Language learning these days

 Hi everyone, it's been a while!!

Dude, how does it feel? (or how it's going in general)

Last time I left off, I decided to quit Anki except for self made cards. I succeeded in this, by just quitting Anki all together. I haven't even so much as opened the app for studying since then. no Intensive immersion, so no new sentence cards, so no reason to Anki.

The Anki-free life has it's perks and disadvantages. I know I am still learning, I am still at the point where free flow immersion has enough repetition that I get a natural SRS. However I know I'd progress a lot quicker if I actually looked things up more often and made them into cards. One one hand, using Anki would provide me with a bit of structure and more of a sense of learning. On the other hand, I quite like this state of passive acquisition. My goal with both Korean and Japanese has been to reach a state where I can consume content with a certain comfort and I can tell that this is achievable. My favourite Comprehensible Input YouTube channel, the absolute GOAT "태웅쌤 - Comprehensible Input Korean", has become very comfortable, for example.

Of course there is still a lot of things that basically feel like a wall of gibberish, in both languages. However domains start to appear where this isn't the case anymore. Hooray!

Korean

Korean takes most of my time these days. Not necessarily because I prefer it, or don't want to study Japanese though. Remember, I am completely relying on passive acquisition at the moment, so the real reason for this is that I have more access to Korean content that's up my alley, or ballpark of comprehension.
Things that I am doing:

• reading random captions on Instagram reels
• listening to the audio drama 내 남편과 결혼해줘 on naver audioclip, I have previously read the webtoon this is based on in English
• reading the webtoon 노빠꼬 최하영 on first read (surprisingly comprehensible)
• obviously watching loads of 태웅쌤 - Comprehensible Input Korean on YouTube, there is almost a video per day atm
• Re-watching the occasional drama episode
• listening to my language exchange friend read Momo in Korean to me, and reading along (I'm doing the same in German)
• Watching Youtube videos in Korean or mixed Korean-English
  

Japanese

Japanese has taken the back burner, for the reason I mentioned in the Korean section. I really want to change that! At the moment I am

• occasionally reading in my physical books
• listening to Nihongo con Teppei podcast on public transport
  
• listening to Yuyu no Nihongo podcast on public transport
  
• listening to some news podcast that is absolutely on the incomprehensible end of the spectrum (also on public transport, when I want to feel humbled)
  
• watching 天国大魔境 completely in Japanese (very proud) I am able to get the major Plot points, but it's like an episode per week. Reading along with JP subs, but free flow
  
• the occasional YouTube video, but so little that I don't think mentioning what exactly is worth it.

Don't get me wrong, it is not that I don't progress in Japanese, I recently re-read a bit of a short story I had previously read painstakingly with a parallel English translation. I noticed that there were a lot of words that I now knew myself but, more importantly, I could parse the grammar and sentence structure with so much more ease. All that listening and nothing else might have actually secretly helped to naturalize a bunch of stuff. This too warrants a hooray.

It also brings me to my next musing:

Listening vs Reading

This will be a ramble, feel free to skip.

 

The Refold Japanese approach (the Korean one too, but a bit less so) to learning is very reading based from the get go. We are encouraged to learn Kanji from the start and grade our cards on meaning first before reading of words. A lot of people develop their listening ability after reading. I have always considered myself a bookworm so I have not had an issue with this and thought I would probably do so too.

I have noticed however, and this shifted my self image a bit, that I much prefer listening based activities first. What do I mean by that? I prefer developing my listening first and then filling in the blanks with spelling, rather than having a bunch of words that I know how to spell but need to fill in the pronunciation for. This is obviously a personal preference!

 

But it surprises me. I am not great with auditory processing. I am one of those people that will ask others to repeat themselves a lot. Not because I couldn't hear but because I couldn't parse what I heard. Usually this has to do with me being mentally distracted, needing a moment to get into "listening mode", stuff like that. Instructions via audio are always a pain for me, lectures almost useless. Listening in a noisy environment is exhausting to the point of impossible.

 

But then on the other hand, as a kid, as soon as I got access to online libraries where I could borrow audiobooks, I was hooked. Instead of seeing me with a nose in a book, I'd be running around with headphones most of the time.

So what's going on there? Honestly I am not sure, but it's probably several things at once, here are my theories:

1. I am so used to missing 30% of what is being said around me at any given time that I am amazing at inferring from context. I am in tune with having no clue what is going on and am trained to pick up on the major points of what is being said anyway. I am comfortable with ambiguity, to use the Refold lingo.
   
   
2. Listening immersion can be done whilst doing other things on the side. Depending on what I am doing, this can actually increase my focus. Being able to move around pretty freely and do manual labour helps.
   
   
3. I might read to myself when I read. So being able to match something I read to what it is supposed to sound like might be more important for me. I can get very into reading too, to the point where I do not notice I am reading and get fully sucked in. But that might not occur for me for a while with KR and JP..something to look forward to
   

In any case, I still much enjoy reading! This was just a thing that I noticed with me. I am including it for documentary purposes, but also because that is something someone who struggles with reading might want to consider. It is not straight forward that listening might help with reading.

Ok, so what next?

I want to progress just a little bit faster, but without putting any pressure on myself for actually doing so. I also want to carve out a bit more space for Japanese. I think this might be hard because I am reaching a point in both languages where I feel like much more immersion is needed to get the same amount of learning compared to before. I do however think that I can bridge some of that gap with my grand Intensive Immersion Plan. The following is therefore the To-Do list! If all goes well, I can implement these things before my next update.

• Make the sentence mining really easy for myself so that I actually do it. Or at least make lookups easy
• Actively search for some more Japanese content. Like find out where to read mangas, maybe get a VPN to view geolocked stuff?
• do some intensive immersion
• output a bit more (haven't really touched on this, but it is very motivating to me and could thus be extra useful. Would do it in a controlled environment though)

That is all, thank you so much for reading and see you next time <3
Zora