. This means that over a long period of time, conscious effort towards understanding is necessary to truly integrate, much like the effort required to learn the language itself.

Integrating into Korean culture is very rewarding and incredible experience. However, before you can be accepted into the community you have to make big changes. You must change the way you think, you must change the way you react, and you must change the way you feel. What the grocery store lesson showed me is that with practice you can feel whatever you want whenever you want. And once you can do that, you can be a social and cultural chameleon, easily transitioning between seemingly incompatible worlds!

Fluency as a Status Symbol

Most of us want to measure our progress towards our goals and have some idea of how close we are to them. I think this is a natural tendency, but used in the wrong way, it can be destructive and quite demotivating. Suppose you evaluate yourself and decide that you are 25% of the way to fluency in your target language. Are you going to congratulate yourself or feel bad about the amount of progress? Will doing either one help you in any way? Also, if you aren’t fluent already then there is no sure-fire way to know how much further you have to go. So your rating is probably inaccurate and, in my experience, usually way overstated. Once you realize how overstated your rating is, the fact that you aren’t as good as you thought you were will be discouraging, and getting discouraged definitely not good for a study mentality!

In this rating system, fluency is a status symbol we are pursuing, and writing a percentage next to it is meant to help us feel better for not being having that status yet. We’re actually trying to convince ourselves that we are good by lying about how good we are! I don’t think it encourages us to keep studying or gives us any kind of guidance. The only thing I think it does is put more anxiety into our study, which is the last thing we need! If we really want to get fluent, we need to remove the anxiety and drop out of the status chasing game.

Another Way

I used to try to rate myself like this, but after having negative experiences time after time, I came up with a different way of rating myself that actually helps me with my Korean study. You see, all the talk of ratings above was about an absolute rating scale, where one would measure against a fixed point of fluency. Instead I rate myself on a relative scale, which takes my best skill to be the maximum and puts the rest somewhere behind. On my relative scale, my best skill is always a 10, and the other skills are somewhere between 1 and 10, though you can use different numbers if you want. Alternatively, you could fix your top skill at 10 and your worst skill at 1, but I don’t think it makes much difference.

For example, at the time of my writing this, my relative rating in Korean looks like this:

• Reading – 6
• Writing – 2
• Listening – 10
• Speaking – 8

So my best skill is listening, and my worst skill is writing, but there is no indication of how close or far away I am from fluency. The obvious improvements over the other scale is that the fluency comparison is removed to keep me from getting discouraged and that this rating very accurate! It’s accurate because, while I may not know how long it will take to push my top skill up further, I have a good idea of what it would take to move my other skills up to par with my top skill – through past experience. Also there is no good rating or bad rating for any skill, just a variance which, large or small, has no bearing on my Korean ability as a whole.

The other thing this scale does is that, instead of focusing on the long term goal, it is one of the few things I’ve found that helps me decide on medium term goals. My short term daily goals are already set in a general way (do something every day!), but it’s helpful to have some guidance to set a general direction for my study for periods of a few weeks at a time. This is usually how long it takes me to se a noticeable (and sometimes dramatic) improvement in any aspect of my Korean.

Implementation

If I’m having trouble deciding what I want to improve next, I give myself a relative rating and choose one of the skills that I want to improve. After that I brainstorm some activities to try out and do each one in turn until it gets boring. I usually have enough ideas to keep me busy and interested for the two or three weeks I need to feel that improvement. Some of my activities will be things I have used before, while others will be experimental stuff that I want to try for fun.

For instance, if I decided to work on reading, given the rating above, here are some activities I might list out:

• Free reading (without a dictionary) one book at a time.
• Scorched-earth reading (looking up every unknown word) with another book.
• Reading the daily Navercast articles.
• Reading newspaper articles on topics that I am hearing during my daily news radio listening.
• Experimental: Switch my daily listening to a loop of the audiobook form of a book I am reading.
• Experimental: Write guesses for the Hanja of any new Sino-Korean words I come across.
• Experimental: Memorize pure Korean words in groups that sound similar.

Even if one of these is a pretty bad idea, I’ve found that the shortest any activity takes to get stale is about three days. But listed above I have ideas to last me at worst twenty one days, enough to achieve my goal anyway. Sometimes I end up using the same technique for the entire time, but I intentionally avoid feeling committed to any one technique. After studying with my techniques for a few weeks I’ll come back to my relative rating scale and might see that my reading moved from a 6 to an 8, which is nothing to sniff at! However, more than the change in the number, which is just a number, is that I will know that my reading is better. That knowing is very motivating and makes me eager to work on the next skill. Anyway, my goal was not to get my reading up to an 8, but merely to improve my reading over three weeks, and I will have achieved it!

You might think that focusing on reading for a while would make my other skills suffer, but quite to the contrary, since I am still learning something Korean, all of my Korean skills get a bit better. The other skills will get better more slowly than reading, but they still improve, and in a noticeable way. So while I’m not singularly focused on getting to fluency, I still get closer to it with every round.

Things to Consider

Some general guidelines for rating yourself on a relative scale:

• You don’t have to work on your lowest skill.
• You don’t have to not work on your highest skill.
• Choose a skill to work on that you want to work on.
• Don’t choose a skill to work on because you feel obligated to work on it.
• Your writing probably sucks, just like mine. There is no shame in it!
• Rate yourself infrequently (once a month or so) to give yourself enough time to feel a noticeable change.
• Brainstorm enough activities to keep you interested, but make sure not to fall in love with any of them.
• Switch your study routine as soon as it gets boring.
• Don’t judge your success by the change in your numbers.
• Judge your success by the feeling of accomplishment that comes with your improvement.

Of course, you should just take what you want out of my advice and then add your own ingredients to make it your own. This is what has worked for me though, and I hope you find it useful!

Disclaimer

Here are some details of the actual activities I’m doing and resources I’m using lately. I change these around quite often, so I’m not suggesting that any of these will work for anyone else or that I will even be doing them a week from now. But by offering them here I hope to give other learners some ideas to play with.

Lists of Hanja by Reading

My recommended approach to Hanja warrants its own separate article, but for now, it should suffice to say that I am currently memorizing lists of Hanja according to reading. So if you came up to me and said “조” (Joe!) I could write 22 different characters with that reading along with their respective Korean definitions. 나라이름 趙! 구유 槽! 조상 弔! etc.!

This is my third “pass” of studying the Hanja, and it would be very difficult for someone to do without the first two passes as a base. If you are just starting Hanja then I suggest you start by first working through Remembering the Traditional Hanzi. However, if you have done RTTH (or RTK, like me) and know the Hanja for a decent amount of Korean words, then you could try going in alphabetical order like I am doing with the help of this book as a reference.

News Radio

Every day I’ve been listening to the daily Radio Free Asia news podcast as a mostly passive activity. There are five(!) hours of news in this podcast each day, but I don’t usually have time for all of it. Twice a day I get to focus on it for twenty minutes while I’m driving, but most of the time I just let it play in my ear and pay attention for very short intervals (ten seconds to a minute or so).

I’m now nearing a plateau with my listening because I need to learn more technical vocabulary, but over the past month or two RFA has really catapulted my listening ability forward. If this podcast is way too difficult (or too easy or too boring) then look for something else. Don’t bore yourself just because I’m listening to it.

Television

I watch the KBS 9 o’clock News most days and try to give it my full attention. I also pause sometimes to look up the occasional new word if I can’t guess the meaning. I also watch other programs but make a point now to watch mainly talk shows, since dramas have become quite easy to understand. Similarly, I watch fewer StarCraft matches because they are also easy, but still tune in if one of my favorite Terran players is in the match.

Low Maximum Reading

A few weeks ago I decided there was a problem with how I read. Though I wasn’t playing a formal number game, I was still exhibiting the symptoms by focusing on the quantity I read instead of quality of reading I was doing. I tended to act like I’m in a race and go too fast, which not only made me miss a lot of content, but also made reading time less fun.  To counter this un-fun reading effect I set a low maximum I allow myself to read each day. Most people (including myself) would normally set a minimum to accomplish each day, but I’m finding that a maximum is so many orders of magnitude better!

Given a few hours I could easily read 100+ pages of Korean each day, but my current maximum is one chapter out of my current book, which is about 10 pages, on average. That is the low part of low maximum. It is ridiculously low compared to my physical maximum, but there is a method behind the madness. A low maximum:

• removes my temptation to go too fast,
• encourages me to read carefully,
• tempts me to read the same material several times,
• alleviates the pressure to read if I don’t have the time that day,
• and stops me while I’m still feelin’ good!

Not only do I have a low maximum, but I intentionally have no minimum. That is, I don’t have to read a single word. (Man, I’m making this too easy!) Anyway, I figure I will default to other fun Korean stuff if I can’t or don’t want to read that day, so why put some painful restriction on myself? With the absence of a minimum I feel absolutely no pressure to read a certain amount before sleeping each day.

So now I both spend less time on reading and read fewer pages, but still I am learning more when I read than I used to when I was flying through my books! Less really is more!

Party-Crashing

In December of 2008 I had met a Korean in Kuwait for the first time, and I got invited to the Kuwait Korean Society’s New Year party. Leading up to the event, I was eager to show off my Korean skill. I had been studying Korean alone in a foreign country for six months straight, and in order to learn as much as possible I had avoided every social obligation possible, disposed of all my English media, spent more than more than a thousand dollars on books and materials, and given myself serious back pain from studying at my desk so much every night. I really felt I had done everything possible to prepare.

Yet despite all those extreme efforts, when I got to the party and tried to talk to the Koreans around me I absolutely sucked. I could barely form a sentence, much less understand the sentences they were saying to me. We played bingo and I couldn’t understand the damn numbers! Who studies for six months and can’t even understand numbers? On top of that, I met a few people that seemed to have a bone to pick with me and made a point to make me feel very unwelcome. What a crushing feeling to pour your life into something and then get absolutely stonewalled!

I met a few Koreans once in a long while after that, but it was about another eight months before I was really invited to participate in the community. That seems like a long wait when you read it, but living it is like an eternity.

During the fourteen months I spent studying alone I always had another option: to give up. I knew other English speaking people that I could have hung out with and easily could have filled up all the time I had been using for studying Korean.  But I didn’t give up, and I stuck to the incredibly humbling task of thanklessly studying Korean every day even without encouragement from anybody I knew, without any kind of monetary incentive, and without the feeling that my skill was anything better than crap. How the heck?

Maybe you also want to learn a language, but how bad do you want to learn it? How often do you tell yourself you want to learn it? What is your language learning goal today? How many times a day do you think about what you will do when you can eventually speak your language?

Maybe studying your language is just a hobby. That’s cool. Good for you. Maybe you only want to prepare some survival phrases before you visit another country. That’s cool too. Good luck. But if you are studying the language in order to speak it like a native, then you are looking at a very long-term project that will require some serious motivation techniques to keep moving in the right direction. Oh, and it’s cool too, but don’t expect many people to tell you that until you are fluent!

Everyone’s motivation is different, but all motivation comes from the same source: yourself. My motivation for studying Korean has slowly changed over time, but it has always remained important. You might think that now that I’m “good” at Korean it is easy to keep studying, but the easy thing would be to stay satisfied with my current level and not take hours out of my day to refine my Korean. The temptation went from “Quit because you suck!” to “Quit because you are good enough!”, and I have to stay on top of this temptation to make sure I keep going.

So enough small-talk, how do you get motivated? Here are a few tips that hopefully can help you sort it out.

Auto-Suggestion

First you need to get used to auto-suggestion. This is where you repeat something to yourself so often that it becomes a belief, whether reasonable or not. I have told myself “I will be perfectly fluent in Korean.” and other variations of this phrase hundreds of thousands of times, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that I will be the best Korean speaker in the world at some point. It does not matter if it will actually happen, because the belief itself is a propellant towards the actualization of it. After all, without this belief my chances of achieving it are much lower, so I might as well believe it even if I’m delusional.

To get yourself in the habit of auto-suggestion, it is helpful to leave reminders around the space where you live. I have never actually posted a statement anywhere, but have Korean things around all the time that bring my mind back to the task I am devoted to. My calendar at work is in Korean, my homepage is in Korean, my computer’s OS is in Korean, my gmail settings are in Korean, I have Korean books laying around my house and not on my bookshelf on purpose, I have Korean cooking products in my kitchen, and I have a Korean TV show in my DVD player right now. The more reminders like these you have, the lower your chance of forgetting what you want. And “dedication is remembering what you want!”

Do you want to be fluent in your target language? Try telling yourself that you will be fluent in your target language. Do you believe it? If not then maybe you need to tell yourself some more and brainwash yourself!

Small Goals

Another tactic for staying motivated is to shift your point of view when it comes to goal-setting. Khatzumoto has beaten this horse to death, so I’ll keep it brief. Small, achievable goals are much more motivating than big, distant goals. If your only goal is to be fluent in Korean then you are destined to a thousand days of failure followed by one day of success. Or worse, you are destined to a few days of failure followed by giving up! Instead (or, in addition) you are better off having small goals that keep you interested in working at it again tomorrow.

My daily goal is just to do something each day that is worth posting in my daily log. And guess what? I blow away that goal almost every day and feel great about it! Some days I do less than others, but if I set a goal of doing a large amount each day, then the days on which I fail to do it I will be beating myself up. And beating yourself up is just a few steps away from quitting. And then you can forget about what is the fastest way to learn a language, because quitting is the fastest way to not learn a language!

Fantasizing

This is also a bit like auto-suggestion, but I consider it a separate activity. As you go through your day there are certainly going to be times when your mind wanders off and you aren’t really “present.” Some self help books will tell you this is a bad thing, and it might be normally, but if you are going to drift off anyway then you might as well make the most of it!

When I drift off I try to think about doing things in Korean that are far beyond my current skill level. I often imagine myself hosting the comedy show, 무한도전, or giving a speech at a political rally, or rapping on MBC Music Core, or translating for an executive business meeting between GE and Samsung! Sometimes I actually have a good idea of the exact words I would say, but for the longest time, since I sucked at Korean, most of it was in English or just without words at all. Still, the positive thoughts and whatever chemicals my brain was squirting out because of them were motivating!

Your Korean/Chinese/Swahili fantasies are probably different than mine, but as long as they are things you enjoy thinking about, then they should make great motivational material. Give it a try and see!

Your Intellect is Powerful

A wise and completely westernized Indian dude once told me that there are three dimensions to our brain; our instinct, our mind, and our intellect. Our instinct governs our body when we aren’t thinking, our mind governs our instincts when we are thinking, and our intellect governs our mind when we are self-aware. Learning a language is a really, really tall and unnecessary task. It goes against both our instincts and the better judgment of our mind! We need to employ our intellect if we want to take control of the situation and get something done. The tips listed above are good examples of this kind of control.

Maybe you think it’s pathetic that I had no friends and had to imagine them, but nyah nyah I’m fluent in Korean now! Oh, and I have real friends now too! And all this time I used my intellect to convince myself that I was not pathetic, that I was destined for something great, and that I was doing a good job every day. Beyond that there isn’t much else I needed. Sure, there were tough times, and I faltered and didn’t take my own advice every now and then, but all the times I did focus on the intellectual approach to learning Korean more than made up for it.

I truly believe (through experience, not auto-suggestion) that the mental tactics are much more important than physical study techniques. You can use an SRS, word lists, shadowing, cultural immersion, and whatever other voodoo techniques are available, but all that is meaningless if you don’t take control of your mind and get yourself motivated every day.

Anyway, there are lots of choices we make in our lives that we don’t immediately recognize, such as what we think of ourselves, what criteria we put on having a “good” or “bad” day, and what we think about when we are bored. If we start being aware of the unconscious choices we are making and consciously change them to our advantage, then we can do something amazing!

For an English speaker, listening to Korean is challenging. I won’t pretend to know exactly why, it’s just that if we listen to a Romance language we can usually parrot back the sentences, but if we listen to Korean we can’t seem to get any of it right. Anyway, it takes a while to get good at understanding spoken Korean, but I think it can be sped up by putting in some focused effort.

Out of all the stuff I have tried, there are three techniques I would recommend to practice listening to Korean, and all of them are “intensive” in one way or another, hence the title of the article.

Listening Immersion

I borrowed this 100% from Khatzumoto, so let’s clear that up first.

Basically I try to listen to Korean audio as much as possible throughout my day. I do this primarily by replacing all of my English audio, and then making sure I carry my iPod around with me whenever I can. I started doing this a week or two into my study, and even though I didn’t understand squat at first, I think that all the audio input helped a great deal in improving my pronunciation once I got around to speaking Korean.

I still do listening immersion every single day, but by now I understand much more and so the listening time benefits me much more. Still, you have to crawl before you can walk, so I would recommend listening immersion to someone at any stage.

There is one pitfall I want to warn about though, and that is making sure you listen to stuff that is enjoyable. When you don’t understand anything this will probably mean music, and if that’s the case there is nothing to feel bad about. Early on I tried several times to immerse myself in radio talk shows. I figured since they were speaking a lot more than any lyrics from any song, that I would get much more out of the listening practice. However, I ended up just getting sick of listening to babble I couldn’t understand and feeling discouraged. These days I am finally listening to news programs, but I do so only on the condition that I can understand most of it and that I find it interesting. If you don’t meet these conditions yet, then I suggest sticking to music, and make sure it is music that you like!

Weather Clip Listening

Last summer some Korean business men were coming to Kuwait to visit my company. Since I was the only person around who knew any Korean at all, I was asked to come around with them and help with any communication. This was a good plan except that I absolutely SUCKED at listening. I had been immersing myself in Korean music for months and months, but really had no grasp of what was going on in any conversation outside of some commonly used expressions.

I had two or three weeks before these guys were coming to Kuwait, so I decided to focus exclusively on listening until they got here. Out of necessity I came up with a technique for listening practice, and by the time our Korean guests arrived my listening was much improved (though it was still really bad).

What I did each day was download a weather report from the nightly news along with its transcript. Why the weather? Because it has the exact same vocabulary every day, and I wanted to focus all of my time on listening practice, not learning new words. Anyway, though the weather doesn’t cover all the words from the Korean language, it certainly covers all of the sounds of the Korean language, or at least 99% of them!

So during my study time I would alternate between listening to the news clip, reading the transcript, and doing both at the same time over and over again. Sometimes I would listen to the same sentence 20 to 30 times until I was satisfied with my comprehension of it, and sometimes I would listen to the entire clip, but with the goal of understanding just one or two words somewhere in the middle.

The goal here though is not to be able to understand the weather 100% on the first try every time, because that kind of goal just sets you up for disappointment. The goal is to understand your clip for the day better than the first time you listened to it. This is not a hard goal to achieve, and yet you will feel yourself get better very quickly.

Up to this point the technique I am describing is not very creative, but I’m about to let you in on the big secret. I usually just focused on a single one or two minute clip each day and would spend about two hours listening to it. Normally this would be a very self-abusive thing to do, but there is a special way to endure it. There are actually two reasons why you choose the weather as your clip. The first is the vocabulary point mentioned above. The second and more important reason is that, especially if you are taking your clips from a news aggregate like Naver, you can choose between several really cute weather girls. For some reason I can watch a cute girl talk about the weather in a place I don’t live for two hours, but I can’t watch a guy give a murder report for more than 5 minutes. Is it sexist to feel this way? I don’t know (or care). I’m just making a practical observation.

Now let me answer your first question before you even ask it in the comments. The cutest weather girl is 오하영 from SBS.

Black-Out Listening

Ideally you would have transcripts for everything you listen to in a foreign language so that you could at least have a hope of understanding what is going on, but life isn’t so easy. As I was transitioning away from music and towards podcasts, I noticed that I kept zoning out and not paying attention to what was being said. After all, I couldn’t understand it. Zoning out was probably the natural effect of having my own thoughts available in my head that were at least more comprehensible than the unfamiliar Korean sounds the DJ was making.

To counter this zoning-out effect I started doing a session each day of black-out listening (I just made that name up!). The goal of black-out listening is to continuously focus on the stream of Korean sounds you are listening to as much as possible, and to do this you need to eliminate all other distractions. What I did was remove all gadgets (phone, computers, TV…) from my room, turn off all the lights, and lie down in bed with my iPod. I would then listen to a podcast that I largely couldn’t understand and every minute or so check myself that I was paying attention to the words and not trailing off into my own thoughts.

During this time I still trailed off a lot, but since I kept checking myself, I would bring my consciousness back to the Korean sounds and try my best to pick out the words I could understand. As a whole this takes the 20 seconds of real quality time you would normally get out of a 30 minute native Korean podcast and brings it up to something like 20 minutes. It’s a great help for improving listening, but at the same time it is also pretty draining. Unfortunately I don’t have any weather-girl type techniques for making this more endurable, but I think a half hour or so each day is quite doable.

This is something that is not likely to be useful on your first day of study. I think it starts becoming useful once you can pick out about 1 in 10 words from a native Korean podcast, so before that the first two points I mentioned are probably going to be better for you.

Overview

The overview usually comes first, but somehow this just feels right.

Look, to get good at listening you need to put in a lot of hours. At the same time, quality hours are better than zoned-out hours, and zoned-out hours are better than not listening hours. Try to fill your day with audio first. Once you are used to listening to your foreign language all the time, you can try to turn an hour each day into a quality hour, but don’t do stuff that is going to make you sick of your language learning project for the sake of some whoa-dude theory from my site or anywhere else. I’ve given a few suggestions here, but I feel strongly that as long as you keep working on your language you will find the things that work for you. So I guess what I’m saying is that you don’t just need to listen to Korean, but you also need to listen (and respond) to yourself. 두둥~

EDIT: In case this wasn’t clear, the whole weather girl talk is about paying attention. It’s hard to pay attention to someone speaking when you don’t understand what they are saying. So in the early stages of learning a language when it all sounds like babble, it is useful to have something that will help you pay attention. A pretty girl is just one example, but you might also watch a show with a lot of physical humor since it will be funny even without understanding the dialogue. But one way or another you should find some media that floats your boat, because otherwise you will be too bored to pay attention to the language you are trying to learn.

When we have a big project like learning a language there is a natural tendency to want to measure our progress. Also, in languages there are some easily quantifiable units: words, characters, pages, exercises, etc. So it’s common for language learners, including myself, to try to play a number game with our study. We say to ourselves “I will learn X words per day.” or talk about our progress like “I know X Hanja.” However, in my experience, every single time I played one of these number games I ended up demotivating myself and focusing on the wrong things.

The main problem with number games is that they focus only on quantity, when speaking a language is equally about quality. When I speak to my Korean friends, they don’t care how many words I know, but they do care that I understand what they are saying and can form intelligible responses quickly. Of course, I have to know a bunch of words to do that, but more importantly, I have to know them well. That is to say, sacrificing quality for quantity is a poor trade-off when it comes to communicating.

So my tip for anyone serious about language learning is: Number games are bad!

Every living thing operates based on incentives. If you are paid by the hour, then you are motivated to work lots of hours. If you get into college by scoring high on the SAT, then you focus on studying for the SAT. And if health care co-payments are lowered, then people will go to the doctor more often. Now, when you measure your learning progress with a number, then you will naturally try to push that number up, because, well, why would you make a goal and then not work towards it?!

I also played these kinds of number games several times and always ended up failing to learn much. I had a project in which I tried to learn 100 words every day, I used to try to read 20 pages of my books every day, and I also used focus on the number of Hanja in my SRS deck. I certainly spent a lot of time inputting in the SRS, looking at a book, and worrying about Chinese characters, but all of these ended in frustration with the requirement I put on myself and a relatively little amount of quality learning. The trouble was that I was going too fast and hardly looking at what I was “studying.” To do so left me with nice numbers to post in my blog, but ultimately not getting much of anywhere actually learning Korean!

But can you structure a long term project in a motivating way without focusing on the numbers? Well, to use myself as an example, I’m currently making a deep pass through the Hanja, and without focusing on the numbers I’ve gone through a great deal of characters (the number is a secret!). What’s more, is that I know each and every one of those extremely well, so I’m not sacrificing on quality. And to give you some background, I have a B.S. in Mathematics, my entire job is calculating figures in MS Excel, and I like to tell math jokes to my friends. My life is numbers, and I was still able to kick the habit for the sake of learning Korean. If I can do it, then anybody can do it!

Here is what I am doing different: Every day I don’t think about how many new Hanja I will memorize, I don’t think about how many hours or minutes I will spend on the SRS, and I don’t think about the total number of characters I eventually want to learn. All I think about is that, when I have the free time, I will focus on the reviews and try hard to fix the characters in my mind as I go through them. As long as I feel I am having difficulty recalling the characters I’m currently reviewing, I don’t add any more. But once I feel I know all the characters in my deck quite well, I go ahead and add some more. So quality of the existing characters comes first before increasing the quantity I study.

To any curious language learners out there, my advice is to immediately re-look at your language learning goals and daily routine and see if you are playing a number game. If you are, then switching to a quality-based study will not only help you learn more, but will feel like unloading a huge burden.

Some signs you may be playing a number game and self-imposing some pain:

• Your current goal has a number in it: “Learn X words”, “read X pages”, “listen for X hours”
• You record your progress in terms of a number: “Today I spent X hours doing blah blah…”
• You are stressed about achieving/not achieving a certain number or daily limit: “I was so busy today I couldn’t study my daily 10 Hanja!”
• You tell people about the quantity of studying you’ve done, rather than show them the quality of what you’ve learned through speaking the language. “Did I mention that I’ve worked through six different French textbooks?”

I am guilty of every one of these, and will likely be guilty of them again at some point. But through experience I’ve come to the conclusion that they should be avoided as much as possible, and I think they are always avoidable, since they are self-imposed!