Half of January already flew by, so let’s check up on my goals that I set in the beginning of the month:
Chinese
- Chinesepod – 15-20 minutes every day -yes
- Memrise – 15-20 minutes every day – yes
- Italki – one session every 2 weeks – yes
- Watch C-Drama – every day – yes, almost every day
Indonesian
- Memrise – 10 minutes every day – yes, sometimes even more
- Indonesian Zoom class – one hour a week on Fridays – no, first week there was no class and I missed the one this week 🙂
Korean
- Memrise – 5 minutes a day – yes
- Journal in italki – once a week – no
- Read Webtoon – once a week – no
- Language exchange call – twice a week – last week was crazy – 5 calls, so I feel like I actually exceeded my goal here 🙂
- Chat with friends on Kakao Talk – every other day – not as much as I would like, but at least a little bit
Overall, I’m still keeping a good pace, let’s see how it continues 🙂 I need to read and write more in Korean, but I was dedicating so much time to language exchanges that I kind of thought it was OK to not force it too much.
I also started regularly doing this Memrise course and at the beginning I had over 400 words to review, now I got that number down to 300. I am amazed at a couple of things: 4 years ago I knew every word in that course by heart and this is why I moved to Unit 2, however, I’ve been really struggling to remember any of them, a lot of words just left my memory! I guess it’s also maybe because Memrise remembers which words were the hardest for me and it very smartly puts them in the front 🙂
Second insight was the Chinese characters – in the Memrise course there are lots of mnemonics created by other users and they often include Chinese characters. 4 years ago I could not make any mental connections with them, but now I finally can! I was surprised at actually how many Korean words have Chinese counterparts, which I could not pick up because they sounded differently. For example, “under” in Chinese is xia, while in Korean it’s “하 -ha” – until I saw the mnemonic in Memrise I had no idea that these words were connected. So now I finally understand what Emmanuel was saying about characters being helpful in Korean learning!
I also saw that famous polyglot Richard Simcott also started learning Korean now, so it’s been interesting to read his blog about how he’s learning it 🙂