[August 2024] Korean Progress Update

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Hey there, how’s your Korean going?

This post is to share with you my Korean language progress for the month of August 2024.

I encourage you to do the same – come share your journey and let’s talk about it together in the comments.

Since this is my first time ever to share my progress with any language I’m learning, it may lack some details about the progress. You can always ask me in the comments so that I could share those extra details.

If we’re all set, let’s begin!

Brief Context: Here’s my About page to see the languages I’m learning, as well as learn what Multilingual Journey is all about.

August 2024 Progress

Let’s have a starting point by telling my quick background, since this is my first update and I don’t have a previous update to base on.

I discovered Korean since 2011. Sadly, this doesn’t mean I’m already fluent because I had plenty of breaks. If I would assess myself in CEFR standards, I would say I’m on the near edge of A2 (Upper Beginner) trying to cross the other side towards B1 (Lower Intermediate).

I managed to conclude this because I based my performance in the previous TOPIK (one of the recognized tests for the Korean language), which placed me at Level 2. I took the exam that could have qualified me to Level 3, but sadly I failed in doing so. There are 6 levels for TOPIK, which makes it pretty similar to the CEFR standards.

How then would I describe my Korean ability? Here are some of my observations:

  • I’m mainly input-based – a firm believer in comprehensible input (CI) – and heavily rely on the Internet for immersing in content
  • I do more listening and reading than speaking and writing
  • I have plenty of grammar and vocabulary knowledge, but a lot of them become forgotten when I don’t encounter them during immersion
  • Whenever I try output, I overthink and rely on English translations to help me create sentences – therefore I still suck at it
  • Grammar is self-sustaining, since I could use either my knowledge or the “context” to understand the input
  • I began to explore different domains, with topics such as travel, weather, culture, and coffee β˜•

So far, this is the starting point.

When it comes to tracking my activities, I admit I don’t yet have a reliable system. What I do have is my Toggl Track app, which has been helping me record this month’s activity (number of hours) with Korean.

For the month of August 2024, my total time (as recorded in Toggl) is 14 hours and 5 minutes.

Personally, I think it’s not much. All I’m focused at the moment is to continue immersing in Korean every single day, turning it into a habit.

Below I’ll break down the specifics of how I immerse in Korean, since my strategy relies heavily on comprehensible input.

  • Watching Korean videos with Korean subtitles on YouTube – I have a dedicated YouTube channel for immersing in Korean (I got Premium to avoid the constant ads). YouTube is pretty huge and diverse when it comes to content in ANY language and topic you could think of, which enabled me to choose domain-specific topics to consume for myself.
  • Reading practice with a physical book – I got myself a fiction book, λΆˆνŽΈν•œ 편의점, which I admit I still struggle to understand and I’m just getting started as of today. The point is not to understand everything, but simply to get the reading practice in, looking up some interesting vocabulary along the way.
  • Listening to podcasts – Before I began to share my progress here, I’ve been heavily listening to Korean podcasts, my main favorite being Talk to Me In Korean’s podcasts. But overall, I have a huge selection of podcasts to listen to, which definitely adds up to my immersion time

The activities above make up the bulk of my Korean learning time for August. Nothing special, it’s just me getting some input whenever I’m able to fit it in my schedule.

Goals for September 2024

Now, I’ll set the goal for the next update.

The way I see it, I only managed to immerse for half an hour in a single day (on average). Surely, it can still be improved.

Without further complicating it, the main goal is to simply increase my immersion time in Korean. Here are the ways I would go about it:

  • Focusing on a handful of YouTube channels – the downside of YouTube is it can be very distracting when you’re not careful. My approach then would be to try narrowing down my selection of YouTube channels to only the ones I’d be interested in consuming.
  • Averaging 1 hour per day in Korean immersion – it’s not so hard to ask for, but it can be tricky to sustain the motivation to maintain that length. I feel like I have no strong reason to keep pushing the language at the moment because I don’t have particular use for it, but as a habit I could easily attend to it regularly.
  • Reading my current physical book – For the sake of reading exercise, I will keep reading the Korean fiction book that I bought. Out of all my immersion resources, this is the only one I can do WITHOUT a gadget, which is nice because I can go analog with it.

These are my goals to keep on pursuing.

By the end of September 2024, I’ll be back again to create another Korean progress report. Thanks for reading this far, I appreciate it πŸ™

How’s your progress in Korean? Let’s talk about it in the comments.