How are you?
How’s your progress with Korean?
For me, I’m making a comeback with Korean since I haven’t updated for a while (since I was too focused on Spanish).
Life happens. Commitments change. Focus shifts every now and then.
But today, I’m putting back my attention towards improving my Korean.
Wondering what makes me motivated to do so?
Also, I came up with an experiment for my Korean that is related to comprehensible input and whether the concept is capable of giving me noticeable results.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
January 2025 Update
I’m back to tracking my Korean after taking a break.
I have my reliable tracker app for compiling all my input time. Prior to this tracker, I collected all my previous immersion times using other resources and methods.
It turns out that I already have more than 150 hours of initial input with Korean. This combined with my January input, I will start February at 175 hours.
However, it’s obvious that this is NOT enough. For a foreign language that is linguistically distant from English (and Tagalog), it will take way more than 150 hours to attain fluency in this target language. In fact, my Spanish is already beyond 500 hours in total, it feels like it’s self-sustaining and that I could easily take in most content.
This leads me to introducing my motivation to learn Korean again – I will retake the TOPIK II exam this April 2025!
To give you context, when I attempted TOPIK II for the first time last year, I failed miserably because I was lacking in so many areas, even the conversational fluency part I didn’t feel well-prepared (day-to-day life questions, no jargon yet).
And to share with you another failure, I tried to take a free assessment by a job recruitment company (I was planning to join them and apply for a job later). I couldn’t even speak Korean and form basic sentences!
To think that I’ve been learning Korean since 2017, accumulating vocabulary and studying more than 90% of the Korean grammar, and all this knowledge couldn’t even be put to practice.
Long story short, it feels like my lack of Korean is costing me opportunities.
Where I’m coming from right now is what I plan to use as fuel to begin immersing hard using the best method I know of in language learning – comprehensible input.
There are many teachers and advocates of CI online, but I decided to follow Pablo Roman’s style of CI, which is basically the natural approach. Thanks to Dreaming Spanish and its influence with my Spanish so far, I’m now passing the concept back to Korean and trying to run this experiment which I’ll be explaining shortly.
The Korean Experiment Explained
It’s hard to measure language learning progress.
But with the help of the TOPIK II exam, I could have a means to determine whether I’ve actually improved. A passing mark for TOPIK II basically starts at Level 3 as the lowest, with Level 6 being the highest I could potentially reach.
To be fair, getting a high score in TOPIK does not prove that you’re already fluent in Korean. For me however, getting a good score here obviously indicates progress. The question is how high I could reach.
So the Korean experiment goes like this:
“If I spend most of my time consuming comprehensible input and immersing in content I enjoy, would I pass the TOPIK II exam?”
Assuming I start from February 1st up until the exam day, which is April 13th, if I did nothing but consume Korean content as my method for preparing for the TOPIK II exam, would I finally pass and get a good score?
The idea is something I’m trying to copy and transfer from Spanish, which is I will grind as hard as I can immersing in Korean like I used to do with Spanish.
Can this experiment work?
Anyway, that’s all for now. My goal is to follow through on this experiment, which I’ll let you know the progress by the end of February.
Til’ next time!
