Progress Report #10

There is a TLDR at the bottom! 

Without even realising it, a lot of time has passed since I last checked in on my progress. All good intentions of sharing sooner rather than later gone. To the wind. I shall never make promises on timeliness again.

A couple of updates ago I stopped posting what sort of content I was immersing in specifically because I thought it was getting too much and was also kind of boring for others to read. Now that I look at my updates after that though, I can't help but feel detached to talk about everything *but* the content and the language itsself to me, so I was thinking of maybe introducing some of the specifics back in. And in the future I'll be able to remember this era of learning better!

Korean

Let's look at the numbers. (Ugh, no pls look away). 

As you can see, i have reached a whopping 1k more than last update. Which puts me in the pace range of just below 5 new words per day. 

Everyone who has seen me on the Refold Korean or Kimchi reader discord server will know that my constant underwhelming word count is bugging me on the regular. I'm not surprised by it though, given my methods. A couple months ago I thus made the conscious decision to try and mine more, so that I may reach a goal of 5 cards mined per day. Reviewing of said cards was optional, so I felt confident that this was a manageable challenge. I had a nice amount of activity on kimchi reader and finished my sixth book 이상한 그림, all while joyously mining and marking along.

Now dear reader, please refer back to the statistics, look at the Mined/day number and let me know if that looks like it did anything. 

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Did you scroll up? Yes? Outrageous right, here I go and set a goal one time and what do I get, below two cards mined per day??! I am beyond words. Gutted.

Now, I didn't go after this goal with the most fervor ever but I did expect a little more results. Then again, it's not a bad thing to mark more words as known than as seen from mining. As a side effect, I engaged more with Anki. You could say we're back on speaking terms but I don't see us becoming besties again. 
Thus my half hearted experiment ends. 

ADDENDUM: In the time between my draft of this post and me finalising it right now, I managed to read my seventh book , 죽이고 싶은 아이 (recommend!). It only took me a couple days and I have probably mined the same amount if not more than the book before that, just in a much shorter span of time. My mined words stats in the last 30 days is now almost 3 per day! Crazy. I also marked another ~100 words as known.

My next adventure is probably going to be getting into shadowing/chorusing. So far I've tried it once or twice with podcasts like 수다일릿트 (I have no idea what the context of this podcast is, but it's about a lot of daily life stuff) and immediately noticed some improvements. There is just something about it that helps with getting into the mental mode required for me to speak. It makes me as eloquent as a chat bot from 2013 instead of the audible representation of a ransom note glued together from newspaper clippings.
I've not been listening to a lot of learner podcasts like Didis or 태웅쌤s podcasts, sometimes I listen to SPNS TV but it's not terribly comprehensible. But being curious about the content is so important for my motivation that I prefer it over stuff that would be more my level. To my detriment.

I have also done a tiny bit of writing that I am rather proud of, even if I will read back on it later and cringe my face into a permanent contortion. In fact I am looking forward to it! Nothing would be more annoying than not being able to see some of my own mistakes in the future.

As before, I still watch an unhealthy amount of dramas, usually right when something comes out. Im getting more used to police and crime talk so now those genres are becoming more accessible to me. For example, i saw one thats called nine puzzles. Since I do this on mobile most of the time, I don't use kimchi reader for the immersion and yes, that does feel exactly like taking the stairs when an elevator is *right there*. Except that in that case you'd at least get more training in. All in all I am thinking that I should include some more intensive video content consumption into the roster, I just find it really hard to do for some reason. The constant play and pause takes me out, looking up words makes me forget what the topic was. Much more painful than reading books with 9T sentences. Help and suggestions are appreciated! Even if the answer is just "choose easier conent and just deal with it smh".

Other than that, I'm an avid webtoon enjoyer! For a while now, I've been at the level where I can read an uncomplicated romance webtoon without being in too much pain from all the unknowns. I want to make extra clear that this doesn't mean I get everything and now fully understand the story or content or nuances. It's just at a level where I don't mind missing out on the details about the 팀장님s project plan that is being pushed on to the already swamped female lead! May her romantic interest come and save her from overworking herself soon 🙏. Some recommendations from me include 이게 웬떡 (wholesome campus romace) and 그 머리 긴 선배 일음이 뭐더라 (unhinged campus romance). Enjoy at own risk.

Japanese

With Japanese I am still trying to find ways to increase my day to day engagement. Unfortunately I just lost my only Japanese speaking friend to the perils of moving away (he's still alive and online, I'm being dramatic) (he also reads this, so hi! Let's play stardew valley and chat soon), but there goes my semi regular chance at uttering some words offline.

On the content side I did increase though. I saw a couple shows, some of them worse than others, some even better! I might have to take back my opinion on Jdramas, maybe it truly only was a whacky selection on my streaming services. Just recently I finished the marry my husband: japan drama and kind of preferred it over what I've seen from the storyline in the webtoon and audiodrama. Although I never finished either of those so it remains to be seen. I saw some anime, finished a volume of からかい上手の高木さん as well as some random chapters from other manga. All in all rather sparse, I know. But I was also feeling like I couldn't, shouldn't and didn't want to take more time away from my Korean learning to increase Japanese. At this stage, some of the words and grammar gained are still fragile and would regress quickly. That's okay though, either way, stressing about this is still against THE RULES.
 

My objective is going to be making Japanese more accessible to me. Finding immersion material has been harder than in Korean, I subscribed to a streaming service only to find that there were no Japanese subtitles. I buy a book digitally only to find that it can only be read on the in-house app, the text not even highlightable for lookups. Kanji without furigana makes searching a word up in a dictionary myself a pain. It's not impossible but all requires me setting up some tools and putting in more intentional effort. A lot of my Korean learning has been fueld by the low level of setup the learning needs.

The Migaku browser extention for Japanese is fine but since I don't use Chrome as my main browser and there is little to no mobile support, I just don't go for it. It's all minor inconveniences, I know. But what I'm trying to say is that the minor inconveniences end up being the thing that makes me grab something else instead of learning Japanese. It needs to be a no brainer. So my intention is to lower that threshold for myself. Set up better workflows and quite literally update the existing ones. 

In my last update I wrote a lot about my extremely relaxed approach to learning (which I still stand by), but this time I mentioned things I want to actively work on. When I started learning I had this rather vague goal of wanting to "get to a point were I can chill with the language" by which I meant get comfy in my learning routine, to the point where I wouldn't have to think a lot about the process of learning and would just learn. I'm quite comfy right now but it's 

a) getting boring to be comfy all the time, 

b) going to take approximately 50+ years to get anywhere sensible with this pace and

c) maybe being too comfy is limiting. I don't want to get to the point where I am so comfy that I don't challenge my knowledge or don't expand anymore. And then get illusions about my level and abilities.

Instead I'm gonna attempt to walk the fine line of changing something up for the better without screwing with my mojo. Again, all recommendations on how to do this without putting unnecessary pressure on myself, comparing myself to others or stressing in any way shape or form are appreciated.

Love,
A turtle with athritis (cause that's the pace I'm at rn) <3

This is Tomte, a tortoise known to me. I don't know if Tomte has athritis but since he's an older gentleman it's likely. He doesn't like to be photographed and has gotten much less active with age but here he is climbing along anyway.

Last spring Tomte pulled of a magic trick. Previously missing and presumed dead, he was mourned all winter.  But right around March he made a surprise comeback in his enclosure. Apparently he had just dug himself into the ground to hibernate and managed to elude being migrated to a different terrarium for safe keeping in the cold seasons. Luckily the winter was mild. Also my apologies to the fox that I suspected of murder.



TLDR; my routine has atrophied a little and in order to progress more I'm adopting a mindset of positive change (self help book sorta sentence). I'm gonna attempt several new approaches for both languages and see if I can make some new routines that I don't hate. Toodeloo