Korean in KuwaitRandom link: interpark.com

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.