Best way to Read Korean on an eReader

I think reading is effective for learning your target language only if you find a way to make it more comprehensible. You still get benefit from reading a lot while looking up nothing but the benefit is so minuscule compared to reading something on the kindle where you can look up stuff instantaneously with very little effort due to its amazing pop-up dictionary ( You can even generate anki cards from the dictionary look ups via anki plugins). I have been looking into how to read a korean ebook (without drm) with dictionary look-up on an ereader this past week because I really hate how I can’t look up anything on the kindle. Your only option for learning Korean on the kindle is to highlight all the sentences you want to look up later as you read. I thought if insert hanja into the text via hanjaro that that would be enough to make reading in Korean on the kindle more conducive to learning but it’s not enough. Usually I more often don’t know korean-korean words as opposed to sino-words when I read Korean since I use hanjaro (and most or half the time it’s correct or at least helpful). What I especially love about the kindle is that I have no desire to add words to anki when I read stuff on it. The reason is that my interest in the word in question is at its peak the moment read it in the compelling book while possessing the knowledge of the full context. So when I look up the word on the kindle my curiosity is usually completely satisfied and I understand the sentence much better than before I looked it up ( don’t know about you but I usually suck at guessing/inferencing from the meaning of an unknown word based on text) and I could care less whether or not I’ll remember the meaning of the word or the word itself 30 minutes from that moment (Also I never understood the appeal of language notebooks where you copy the dictionary/example sentence etc in a notebook when you look-up words while reading… sounds time-consuming and ineffective to me). I sometimes highlight sentences and stuff if there are stuff I want to look up that I can’t look up or find in the kindle dictionary. Also FYI Hanjaro is conducive to look ups because it separates the word from the particle etc with the parentheses so all I have to do is long-press rather than long-press and drag to only select the word. 

So it is possible to make a kindle dictionary for Korean-English. I came across one, I made 2 of them myself (from lingoes dictionary) but it seems like the kindle’s firmware doesn’t allow it to work somehow?? The dictionaries show up on the kindle but then when I look up a korean word it keeps pointing me to this same dictionary entry (I think it was margarita lol. I was livid since I was so close) regardless of what word I press on. They just don’t work on the kindle but there’s nothing wrong with the dictionary files themselves. I know they’re formatted perfectly exactly the way kindle wants it.

<— The brown thing at the bottom is a woodenbookholder I got off amazon. I highly recommend GETTING one if you read books.

I got the boyue likebook 7.8 inch ANDROID ereader in 2018 or 2017 (can’t remember) for the purpose of reading manga since the price seemed reasonable (to search for other android ereaders check out the good ereader blog or ebook reader blog). It was around $185 and I figured if I read 37 manga I would’ve gotten my money’s worth. I definitely did since JIN is 20 volumes, bokutachi ga yarimasita is 9 volumes and liar game is 19 volumes and I read other stuff too. It’s ironic because right now I’m not reading any manga on it. I will go back to manga once I finish reading this PDF of this korean novel (I think it’s a light novel if such a genre exists in Korean writing).

During my kindle investigation I realized that android ereaders might be the ONLY SOLUTION. I found this forum post about using goldendict as a pop-up dictionary on the Moon+ Reader app. So I got the apps via google play on my likebook android ereader and loaded all the stardict dictionaries (they’re available for free! Just google) for Korean onto it and it works! I loaded Naver Korean-japanese, standard korean-korean,  naver korean-english, edocu korean-english from lingoes, and vicom korean-english (I think the naver dictionaries are from 2009 because they match the lingoes dictionaries that were uploaded in 2009. ). Coincidentally the max number of dictionaries for the free version of goldendict is 5 dictionaries. Goldendict lets me order the dictionaries because i don’t have to be scrolling all day so i keep the k-k at the bottom of course and naver at the top of the pack. Also I enabled the option to save history of look-ups. This means that it’ll make a .txt file that contains all the look-ups that i did while reading that has an entry in one of the dictionaries. It doesn’t save look-ups that have no matches in the dictionaries. hmm guess I could use that for MASS TAGGING via morphman… we’ll see how that goes! The downsides are the lag and that the pop-up dictionary only does exact match minus a dictionary that has inflections in it but it’s not complete because korean has a million conjugations lol. Also if you were to read it on the smartphone/tablet you can configure it so the word is looked up on naver so you don’t have to do any deconjugating. As for the exact match, I sometimes have to erase letters just so the goldendict dictionary suggests “are you looking for this word?” in the dictionary window and then I click on the word in question. Other times I partially select the word before hitting dictionary look-up so that goldendict can suggest the word once the dictionary window opens. For example for 가다듬기  I selected 가다듬 then clicked dic to bring the dictionary up, then tapped on the search bar, at that point goldendict gives me suggestions such as 가다듬다 which I click on. For stuff like 서려서, I would either highlight the whole sentence to look up later or type 서리다 in the dictionary window ( only problem is I risk the chance of wasting my time if the word is in none of the dictionaries anyway. For some reason goldendict adds a space at the end of the word but it doesn’t affect the search results so I don’t bother erasing it and just type whatever I need to type to bring up the results ) . Also if the dictionary entry defines the word as a stronger/weaker version of x I can long press on x, copy it, then paste it in the search bar. Combining hanjaro with this pop-up dictionary makes reading in Korean so much more fun (since obviously it’s more fun when you understand what you’re reading. I think the most important words that i don’t know that i come across are nouns because if you know what “that” is you’re fucked and the dictionaries are really good for nouns which aren’t  conjugated ), less burdensome, less exhausting, conducive to learning, and I feel no pressure to make up anki cards for words I look up. I like reading korean with hanja inserted as I explained in my love letter to hanjaro! Moonreader has other dictionary options like google translate and some other web translations but I never use them. I am kinda frugal so that part of me likes how this method does not require Wi-fi. One of the advantages of an ereader versus the smartphone/tablet IS the battery life… Though this isn’t as convenient and ideal as clicking on a word to have it looked up on naver dictionary automatically unconjugated, it’s still incredibly helpful and convenient for me at my current korean level since I’m not a beginner. I can imagine that this ereader reading method may not have much appeal to someone who has to look up 10-20 words a page. Though I would recommend such a person to do something else and go back to novels later since it sounds like the book is too hard or their Korean would be better improved through other activities.

Actually now that I think about it, even if the dictionary worked in kindle it’s inferior to goldendict since it searches via exact matches (most of the korean dictionaries don’t have the inflections included) and it doesn’t give you the option to search the dictionary like with the 가다듬다 example I mentioned. As far as I know that only one of the 5 dictionaries has inflections (all the manys ways you conjugate stuff ie 가다듬다, 가다듬기. Korean grammar is super convoluted so the inflection list would be very long if you were to make a kindle dictionary that functions well. ) but even then it has less entries than naver korean-japanese dictionaries so I’m not sure how helpful it’d be. After all the whole point of reading novels is so you can come across words you don’t necessarily hear/read everyday.

Moon reader gives me the option of copying the text or looking up the word in the dictionary when I tap once which works great for japanese defintions since there’s no spaces between the words. I can also highlight text in the dictionary to copy if I long press but dragging is annoying so I stick to the normal tap) on the ereader app. The moon+ reader app allows multiple highlight options such as squiggly line, straight line, different colors. I thought it might separate the notes/highlights based on the style in the .txt but it didn’t do anything like that so i just stick with the squiggly line because it’s aesthetically pleasing. I stuck with the squiggly line since I like the way it looks. To highlight I long press on a word, extend the highlight as far as I need it to be extended, then click on the highlight option among the options of HIGHLIGHT, NOTE, and DICTIONARY. I’ve accidentally looked up whole sentences in the dictionary by mistake due to mis-press. Moon+ reader allows export of notes and highlights one book at a time so you can’t export your highlight/notes for all the books you read at once on the ereader. That’s not a deal breaker for me since it makes sense for me to e-mail the highlights/notes after finishing a book rather than months after finishing the book. To send it, go into the book, double press in the center to bring up the notes/bookmarks options, go in to the bookmarks section, then press SHARE. Under share it brings up many options but I stuck with the one that involved emailing it via gmail.

It was formatted like this in the e-mail. It shows the title of the book, author, number of highlights, number of notes, the highlights in CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. Each highlight is preceded by a square which I appreciate. Considering that the book is 300 pages long, I think 199 highlights + 3 notes seem reasonable. It doesn’t even include dictionary look-ups and as I’ve said I usually don’t highlight stuff that the dictionary elucidated. I think he difficulty level of this book is pretty similar to 엘리베이터에 낀 사람 by 김영하 which is also a collection of short stories by the same author. The number sounds right to me. For the elevator book, I only added stuff to anki for some of the short stories because I had the physical book and I only wanted looked up words for the short stories that I had found an electrical copy for since manually typing stuff is too labor intensive. Google works wonders 🙂 I could’ve taken pictures while reading and then run them through google keep for OCR then generate cards but I didn’t know about google keep’s capabilities back then. It’s a shame because there were even a couple paragraphs in the later stories that made me go wtf did I read? I literally took my red pen and drew an arc next to the paragraphs. I love learning from sentences/paragraphs that I don’t understand by asking on chiebukuro and other places.

무슨 일이 일어났는지는 아무도 – 김영하 (Highlight: 199; Note: 3)

───────────────

◆ 무슨 일이 일어났는지는 아무도

▪  SENTENCE I HIGHLIGHTED

▪ SENTENCE I HIGHLIGHTED

I wrote this because I like reading stuff on an ereader and NOT on a smartphone or a tablet or a computer screen due to the eye strain those devices cause. Even if you use dark mode/background, blue light filter, computer glasses etc, it’s never going to be as pleasant an experience as reading on an eReader. Although, I’m sure there are many great options for looking up words while reading Korean on the tablet/smartphone/computer screen.

My initial goal of getting a korean-english/korean-japanese/etc dictionary on the kindle working ended in futility since I didn’t succeed. However I got my answer of “no you can’t use a Korean-English dictionary kindle.” Just in case you’re curious, the English-Korean dictionary works perfectly on the kindle but I don’t need that! From this experience I learned how to convert dictionary files to STARDICT format (which enables me to use them for wordquery anki plugin and so now I have 5 dictionaries that I run through the wordquery plugin on anki for my Korean cards), I know how to convert tab delimited files to the kindle format though it’s pointless for Korean, and I found my holy grail Korean font as you can tell from the screenshot. This was tricky because I like reading Korean with hangeul and hanja together so the hanja can’t look hideous. Unfortunately I had to eliminate some fonts that were gorgeous in their hangeul letters but hideous in their kanji/hanja forms. There were some korean fonts that only had hangeul and no hanja so the hanja just became squares or blanks which shocked me. Also, I thought the hanja looked gorgeous on the UnGungseo font but for some reason the letters are spaced way too far apart so I can’t tell where the spaces between the words are since it looks like there’s a space between every syllable block. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a Korean font where the hanja looks gorgeous the way it does on ungunseo so I settled on 서울 font and 한겨레. I have a distinct disdain for straight Korean fonts which make me that much less motivated to read Korean and increase my anxiety. I must say that using a font I love in the ereader makes me that much more excited to read Korean but I’m sure the novelty will wear off .

I aptly titled this the best way to korean on an ereader since it’s the only way as far I know for us korean learners that do not live in korea. I’ve heard of this korean ereader crema that is overpriced, is slow/laggy, and only has korean-korean dictionary WHICH just doesn’t appeal to me since the android e-reader is much better.

Crema e-readers in USA?
byu/boristhetorus inKorean

Also, I unfortunately bought physical Korean books  a year or two ago.  I finished one or two of them and for one of them I kept writing in the kanji in the margins of the book because I hated and resented being forced to spend unnecessary energy to figure out the meaning of the words because they only write in hangeul (Sometimes I could clearly tell it’s hanja but I had no idea which one it is despite the context so I felt even more resentful). I can only imagine how much more fruitless and hopeless it would feel if I was illiterate in Japanese and knew nothing about hanja…. I think I’ll try to go back and finish reading them all after I read all my ebooks (about 30 or so). I’m sure it’ll be a breeze by that point.

EDIT: I don’t think it’s unfortunate  that I bought physical korean books at all! I discovered the mass tagger feature for morphman so what I do is read the physical book in korean and underline words using a red pen and copy the words into a notebook with a black or blue pen right before I flip the page over. It’s not a massive undertaking because I underline anywhere from 0-6 words per page.  I underline with a straight line for words I do not know and have no f’in idea what it means and squiggle or wavy lines for when i kinda know the word or it’s kinda familiar with etc but i want to read the definition or example sentences in anki. Then I type up the words and tag the anki cards THAT MATCH THE words in the text using morphman and move the cards into their own priority deck. from there I curate anki cards during anki reviews using the mark feature because korean has homonyms and some anki cards based on certain dictionaries are better (ie presence of example sentences, english, japanese, korean etc) and I am all about the cloze format. I use the basic card type for the initial view and use the css that makes the first letter of the text after a <p> white to make a clozey card.

}
p:first-letter {font-weight: bold; color: white; border-style: dashed; border-color: black; font-size: 50px}

I didn’t make anki cards out of the 900,000+ entry korean-korean dictionary or the other korean-korean dictionary (except for the STANDARD one with 300,000+ entries because it has mad examples sentences) because I hate wasting time reading hangeul I don’t understand. Then I convert the curated cards into cloze cards by changing card type in anki (i generated clozes in advance using excel). I don’t worry about the words that anki didn’t tag because it wasn’t among the 400,000+? 600,000+? dictionary anki cards and other anki  cards i’ve dumped into from sites and I don’t have time or energy to chase after every word. I am aware of the endless number of korean words that are not in the dictionary including the korean-korean dictionary. Luckily I’m at a level where 95-99% of the time, the word I underline in the book is not critical to understanding the story or be significant enough to sway my enjoyment/rating of the book/story so I feel pretty content. I will mention that I’m very liberal when it comes to underlining the words like i’ll underline words evne if i am 90% sure of the meaning or it’s not my first time coming across it so i have some familiarity with it because i want to see the word/ex sentence in anki because it’s easy to do that.  morphman’s main function of ordering cards is useless af for me for korean but it’s other functions like mass tagger is a GODSEND!

Here are the dictionary files I used for goldendict + moon reader for anyone with android! I got 2 from lingoes (they had to be converted and that’s the edocu and the vicom one), and 3 from stardict. I edited 2 of them with stardict editor because there were no line breaks which makes reading the entries unnecessarily difficult.

MEDIAFIRE LINK (updated 02.2021)

to break it down the 5 are

①　92,000 entries – vicom is korean-english (from lingoes).

②　81,596 entries – K-E naver dictionary converted from lingoes. for some reason i can’t get edocu lingoes dictionary to convert to stardict. unfortunate since it contains more entries than the stardict k-e. well 5 dictionaries is amazingly helpful.

③　standard korean dictionary  366,507 entries  – KOREAN – KOREAN | vastly superior to the k-k dic on the stardict site in terms number of entries  (k dic on stardict contains 147,000+ entries). it has example sentences and pronunciation too.

　四　84, 000 entries naver-KRJP is korean-japanese

⑤　stardict-korean-eng –  49, 757 entries

MORE stardict/goldendict dictionaries here

if you just dump stardict dictionaries into the android ereader you’ll most likely hate the formatting. you have to change <br> to \n for the goldendict and get rid of </font> and <font color= etc etc . dl and use the  .exe file in the stardict-decompile-compile folder to make the .txt to find and replace the stuff to format to your heart’s content.

ALSO! here is the link for all the stardict dictionaries that you can use on the FASTWORD QUERY OR  wordquery plugin on anki 2.0/anki 2.1 !  they’re formatted for using on anki with wordquery so they won’t look pretty on stardict/goldendict.

MEDIAFIRE

There are 4 dictionaries in the korean-english dictionary folder. The other dictionaries are korean-korean, korean-japanese from naver, and hanja (all it does is insert all the homonyms). This brings the grand total to 7! I had to edit some of them with stardict editor because there were NO LINE BREAKS which makes the entries hard to read. The one titled github was converted from the tsv file on this github page

I like the quick korean-english dictionary because it’s so BRIEF and short. Of course my favorite is naver korean-japanese. If I’m desperate or I feel like it (if it’s the only field that’s filled from running query) I check out the korean-korean definition since reading Korean is labor intensive and fruitless at times (when you read it, or even re-read it and don’t understand what you read). There are 2 English dictionaries that generate a lot of text since they’re FULL of example sentences. They might be identical but I’m not sure so I just kept both.

Here’s another reddit link where someone mentioned using koreader on a kobo ereader to read korean.

What’s the best way read Korean on android and iphone or ereader for learning Korean??
byu/Sayonaroo inKorean

found this: https://medium.com/korea-travel-art-en/e-reader-korean-en-56d4d9ca589c

also this: https://m.blog.naver.com/mebiwoos82/221923690860 this person calls crema reader shit lol.

tldr is get an android ereader and install apps to read ebooks with dictionary look-up. kindle is shit for learning korean.

Korean 101: yet again

Previous installments: here and here

포스

I first came across this word on a Korean TV show that involved dancing, singing or rapping. I am certain that on Unpretty Rapstars someone was using that word to describe Jessie. I misunderstood 포스 for a long time because I never looked it up in English. I recall looking it up in Japanese and got the meaning of the word. I assumed that it came from POSE since I heard POSU. The Korean word is actually based on FORCE. When I read the meaning of the word I was peeved that they were forcefully imposing that meaning on top of the word “pose.” I must say digesting and remembering the meaning of POSU is easier after inputting the actual English root word. It reminds me of the time I thought style meant style in Japanese for the longest time since I never thought to look it up since I know English. However, it turned to actually mean body…. I wrote about it on lang-8 eons ago!

Another Korean-related snafu that I experienced was a ridiculously long sentence.

I was reading this blog entry about Produce 48 that was disguised as a news article. At the end of the article, they write this was from a blog or something that to that effect which sounded ridiculous to me. While I was reading this mammoth of a blog entry/article, I came across a long sentence that I could not follow. I had no problem understanding the clauses but I could not connect them together and comprehend the sentence as a whole. I read it multiple times and kept getting lost at the same part lol. After reading someone’s English translation, stuff clicked in my head and I had no problem following and understanding the sentence in its entirety.

here is that sentence!
이에 일본을 대표하는 아이돌 그룹이 자신들의 떨어진 인기를 회복하기 위해, 한국 아이돌처럼 뛰어난 실력을 기르기 위해, 동시에 이를 바탕으로 혹시라도 케이팝의 시장인 더 넓은 세계에서도 이름을 알릴 기회를 얻을 수 있을지 모른다는 기대를 갖은 채 자신들을 참고삼아 만든 것이 분명한 한국 프로그램에 참여하는 재미있는 상황이 벌어지고 있는 것이다.

and click below for the translation/explanation. Also I learned that this Korean person made a mistake in his writing in this crazy long sentence.

This sentence is so long I can’t follow it. what does 자신들을 참고삼아 만든 것이 분명한 한국 프로그램에 참여하는 재미있는 상황이 벌어지고 있는 것이다. mean??
byu/Sayonaroo inKorean

Moving on, I learned about the nuance of bun-hada when I was reading about Produce 48 in Japanese.

I read the article a few weeks after the show wrapped and I admit that I completely missed the bun-hada commotion. I didn’t notice at all. On the show they mistranslated miyawaki sakura’s comment when she said kuyashii desu which I’ve heard at least a couple hundred times in my life at least just from KATOU the geinin. Apparently, a bunch of korean netizens starting hating on her from that mistranslation.  Apparently they’ve screwed over asada mao and other Japanese people with mistranslations. I understand Japanese so if anything when people speak Japanese on Produce48 I read the Korean to learn Korean or to see how they translated stuff. So of course I’m not gonna go outta my way to look words in a Korean translation of Japanese speech when I understand Japanese speech. If you want to read about that maelstrom  google 분하다 미야와키 사쿠라 or watch the youtube vids about it.  Now I know the nuance of bunhada~

Additionally, I learned about 야민정음 when I was reading produce 101 season 2 stuff and ran into 국끄 which obviously is not in the dictionary. I can just tell.

Here’s a copy paste of the explanation:

국끄 is a sort of 야민정음, an alternative alphabet of Korean mostly used in dcinside and other sister sites related with it. The main rule of creating 야민정음 is to replace hanguls with other similar-shaped hanguls. So the actual meaning of 국끄 is 국프, the abbreviation of 국민프로듀서.

The fans of 프로듀스101 call themselves 국프, following the original concept of the audition program, which asks viewers to pick a contestant and vote as producers. When you self-claim as a 강다니엘국끄, for example, what you are trying to say is that you’re a 강다니엘’s fan/supporter.

END OF PASTE

To be completely honest, I hate that shit and I will never use it. Nor will I ever misspell words on purpose in Korean when I write in Korean. Reading Hangeul is labor-intensive as it is since I can’t help but compare it to my reading experience in Japanese… I was livid when I saw them misspelling words on purpose on this Korean TV show on MNET. It was a combination of yamin-jung-eum, making shit cute, and just for shits and giggles. I wonder what percentage of the words were spelled correctly on that show?? It was ridiculous and I’m so glad I didn’t see it 2012/2011. I would’ve been wtf and wasting a lot of time with google and dictionary if I attempted to decode that.

(<__- lol Japanese idols)

Lastly, I found out that hoarders exist in Korea too! If you think about it hoarders exist wherever consumerism exists. To fill your computer/phone screen with disgusting images search 호더즈 or 저장강박증

I gotta check out all the videos on youtube. It’s fascinating to me.

HANJARO – 漢字路 Resource Recommendation

HANJARO | 漢字路  |  한자로 ♪～（･ε･ )

I recommend this useful resource for Korean learners who know and can read Japanese or Chinese. For the love of god don’t learn Korean and japanese/chinese at the same time unless you want to suck forever. Get very literate/good at Japanese/Chinese then learn Korean for max efficiency. This is a site that inserts Chinese characters into the Korean text you paste. For longer texts like ebooks you have to download their program and use it on hancom or microsoft office.  (mediafire link to the plugins)The hancom/microsoft word plugin has more options to customize rendering ie only show hanja for the first instance of the word, ignore single syllable words, ability to add more words to the list, etc.  I recommend pairing hanjaro with lingoes off-line dictionary for reading on the computer!

lingoes dictionaries i Use : MEDIAFIRE

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<_-__–_first selection is language as in what kinda chinese characters do you want: they are korean, taiwanese, mandarin, japanese… hanja, hanzi, hanzi, kanji

second selection is asking you whether you want to put the hanja next to the word or replace the hangeul with the hanja. i have it selected as NEXT To the word which is the second option.

the last option let’s you exclude/include hanja in different levels… if you’re literate in Japanese then you pretty much know all the hanja or kanji equivalents in the 8 levels since 2000 is the bare minimum i’m sure we all know more from reading and watching japanese tv lol.

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It gives the user various options to customize the rendering to his or her needs:

• • paste the text or paste the URL. I usually paste the text because I usually hate the formatting of the website.
  • replace the hangeul with hanja or place hanja next to the hanguel word
  • the option of choosing from Chinese characters used in Taiwan, China, Japan, or Korea.
  • when it places the hanja next to the hangeul it place parentheses around the hanja word so what I like doing is doing control + h  (to bring up the FIND AND REPLACE WINDOW) and replace ( with space (
    so I can use lingoes off-line dictionary since lingoes only processes exact matches for Korean (I double click for it to look up the word). For example, instead of 논의(論議) I get 논의 (論議).  Parentheses inserted in by Hanjaro and the space inserted via control +h facilitate the use of lingoes pop-up dictionary (Before I’d manually insert spaces between sino-words and particles so I can double-click and look up the word on lingoes). Lingoes is great at compensating the weakness of hanjaro which is that it only inserts one hanja that matches even if there are multiple homonyms. Hanjaro makes lingoes even more useful by making it easier to look up sino-words. Lingoes offers k-j, k-e, and more ! ( I use K-J and K-e) Also, Hancom word processor has a k-k dictionary which works as a pop-up dictionary too! (however like lingoes the stuff has to be unconjugated and the kango words need to have a space from the verb etc) I do like how the dictionary searches as you type like Lingoes.   Unfortunately lingoes pop-up dictionary does NOT work on hancom word so I read the articles on notepad (the formatting on these Korean websites are terrible for reading) and I use lingoes pop-up dictionary (I also send text lingoes to look up words to save time for words that need to be unconjugated etc) then either look up the word using one of the authotkey shortcuts for opening a dictionary website with the word already inputted. However, lingoes comes to the front when I press control + L and also minimizes when I press control + L so looking stuff up isn’t cumbersome. I also have a script that sends text to lingoes
• 
  • <-FOR THIS particular word the corresponding meaning was not listed under the k-e english dictionary lol. It was however listed in the K-J naver dic for lingoes which I reached after scrollling.
  • 
  • I  have it set it on lingoes that if I hover over a word in the definition and press SHIFT, lingoes looks up that word! Also I only have the computer’s language set to Japanese because I can only set the computer language to Korean or Japanese because those are the only keyboards I have installed since it’s a pain to switch between keyboards if I have English, Korean and Japanese. also the korean keyboard includes English so it is redundant.  I prefer reading Japanese over Korean (I prefer English the most though! I’d rather read English than katakana which is the case with the computer) so I switched it to Japanese but now I’m considering changing it back to Korean because now hancom is full of gibberish since it can’t render Korean.

• I use it when I generate Korean anki cards from readlang.com. I use the cloze deletion format so I put the text rendered by hanjaro on the back of the card instead of the original sentence to lower the barrier of reading. Also the sentences that I encounter via reading  tend to be dense with information. UPDATE: I now use authotkey to collect sentences and it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It’s just more convenient for me than readlang.com. Also I LOVE EXCEL!

Here’s an example of text that went through hanjaro. I chose hanja for the rendering BUT as I’ve mentioned you choose kanji, simplified hanzi, etc.

7일(日) 한 매체(媒體)는 ‘프로듀스 101’의 네 번째(番째) 시즌이 내년(來年) 4월(月) 방송(放送)을 목표(目標)로 제작(製作)을 준비(準備) 중(中)이라고 보도(報道)했다. 이에 대(對)해 Mnet 측(側)은 “새로운 시즌을 논의(論議) 중(中)이다. 하지만 편성(編成) 등(等) 자세(仔細)한 사항(事項)은 아직 확정(確定)된 부분(部分)이 없다”며 말을 아꼈다.

‘프로듀스 101’ 시리즈는 그동안 아이오아이, 워너원 등(等)을 탄생시켜 대중(大衆)들의 뜨거운 반응(反應)을 이끌어 냈다. 또한, 가장 최근(最近) 시즌인 ‘프로듀스 48’에서는 아이즈원까지 출범(出帆)시켰다.

I actually know and am already familiar with all the words in the article excerpt so I don’t need the hanja inserted but I definitely read faster and with LESS effort with hanja than without. The name of the program, Hanjaro, reminds me of 活路 sure enough for a myriad of reasons. The word exists in Korean too so that’s a freebie! Hey there’s also 血路 혈로

Here’s the before:

7일 한 매체는 ‘프로듀스 101’의 네 번째 시즌이 내년 4월 방송을 목표로 제작을 준비 중이라고 보도했다. 이에 대해 Mnet 측은 “새로운 시즌을 논의 중이다. 하지만 편성 등 자세한 사항은 아직 확정된 부분이 없다”며 말을 아꼈다.

‘프로듀스 101’ 시리즈는 그동안 아이오아이, 워너원 등을 탄생시켜 대중들의 뜨거운 반응을 이끌어 냈다. 또한, 가장 최근 시즌인 ‘프로듀스 48’에서는 아이즈원까지 출범시켰다.

 

<- goldendict woes and joy

 

It has its limitations which primarily stem from the existence of homonyms that exist in Korean. However, that’s almost nonissue to me since I am very literate in Japanese and I’ve gotten fairly proficient in Korean from the time put I put into the language from the summer of 2011. It’s obvious to me when the hanja is wrong based on the context. I use the hanja as a visual aid to exert less effort and lower the burden while reading and to read faster. The beauty of kanji and hanja is that I read its meaning automatically, without my volition, and instantaneously. Hangeul is cool and effortless to read out loud (phonetics phonetics) and it’s easy to read and you max out on your speed rather quickly if you read a lot BUT compared to reading Japanese it’s more labor-intensive and it’s not something will change from reading a shit ton of Korean. If I had to quantify the amount of energy it takes to read hangeul for meaning for the sake of comparison it’d be 1 and for Japanese it would 0.1 or 0.01. The only analogy I can think of to explain it to someone who can’t read Japanese/Chinese is numbers and even then it’s not a perfect analogy since hanja/kanji aren’t numbers and numbers aren’t hanja/kanji…. but at least you get an idea

Here goes:

Would you prefer to read 123,865,987,123 or one hundred twenty-three billion eight hundred sixty-five million nine hundred eighty-seven thousand one hundred twenty-three?

Or how about 천이백삼십팔억 육천오백구십팔만 칠천백이십삼?

I definitely prefer the former. And on a related note, I hate reading numbers in kanji which would be 一千二百三十八億六千五百九十八萬七千一百二十三 here according to aChinese number converter. All the characters here are the same as the characters in Japanese with the exception of MAN. Not as labor-intensive to read as roman numerals but still way too demanding for me. I never got good at understanding/using man/oku etc  (issenman etc) because usually they’re talking about money so I’m always converting to USD to see if the people on TV are over-reacting or exaggerating.

Here’s another one:

would you prefer to read Breaking Bad or 브레이킹 배드,

orgasm or 오르가슴?

lol j/k but seriously I take English’s spelling inconsistencies over reading English words in hangeul any day!  The first time I encountered 오르가슴 in a Korean novel, I thought it was a Korean word that had something to with chest lol… BTW 얼룩말 has nothing to do with words or talking… I didn’t know the word before I watched so I was just as confused as they were…

I am acutely aware of how labor-intensive reading Korean is compared to Japanese when it comes to reading for meaning. It’s especially noticeable when I see a Korean sentence with a Japanese translation when the sentence is full of sino-words such as this huge deck I made from dumping in stuff I found on cool, helpful Japanese sites… That’s just one reason why going “monolingual” for Korean is so different from going “monolingual” for Japanese which I don’t support anyway. It takes SO MUCH MORE effort to read uninteresting Korean stuff vs uninteresting Japanese stuff simply because hangeul is labor-intensive to read compared to Japanese… I especially noticed this disparity between the writing system when I do my huge pre-made Korean deck that I made from Japanese sites. I read the Japanese automatically with 0 effort and even if I try to focus my energy on reading the hangeul first etc during my anki reviews because kanji/JAPANESE-WRITING gets read automatically without my volition…. I am saying this as a person who is MAXED THE F OUT on my hangeul reading speed. It doesn’t take long to max out on that. On a side note, I like learning Korean using Japanese because it also helps my Japanese since it helps my notice how exactly stuff is said/worded in Japanese since it’s not always a word-to-word translation from Korean.

ie this

Front:

A: 회사를 그만두고 독립하기로 결정했다.
会社を辞めて独立することにした。

Back is the same as the front.

Some sentences are longer or more boring or more complex or have words that I am less familiar with and those factors contribute even more to me rejoicing that I don’t need to read Korean translations of Japanese books/manga/etc. I personally think it makes sense to take advantage of ALL THE LANGUAGES you know to learn a language rather than LIMITING yourself one language (even if it’s that’s the target language or especially because it’s the target language) to learn the language. It’s common sense. Sometimes the English/Japanese/Korean is more memorable or explains it better etc and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hanja is a fantastic companion to hangeul for reading for lazy people like me who happen to know how to read Japanese. I use hanjaro for internet articles and korean ebooks. It makes reading Korean more pleasant for me even despite its limitations.

Now, I can finally put my foot down when it comes to adding hanja based words to anki. Sometimes I’d be almost mad at myself for not recognizing a hanja word that I already know since I know the Japanese equivalent and they sound sorta similar and/or I’ve already looked it up in the past. I get into this conundrum of should I put this into anki to make sure I don’t waste time looking it up if I don’t recognize the word in a future encounter even though it’s kind of a freebie since I know Japanese or should I not add it and hope I will be able to conjure up the word’s meaning next time I encounter it from having looked it up and just based on the hangeul and context. Now because of this site I will only add hanja-words to anki that are truly difficult or tricky to remember. After all, the korean korean words (ex 코딱지 and no that word is not in my anki deck) are hard to remember as it is and I want to focus my energy on those words as opposed to hanja-words I already know that I don’t recognize that hide behind the hangeul-mask.

I found the the site by googling in Japanese when I reached a chiebukuro question. and I’m just kicking myself for not having done it sooner. The thought popped in my head because I was reading about the pros and cons of writing in Korean in hangeul only vs writing korean in a mixed script of hangeul and hanja on this wiki website that was outlining all the points of contention between the 2 fierce groups. I was surprised to learn from that site that there are so many ways to propose mixing the hanja and hangeul in writing ie only write x type of words in Hanja. I never realized that there were so many ways to go about it. At first I was interested in finding a news site or blog of some sort that writes in mixed hangeul-hanja writing but there’s not much out there and I have no interest reading newspapers from the 70s, 60s etc. With hanjaro I can read any site with hanja inserted and most importantly it allows me to customize the rendering. I never choose the option to replace the hangeul with hanja since the hanja may not be correct due to homonyms or hanjaro mis-identifying non-sino words as sino-words since they happen to share the same sounds such as when it thinks someone’s name or a verb conjugated a certain way or a noun with a particle attached ie ㄴ is a sino-word (this is something they can’t fix since the only way to determine the correct, intended meaning is to look at the CONTEXT precisely because it’s written with only hangeul). Also, if it replaces the text hanja, and I don’t know the reading of the hanja then I’m completely shit out of luck, not to mention it may have replaced the hangeul with the wrong hanja, and most importantly I can’t look up hanja on lingoes pop-up dictionary. Anyway, I love this site because it enables me to take full advantage of Japanese proficiency and my latent korean instincts, knowledge, etc. I have experience a lot of experience reading without hanjaro unfortunately lol and reading with hanjaro and I can unequivocally say that  if I discovered the site in 2016 and NOT 2019/2018 (of course it didn’t exist in 2012/2011! when I started Korean), my Korean would have improved much faster and I definitely would have read MORE. COMPREHENSIVE INPUT ALWAYS TRUMPS INCOMPREHENSIBLE INPUT! But for reals if I read korean with hanjaro from the get go in 2011/2012 i would’ve improved like f’in crazy at an alarming rate lol especially for the news where it’s literally like 90-95% the same words as the japanese news with the korean readings.  I’ll finally get through the north korean spy diaries on lingq !!  thank god for lingq.. the original korean urls are DEAD AF. Reading korean is so much more pleasurable and fun and effortless (not labor-intensive!!!) now!  It’s a pleasant surprise how hanjaro even works on north korean words where they keep the first syllable as R instead of changing it to a Y like they do in south korea. I ain’t saying bring back the mixed script.. don’t put words in my mouth. I’m just saying hanja-filled text (hanja next to the words.. the thing they’re trying to do with korean textbooks… hope it passed!! i don’t like words being replcaed by hanja lol.) provided by hanjaro is better than the original text for my reading pleasure.

I believe I will improve at reading HANGEUL ONLY texts better and faster through reading hangeul text that has hanja haphazardly inserted in than reading the original hangeul only text. ( It’s unforuntate that I can’t test my hypothesis out since I hav ebeen learnig Korean hanjaro-free from 2011 to now which is sheer BS…) It means I constantly reinforce the hanja-based words with the hanja next to them (or by double clicking with lingoes pop-up dictionary to get the correct hanja if it’s the wrong hanja. This is a inconvenience that I don’t consider an inconvenience since it makes me more aware of homonyms and Korean people are pretty much doing this while they read since they possess a huge vocabulary since they’re fluent in Korean and have plenty of experience reading hangeul) instead of seeing them veiled under hangeul and look them up manually over and over EVEN with authotkey scripts + gaming mouse. Before I knew about this site, I would waste my time looking up hanja words I already know but didn’t recognize because they were written in hangeul. I am free of delusions and illusions that somehow reading hangeul-only texts will help me improve at Korean as much as hangeul texts with hanja haphazardly inserted in. Reading hangeul as a native Korean is a completely different experience from reading Korean as a Korean learner simply for that fact that I’m not fluent in Korean. You can boast about your ability to phonetically read hangeul as much as you want but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not comprehending the information like a native due to lack of vocab, shoddy parsing skills, lack of knowledge, lack of grammar, etc… There’s no reason to subject myself to what natives read which is hangeul-only text for silly, vapid, ascetic (? lol) reasons. I am not a native Korean speaker and somehow pretending that I am one and acting like one, does not serve my goals and aspirations. For one thing, I know English and Japanese and I am very literate in both so I can never look at hangeul the way Koreans (who can’t read hanja/KANJI/ETC) look at hangeul. Hangeul’s weaknesses and strengths are obvious to me and I can’t pretend to be illiterate in Japanese/English. I’ve recently developed a new-found appreciation for hangeul when I found out how misleading pinyin is! The most damning anecdotal evidence that I have to back reading text with hanja haphazardly inserted over hangeul-only texts is my experience of learning/reading Korean pre-hanjaro and post-hanjaro. It’s better to read comprehensible text than incomprehensible text and hanjaro increases comprehensibility despite its defects so it makes reading Korean more fruitful and I am at a level in Korean where I’m not being overwhelmed with the inclination to read the hanja next to the words with the Japanese readings and disregarding the Hangeul that corresponds with the hanja (Though I have a feeling I would’ve benefited from hanjaro from the get-go in my Korean learning since it would’ve cut-down on dictionary look-ups).

here’s an example of a hanja word that I couldn’t figure out from the hangeul and the context. It happened like years ago ?? It’s the only example I can come up with right now because I’ve been loving the hanjaro site and I’ve gotten more literate in Korean these past years. Variations of this has happened to me so many times!

So, I read an article and it used the word 화재 a bunch of times and I said to myself it’s definitely not 화제 (hot topic) and nothing is coming to mind as to what kanji/hanja word it is (I just know that it is a noun and it’s definitely a kanji/hanja word). of course at the end I either looked it up or figured out its the korean version of kasai (Fire disaster). Without fail, I realize that I already looked up 화재 sometime before the second I learned what the meaning was (just seeing the hangeul is completely arbitrary to me). So at that point I had read the whole article not understanding what hajae was other than it was a noun and it’s based on hanja so obviously I missed out. At that point I decided to not re-read the article because it annoyed me immensely and I did not care about the article that much. If you asked me THEN what’s the the hanja reading for 火 and 災 I would say hwa and se/je. I know hwa of course because of TUESDAY and other words but just seeing it in hangeul doesn’t guarantee that I will instantly think of 火. The only thing that evokes  火 without fail is 火 not 화 nor ひ nor か. With the hangeul, depending on the weather, my mood, color of MY underwear etc, I may or may not make that connection ( there is just no guarantee especially since there are multiple hanja that have that reading. Though sometimes nothing comes to mind .  here are some hanja with HWA as the reading.

1 畵
2 話
3 化
4 和
5 嬅
6 樺
7 火
8 禍
9 禾
10 花
11 華
12 譁
13 貨
14 靴

AND are some hanja with jae as the reading

1 再
2 哉
3 在
4 宰
5 才
6 材
7 栽
8 梓
9 渽
10 滓
11 災
12 縡
13 裁
14 財
15 載
16 齋
17 齎

I would answer se/je from guessing since I know that sound conversion rule well since it’s so simple and logical. I think half the time when I read hangeul-only text when I come across unknown hanja compound words NOTHING comes to mind (even if I know a ton of words that contain that hanja) or I think of a few hanja/kanji that would fulfill the pronunciation requirement but clearly does not fit the context so is most likely wrong so I feel pissed that I’m robbed of my energy. I can’t blame myself for not magically figuring out the word on the spot all the time… that’s just the way it is. The other half of the time, I FIGURE IT OUT correctly or think I did but I did not lol or more like FML. It bothers me tremendously because this shit never happens in Japanese because they use Kanji. The thing is your language-learning is a never-ending endeavor… it doesn’t matter how long you’ve been at it, there’s always going to be something you don’t know ie vocabulary EVEN with your native language. When I use hanjaro (I think of it as KATSURO sometimes), reading takes less effort, I read faster, and I don’t waste my time looking up words I pretty much know but have a low familiarity with (I’d rather learn sino-based words from encountering it 20-30 times with the correct/incorrect hanja next to it than to look it up multiple times manually and making anki cards. There’s no urgency for me to grow my korean vocabulary in a brute-force, unnecessarily painful, and laborious manner). time spent Reading > time spent in Anki-related activties like making cards. no brainer! It’s a win win win situation.  Just the other day I came across 중단발 in youtube comments and I was like did so-and-so do something with her leg? then I realized it’s hair and not foot and it’s jong + danbar NOT jongdan + bar. I would never waste this much time for comprehending written text for Japanese.

Also sometime last year, I tried learning from Korean news through this Japanese site that provides korean news in Japanese with links to the original articles in KOrean. For a second I thought that having a Japanese translation would lower my apprehension and burden dramatically. It was a big fail because I don’t like reading about news about government/economics/etc especially when I don’t live in Korea… that stuff bores me. It’s like watching the weather segment of the Korean news except it’s 100 times harder to understand and I live in America. Also darting my eyes between hangeul and Japanese searching for the translation of the unknown word is a pain. Also, sometimes the Japanese version of the article would omit the sentence that I specifically wanted clarification on! More than anything the site made go why the hell would I read this in Korean when there is a Japanese translation with all that kanji since it’s so dense with sino-words written in hangeul.  I think this year I may try to learn from this site since now I have hanjaro added to my arsenal.  I will blog about it if I go through with it~ I’m thinking of setting low goals like 1 article a month etc. EDIT: I did not do this because I have a million other things I’d read in Korean than korean news articles about politics and whatever other boring topics on that site… I’m not into reading news regardless of the language at least the hard-hitting news. I will read news about stuff I’m interested in. Life’s too short to read stuff you’re not interested in. EDIT: this youtube channel is pretty cool. They put japanese subs on short korean news clips and i find it helpful for training listening comprehension haha. i find it better than watching it with english subs, korean subs, no subs in the situation where I watch the video only ONCE with rewinding because my korean level is high and japanese subs serve as fantastic hints  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkSHg01LkqghdfbE_Ru5amg tHIS REMINDS me of the time I saw BoA in a Japanese documentary-type show where she was watching a korean drama with japanese subtitles to practice reading Kanji. I thought it was brilliant due to all the sino-vocab overlap!

I tried using the site for Korean subs to see if it would help me comprehend/reading the subs faster but I found it incredibly distracting since hanja is traditional characters (there’s a lot of stuff going with one character lol). I tried with kanji just in case but it was still distracting since it’s not 100% correct. Not only that, it was subs to YG treasure box on V-LIVE (it is subbed in MANY languages) which is very easy to understand anyway. I love hearing the incorrect Korean from the Japanese people lol. They direct-translate like crazy and they always correct their Korean in the subs. I usually make anywhere from 2-5 anki cards per episode. It’s not as challenging as SMTM or talk shows for obvious reasons. I am better off with hangeul-only subs for this situation. BTW Viki has a lot of dramas with korean and english subs and you can download the subs!

On a related note, whenever I go through korean song lyrics if I think the artist or song is remotely popular I google the song title, artist and wayaku because it’s so much faster for me to go through the lyrics with that compared to me going at it with a dictionary and the korean lyrics. Also I generate anki cards so it would speed up the process.

Part of the reason I do that is because Korean requires interpretation skills that I don’t possess yet. I’ll read the lyrics and be confused or unsure as to what it means because they often leave out subjects. I’ll figure out all the ways something can be interpreted and then I’ll come to a decision and then later find out (through an english or japanese translation) that I was wrong in that none of my interpretations were right or the one that I thought was the least likely was correct. I believe I gain more by using wayaku and just getting the answer to the correct interpretation than wasting my time trying to figure out the interpretation every time I look up song lyrics to a song I like. It’s time I don’t have and I don’t believe the labor-intensive activity of looking up all the words and interpreting the lyrics myself instead of reading the wayaku will help me grow my interpretation skills. I think I’ll eventually hone in on this skill once I spend enough time inputting comprehensible input.

Hanja compliments Hangeul because hanja makes the text easier to read by rendering the act more effortless. There’s an effortless quality that I attribute to reading Chinese characters compared to phonetic alphabet like English or Hangeul. Hangeul represent sound while hanja represents MEANING and SOUND (if you know the reading. It’s a quality that’s highly desired by lazy people like me (Of course I’ve experienced first-hand that learning to read and write 2000+ kanji takes more time and effort than learning how to read and write hangeul. I did like how it broke up the monotony of studying grammar. I enjoyed having variety in that I had the option of doing an acitivity to learn Japanese that involved a different part of my brain or a lower level of energy or so it seemed.). Of course, if you don’t know Japanese or Mandarin you may assume that phonetic alphabets are superior to logographic writing systems in every way. It seems that a lot of Korean netizens always say that hangeul is acknowledged by scientists as the MOST brilliant, logical writing system and that Korea was able to abandon hanja ( The scientists statement is complete bullshit and I feel terrible that it keeps being stated over and over again since it makes Koreans and Korea look bad. I think it’s great that they celebrate Sejong the Great but he didn’t invent hangeul with the intention of changing the writing system to hangeul-only and they kinda make it seem like he would support that even though there’s no evidence to support that. I hate it when people put words in other people’s mouth. ) while Japan has a crazy writing system where you have ask people how to read their name which is a sign that they have a primitive writing system ( Of course that’s what precisely what some Japanese netizens say about hangeul) and China is spending too much time and energy learning all those characters. Statements like that only demonstrate their ignorance and close-mindedness. There are disadvantages and advantages to the 3 writing systems.

When I went into Korean knowing English and Japanese, I knew that no matter how much I read hangeul it’ll never feel as comfortable as reading Japanese as far as reading for meaning or speed (as in not reading it out loud) in terms of obtaining the meaning or exerting least amount of effort possible. The inherent nature of the PHONETIC hangeul writing system and its limitations are obvious to me. I think if it came down to which language I can read out loud fastest without taking comprehension into account it would come down to English and Korean of course but that defeats the point of reading which is to understand what you’re reading. Of course the downside to Japanese is that I have the dilemma of being unsure of the readings at times but I prefer knowing meaning over reading any day. I find not understanding the most “frustrating” part of sucking at language rather than not being able to read it out-loud. Reading hangeul is tiring. Reading Japanese is less tiring and takes less effort once you’re literate. ACTUALLY there was a point in time where I kinda looked down on katakana/hirgana because I was comparing it to the “brilliant” hangeul. At the time I thought DAMN instead of making people memorize so many kana (hiragana/katakana – I’m not referring to kanji here) why don’t they use hangeul or something like hangeul where it functions as an alphabet and you combine crap instead of memorizing a symbol for each sound. I thought the katakana/hiragana thing was very basic in a bad way…. however NOW (it didn’t take me long ) I’m really grateful that they have hirgana/katakana and not some alphabet thing (they have ta / da/ ba / ha /pa but it’s nothing compared to hangeul’s combining properties) because it takes LESS effort to read that stuff though it takes more initial effort to learn them compared to hangeul due to the sheer number of symbols you gotta memorize… 26 vs  92 or something no?? Obviously korean has way too many sounds to use a writing system like hiragana/katakana to represent the sounds…. that would be cray cray.    As a lazy person, I’m glad I learned Japanese because of how effortless it can be to read stuff in Japanese at times. Every time I see a big block of text in hangeul when I open online articles I feel a tinge of anxiety and ominous dread because I have a point of comparison. It’s the analogy of why would you go back to black and white when you can have all the colors  or why go back windows 95 when you have windows 10 (I can’t think of a good one). The point is I’ve experienced the wonders of reading Japanese. It’s obvious to me that the Japanese writing system plays an integral role in the popularity of reading in Japan. Actually when I started reading Japanese novels I thought korean novels are probably more fun to read (if i had the vocab) since korean has so much more grammar/variation with the 600+ possible grammar endings etc (korean grammar is japanese times 10)  but i don’t think that way anymore and am rather embarrassed i ever thought that lol. nowadays i enjoy korean novels and japanese novels and call it a day. 

Also it seems like everyone on Japanese TV has written a book because I constantly add stuff to my amazon.co.jp wishlist or dokushometer when I watch Japanese TV shows (there are so many interesting books to be read). I’ve always cared about being able to understand a piece of writing more than being able to read it loud. Also, I’ve never had to waste time looking up words like MARTHA or 오르가슴 or VOLDEMORT (no i was not reading harry potter) since they write foreign words in Katakana meanwhile I’ve had that bitter experience many times with Korean since they only write in hangeul (in printed books they write foreign names and foreign words in a different font or was it that they italicize it… ). That was one of the most demotivating characteristics of Korean with respect to learning it for me personally. I am very happy and blessed to have found HANJARO.  I just wish I found it in 2016!

Ultimately for kango words like KASAI/HWAJAE I prefer to sort it out by encountering it multiple times with the hanja next to it when I read rather than seeing it in anki or looking it up over and over and over and over when I read to my dismay and disgust (that’s what I feel when I look up a Korean word that I already know on some level but don’t recognize it when it’s just hangeul and the context is not strong enough to conjure the meaning). I believe in being as lazy as possible at times by not going against the current. I don’t aspire to reach a point in Korean where I read hangeul-only texts “fluently” with such ease that going through the rolodex of words to find the corresponding meaning only based on the context is imperceptible to my consciousness. I have no desire to strive to reach or reach the level where I read hangeul like a Korean native. It’s a pipe dream that I never had for Korean. The alphabet only represents sounds since it’s an alphabet which means to read as fluently as a native you’d have to as fluent as a native to parse the words, and go through your gargantuan mental rolodex of words etc etc. I have no desire to dump the Naver Korean-JApanese dictionary on lingoes which has at least 90,000 entries into anki and memorize it (ha even if I did that I’d still run into unknown words since I go to the internet when the dictionaries lingoes fail me. PLUS korean people love making up new words, shortened versions of words, variation of the word which you’ll only recognize if you already know the original word so it’s a big fuck you when the dictionary/google fails you. some of these new words are only transparent to certain age groups.)… You will always have to convert this PHONETIC INFORMATION into meaning when you read hangeul. This means there’s a minimum prerequisite of possessing a huge passive vocabulary that rivals a native speaker to read fluently like a native  AND know korean grammar INSIDE AND OUT AND the ability to parse written Korean like a native which is herculean feat lol. I am aware of deficiencies in my Korean such as onomatopoeia and obscure vocabulary which I know that korean kids know really well but I don’t (for example they love using onomatopoeia and use it well. I notice the same thing for Japanese… onomatopoeia is one of those tricky, never-ending things that natives use frequently but I can’t seem to use/remember them easily as natives and that includes the KIDS. I accept it and move on). I’ve come to the conclusion that I read much faster when hanja is haphazardly (it’s just not 100% correct) inserted into the hangeul text via hanjaro and I completely accept it and embrace it.   This fact will never reverse unless somehow I become illiterate in Japanese which seems impossible to me. My conviction is rooted in my literacy in Japanese,  my literacy in Korean, time I spent reading Korean + dic/google/etc while being completely OBLIVIOUS to the existence of hanjaro, time I spent reading Korean with hanjaro, my understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of the Korean and Japanese writing systems that I gained first-hand, and also from reading about the topic in 3 languages. I can’t imagine a day when I don’t run text through HANJARO before reading when I can (maybe if I’m reading a short paragraph or two??). To me, not running a text through hanjaro is equivalent to asking myself if I want to subject myself to the experience of reading a Japanese article or book that’s only written in hiragana/KATAKANA. Sure you can do that but it is torture! 😦  But in all seriouness Japanese people describe hangeul as something between hiragana and Kanji and that’s the reason they give as to why homonyms/homophones are not a problem in Korean since Japanese people always ask isn’t reading hangeul like reading hiragana?

Anyway, even if I know all the words really well in the article, book, etc, it’s still easier to read with hanja than without as I expressed with the example in the beginning of this post. I think for me, I would’ve NEVER EVER EVER EVER learned Korean to this level if I didn’t now Japanese. It’s just way too frustrating, inefficient, and stupid otherwise. Plus the Korean-Japanese Naver dictionary is a god-send. It just feels like a waste of my time reading hiragana/hangeul that has no meaning to me. Reading a text or a book full of unknown words in Japanese is a completely different experience from reading a text of book full of unknown words in Korean because it’s just that much more fruitless and painful in Korean. The same can be said about using a korean-korean dictionary and japanese-japanese dictionary. It is NIGHT AND DAY!  and yes I have seen them use the word to define the word in the korean-korean dictionary. It’s a real nightmare that I don’t have to deal with for Japanese since they have better dictionaries and write stuff in hiragana/katakana and kanji. Of course my go-to authotkey script is for google searching the word with IMI WA appended to it). For Japanese even if you don’t know the word, if it’s written in kanji you get something out of it and you have some obscure, vague idea of it (and you can even use pop-up dictionaries like rikai-sama, yomi-chan, etc. pop-up dictionaries exist for Korean but they suck compared to japanese ones) while in Korean you can waste a lot of energy trying to figure out the meaning solely based off the “sound” of the word (the fact there are homonyms and countless hanja that share the same pronunciation doesn’t help. this was exemplified by the KASAI/HWAJE example I mentioned.). Also, I think I was more acutely aware of my deficiencies in listening comprehension in Japanese when I was at an intermediate level years back precisely because reading Japanese is easier than reading Korean. That is because the written form of Japanese represents sounds and meaning while for Korean it only represents sounds. Written Japanese is easier to understand than written Korean for language learners because it’s more transparent due to the writing system representing both sound and meaning.  There is a greater disparity between reading comprehension and listening comprehension for Japanese compared to Korean when you’re intermediate/etc ie for Japanese you may read and understanding something just fine but end up not understanding it when it’s just audio while for Korean that would never happen! For Japanese you have visual cues that represent meaning and sound (or just meaning if you don’t know the reading) while for Korean you’re SOL if you don’t know the word. Actually I can think of a couple exceptions, Korean words that aren’t pronounced phonetically due to pronunciation rule ie 격려, 심리, 설 수 있다, 굳이, 폭력, 짓이기다 etc (answers are 경녀, 심니, 슬 수 있다 , 구지, 퐁녁, 진니기다 and no I never bothered to memorize the rules so don’t ask me why). A recent example I can think of is the word 視姦　(しかん) which I encountered when I was watching hanseikai. I’ve never heard of this word in my life but I know the kanji that make up the word and I don’t need to look it up since it’s obvious from the context and kanji what it means. This kinda stuff happens from time to time and it will never cease to stop occurring since obviously you can’t memorize every single word in the Japanese language or any language. Conversely, in Korean all you get is the sound of the word so when I come across new words that are sino-based I may or may not figure it out on the spot or I may think I figured it out but I figured wrong ( SINCE THERE are plenty of hanja that have the same reading depending on the hanja). Initially the kanji mountain seems like a huge deterrent for learning Japanese compared to Korean but once you’re over the mountain you realize the mountain for Korean is never ending because they write everything in hangeul lol. it’s another case of the tortoise vs the hare. we all know the tortoise wins.

I’ve always felt super entitled as a person who knows Japanese that whenever I looked up hanja-based words that I already know that sound similar to Japanese or exist in Japanese I would feel irritated and mercilessly robbed of my my time and energy. Also I know about the history of the Japanese language and the Korean language ( I inadvertently learned about the influx of foreign words into Japanese during the Meiji Era when I was reading a book about Korean/Korea in Japanese. ) which makes me even more flummoxed to being subjected to reading hangeul-only text. Now I have no reason to feel that resentment when I read Korean on the internet or ebooks! I have a lot of articles and topics I’m interested in reading on the Korean internet and now I can finally hop to it. I would’ve never fathomed in 2012 that I would read Korean novels/books one day but I am (by read I mean reading and understanding 85-95%! NOT just having the ability to read it out phonetically while not understanding shit or coming across an unknown word in every other sentence etc. I could do that in 2012! Ain’t nothing productive or admirable OR NOBLE or fun about being able to read something outloud 100% phonetically while missing all the important details. Maybe for Koreaboos it’s cool enough??). Vocab is king. Reading is king. Hanjaro makes reading so much better so hanjaro is king! I wish I read less  Korean between 2012-2018 lol.  I hope to read more in 2019! 

hanjaro + likebook 7.8 in android erearder moonreader + goldendict = heaven

—>

HERE are some articles I read so far: I like reading about people or topics that are of interest to me.

http://www.hankookilbo.com/News/Read/201605122062423406
http://www.pressian.com/news/article.html?no=69280#09T0

https://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=26576 <-this was hard to follow at times. It was pretty bad. I didn’t understand the main points of the article. It was unclear to me and I had no motivation to re-read stuff to figure out the meaning of the sentence or phrases. I kinda gave up on this one. It’s too hard for me at my current level or I’m just too lazy to apply myself (no that’s a good thing because I gotta read what I’m really interested in) I think I’ll read an article about it in Japanese sometime in the future. I feel content with my expectations and my goals. I don’t need to kill myself AND read anything and everything in Korean. I have a choice to read about topics in English or Japanese instead just so I can satisfy my curiosity without having to spend ungodly amounts of time and effort. It’s just more fruitful and beneficial to focus on reading stuff in Korean that I really want to read in Korean. Enjoyment is VERY important and can never be tossed aside.

http://news.donga.com/Culture/more29/3/all/20141010/67068211/1

https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%9B%90%EC%A0%95%EB%85%80

https://www.sisain.co.kr/?mod=news&act=articleView&idxno=24942 <- about hanja

http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202553.html

http://monthly.chosun.com/client/mdaily/daily_view.asp?idx=1998&Newsnumb=2017111998

https://theqoo.net/square/1043395792   < – seungri’s interview

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bu3JOlUBbVK/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1glj78ewve7pw

tiffany’s apology
http://tenasia.hankyung.com/archives/995846

tiffany’s main apology
http://news.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2016/08/26/2016082602778.html

jimin’s apology

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCNxXQjF1jv/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=09038146-ef9c-4415-a714-c36820f014f7

https://www.hangeul.or.kr/modules/bbs/index.php?code=bbs23&mode=view&id=12281&page=14&___M_ID=47&f_head=&sfield=&sword=

http://blog.daum.net/_blog/BlogTypeView.do?blogid=0CgXV&articleno=5862561&categoryId=510472&regdt=20060925005221

i WOULD love to link this article/blog entry/comment/whatever it was that I read a couple years ago. It might’ve been written in English. The gist of the text was that someone had to translate this science-jargon heavy article or study (maybe it’s an academic paper) from Korean to English and it was an insurmountable task. So you know it’s 90% hanja-based words lol. There’s literally no way for the person to make heads or tails of certain words because there’s all this ambiguity.  Context wasn’t doing shit in this case… So the translator person had to contact the author to figure what the fuck the article is saying then he was able to translate it. It’s not even like he understood the article and was just struggling to express it in English. HE literally could not even comprehend it because of the limitations of hangeul. sO what should the author have done so that it’s not incomprehensible to most people (it could be everyone for all i know. who knows who ambiguous and frustrating it was to read it. I haven’t read this article question my self)? Insert a shit ton of hanja? insert a shit ton of english in parentheses? write the whole thing in English? Not sure but any of these options is better than reading hangeul-only text for this particular case.

LASTLY my favorite hanja is 畓 1. 논 2. 수전(水田)  and it’s because I like the way it looks and I don’t think it exists in Japanese 🙂 I’m all about being shallow like picking books by the cover . i get excited when i see hanja that don’t exist in japanese

articles about hanja:

https://m.cafe.daum.net/nature-hanja/YpJG/3?q=D_jDGwPlH16FY0&amp;
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202553.html
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/03/02/2014030202535.html
https://m.blog.daum.net/kimkyoc/1221


http://pub.chosun.com/client/news/viw.asp?cate=C03&mcate=M1003&nNewsNumb=20161021618&nidx=21619
https://m.blog.daum.net/kimkyoc/1221
https://www.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2014/01/19/2014011902491.html
http://topa.co.kr/archives/198
http://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002478244

english: https://web.archive.org/web/20160811071843/https://kuiwon.wordpress.com/articles/ -hmm i don’t believe this: “In fact, this blogger knows a few Koreans that do not know the word jangrae, and surmises that vast majority of the ones that do know the two words do not know the difference in nuance.” that’s bs.. he must be referring to gyopos that speak korean well??

other articles:

https://www.chosun.com/opinion/readers_opinion/2021/05/05/KYRDDSN3MNGPLK7BP5XDBAK7RM/

https://www.chosun.com/opinion/readers_opinion/2021/05/05/KYRDDSN3MNGPLK7BP5XDBAK7RM/

https://www.chosun.com/national/education/2021/04/27/NWS4LCICMBBAZM3QE3ZQICIKBA/

http://star.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/OhmyStar/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002727773

http://news.kmib.co.kr/article/view.asp?arcid=0015606353&code=61171511

https://news.nate.com/view/20210317n50309?mid=n1101

https://m.blog.naver.com/jjlove0526/221369843354

https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/schooling/711527.html

http://star.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/OhmyStar/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002731796

OBSESSED with BRODUCE!

    

haha I was originally going to name this blog post “found my crack for 2018!” That crack was gonna be Produce 48 but it turns out to be Produce 101 Season 2. This post was going to be in the same vain as my Unpretty Star post back in March of 2015 in the conception of the post in my head! I am genuinely surprised at how amazing this show was from start to finish! Unpretty Rapstars wouldn’t have blown up if it wasn’t for Jessie and it’s the same thing here. The show would not have blown up if it weren’t for the people in it.

This is my second edition of thank god I know Korean and that my inconsistent, sporadic efforts of watching korean tv (and mining words while watching and HALF-ASSING my reviews as much as possible) from 2012 to 2015 weren’t for nil. It really would be a pain the ass if I had look up something every 10 seconds or watch it with english subs or japanes subs or something ( IT’S JUST NOT THE SAME)

<-–  There’s so many interactions and convos that I loved to BITS in this show including this! unforuntaely I found out ahead of time that daniel’s group won before watching the eps since the mnet performance is already up on youtube since it’s already been over a year.

<- otome at full force! 

< – I took this screenshot because they didn't blur his tattoos.
 <- OMG Daehi’s handwriting! I took a picture because it looked interesting and unique to me. I notice there’s an OTOME quality to him that I like a lot!

 <- mnet’s editing here added to the hilarity. I wonder how jisung felt about the edit.

It was a bunch of coincidences that lead to me discovering my crack! I got to the OMONA lj somehow from googling something that popped into my head. Then I saw matsui jurina and I was like what is she doing there? Then I found out produce 101 was collaborating with AKB48 and their sister groups for Produce 101 season 3. To me that that sounded SO INTERESTING and it’s something that I never thought I would ever see. By see I mean like having a jpop idol perform in front of the teachers of Produce 101. Seeing their reaction was as fun and satisfying as I imagined it to be! (I was sad to hear that yabuki nako’s audition won’t ever be released since it was deemed too sexual and inappropriate or something. I actually know that AKB song –tonari no banana- and I like it alot because it’s catchy and the lyrics are interesting. If you want to interpret the song “that” way you can but I never did. I just thought it was cute and relatable). I was into AKB48 to some extent in 2008 to 2011 since they were being pushed like crazy and I was into Japanese TV and I had my oshimen and others members that I liked and they had the AKBINGO show which could be very funny depending on the episode. However the year is now 2018 and most of the members I liked the left the group so I’m not into them as much though I will forever be Sashi’s fan! I did watch the speeches of the members when the group was at its peak. I do understand the appeal of Japanese idols that even though they may not be good at singing or dancing the fans love supporting them and watching them grow/improve and sometimes cute/fun is enough for the fans. So when I heard about the show 2 eps had already aired so I watched them and I felt very impatient for the 3rd ep and I felt gald I found out about it 2 weeks in rather than before it aired because the waiting game is killing me.

I had seen Produce 101 season 1 and I enjoyed watching it but I didn’t feel compelled to watch season 2 because I figured it’d be the same format so I’d be bored. Also I THOUGHT that I find girl groups more interesting than boy groups so I didn’t want to watch it. Also the IOI group wasn’t much of a success in my eyes with their lackluster debut song DREAM GIRLS (It’s very generic and boring. calling it the poor man’s into the new world (SNSD) would be a compliment) and the other 2 songs that weren’t up my alley. But then I found out that the group formed from the second season was actually successful and I was so impressed by their debut mv ENERGETIC because the song was catchy and the dance was captivating. I’m not into kpop or boy groups but it grabbed my attention and I watched it beginning to end (usually I fastforward 45 seconds, listen/watch a little bit and then stop when it comes to checking out kpop mv and stuff since not everything is going to grab me). In a Produce 48 video that MNET posted on naver/youtube that wasn’t included in the episode they featured ariyoshi risa and takada kenta from the previous produce 101 seasons. So I wanted to watch it because I was curious about this Japanese trainee. I decided to watch it during the 6 days of the week when produce48 doesn’t air. Also I figured it’d make produce 48 easier to watch since the format is nearly the same down to the stuff they make national producer representative say.

Even though I’m watching Produce 101 season 2 a year after its initial broadcasting as opposed to while it’s airing. It worked out better for me in that I love this show so much that after episode 3 or 2 or 4 I knew I had to watch this show every day to finish it ASAP. I’d die if I had to wait a week for an episode. I usually am patient and able to wait weeks or months to watch the next episode when it comes to TV shows… it never really hooks me to that point.

I think the only other male-idol competition shows I’ve seen were the one for WINNER and the one for becoming a member of IKON ( I could not watch the last episode but i hate live-finales anyway.) and Produce 101 season 2 blows both out of the water both in terms of performances and entertainment value.

I’m going to write my random observations, rambling and ruminations about the show.

*******

I thought it was hilarious when the idol trainees did sexy dance moves during the 1st two eps that made the Lee Suk Hoon (a very talented singer who was on immortal song way back when) feel uncomfortable lol. He’s a guy and he’s not gay so it was awkward…

They had so many ranking ceremonies in this show. I don’t know if they had more than the first season but it seemed like a lot but I wasn’t bored by it. Compared to the 1st season the ranks move more dramatically and unpredictably. I don’t remember being this emotionally invested, shocked, and connected for the first season. It was incredibly sad watching it at times but it’s just the reality of the idol world/television surival series. I sometimes fastfowarded the parts when BoA described the trainee before announcing his name or when they took forever to announce stuff but I definitely had to listen to any and all other talking.

I loved seeing the interactions/facial expressions/reactions/bonding between the trainees. It was evident from the first 2 episodes like when dong-bin got nervous during his bubblegum performance or when people did cringey dances or when lai guan lin and his fellow chick trainee did their dance fundamentals practice routine.    I’m sure that was present in the 1st season but I didn’t love it to bits like I did for the second season. Surprisingly I loved the SPORTS FESTIVAL they did for episode 10(?). It was incredibly funny and fun to watch. A big part of the reason why it was so fun is because I got to know these trainees for the past 9 episodes and every episode is usually as long as a movie. I ABSOLUTELY LOVED the part when Jae-hwan started laughing like he lost his mind. I was genuinely jealous and happy that he was laughing and having so much fun rather than shocked. It reminded me of the pure joy and fun one experiences  during childhood. Usually when they play game and stuff on korean talk/variety shows I never find it that funny and fast-forward the crap out of it but I savored each second for this show. In the same vain I was surprised I enjoyed watching the arm-wresling ( I loved their interactions like saying something to the opponent to intimidate them ) and the ghost scare prank ( omg daehi screamed with such a high-pitched voice. I love his otome-ness. I also love fujimon’s otome-ness). For produce 48 they did some scare prank too but it wasn’t as interesting or funny ( it was the typical uninteresting crap I expect from korean talk/variety shows that doesn’t do shit for me so I fast-forwarded). I absolutely loved the bonding they showed between the trainees. It was fun to watch and made me fuzzy inside. Something about this show is very special. They were incredibly lucky to have daniel kang and all the other trainees that were incredibly talented or interesting. I was in pure shock when I heard Daniel thought of joining show because jisung wanted to join the show because I thought of the what if’s….  I don’t think Produce 48 could ever surpass this show simply because they can’t have interactions/conversations/lines that are as memorable simply due to the language barrier.  Even though the episodes are so long I feel so sad now that I can’t watch it anymore since there’s no more left.

(<—- hilarious!)

I loved the korean-ness of the show. By that I mean the ggal-ching (the thing you put in your shoes to make yourself taller), the lipstick, the cushion. I DID NOT realize Korean guys or kpop guys wear lipstick. for some reason I thought they stopped at guyliner. I was mistaken. I thought the Daniel's lips stood out sometimes but I never connected the dots in my head that that's lipstick. I think he did the gradation lip look at one point and it looked really good (unless that's his natural lip color). I also loved Daniel's blonde hair! That color works so well on him as if he's naturally blonde. I used to think that asians don't look good with blonde hair usually but I realized it just depends on the person and the shade of blonde.

I went into the show knowing that Daniel Kang won and during the first few eps I didn’t get why because he didn’t stand out. In fact he was never the center but sometimes I get the impression he’s the center of the particular performance because he stands out. It was apparent when I saw the 2 sorry sorry performances. People in daniel’s group had star quality and each person stood out while the people in the first group were difficult to remember/differentiate. I also noticed him whenever they put him in the shot for his facial reactions to stuff.

I could say so much more if I took notes or something while watching it but I loved the show way too much to be doing anything like that.

I noticed that in one of the earlier eps that they didn’t sub the second half of the episode. usually they do their editing/post-production thing where they put text on the screen to make it more interesting and fun to watch. most importantly, they add korean text whenever people talk so I don’t miss a word and generate anki cards with ease. I thought maybe they just ran out of time didn’t have time to add in the korean subtitles. I was annoyed though! there are english subs available for this show for anyone who like me is watching this  with learning korean as another impetus to watch besides pure enjoyment and joy. I would’ve definitely turned the english subs on for those parts if I knew they existed (so I don’t miss out. english subs is better than no subs… in case the translator catches something i couldn’t catch) but I didn’t bother searching for english soft subs. But I watched one of eps with the english subs on a little bit because that part wasn’t subbed in korean very much but I quickly realized I probably am much better than the translator at korean. i realized the translator misheard 과정 as 가족 which are katei and kazoku respectively in Japanese and went to town with it lol (I’m sure all you anime/drama fansub watchers know what I’m talking about when the translator mishears or misunderstands stuff and then translates with all this confidence and you’re like…. surely you’re aware that you’re unsure yet you translation oozes of unwarranted confidence). Even if you were speed-translating or whatever you call it no fluent korean person would ever mis-hear/misunderstand like this (those words sound so different… bad sound quality or not) especially with the way it was used in the sentence for that particular instance.

At first I thought the lyrics of na ya na is melodramatic with parts like “I’m scared that this might be a dream.”However, later I realized how the lyrics of the song matches the show perfectly and isn’t melodramatic since being a trainee is so depressing. ( lol I pulled up more of the lyrics   너는 내게 너무 예뻐서 꿈일까 난 너무 두려워. guess it is melodramatic but I’ve grown to love the lyrics nonetheless )  In the episodes where they announce everyone’s rankings there’s a lot of surprises and I remember this one particularly trainee was shocked and couldn’t believe his name was called and if I remember correctly he said “is this a dream?” or something along those lines.   Then I also thought how the lyrics apply to everyone since you can’t predict the results of the voting as evidenced by all the shocking, happy, and sad moments in the show during the ranking announcement ceremonies. It must be surreal to know you were one of the 11 people who got picked out 101 or 90 something trainees especially since BoA paused for a long time before announcing the name! (Well it’s not her fault). Other than the long pauses that BoA had to place I must say that MNET did a fantastic job with the live finale. I remember the kpop star season 1 finale being crappy in the way that live finales of competition shows are known for…

I thought it was hilarious how they used the dothraki background music from Game of Thrones on dong-ho (apparently he goes by baek ho in nu’est).

I recommend recording audio on clyp.it  to ask people online to transcribe for you if you want that.  I definitely use it when I get really curious and love whatever it is I’m watching.

Here’s a few of the questions I asked. I asked a lot of questions because I love this show and there’s 11 eps and each episode is at least 2 hours long so there’s definitely stuff I learned from the show.

1   2   3   4  5

I highly recommend this show to anyone who is remotely interested in it! It is hands down my favorite season of the PRODUCE series!

out of the final group my favorites are ji-sung ( i love talk/variety people), jae-hwan (his voice makes energetic that much more powerful), ong seong-wu ( love his unique last name, good looks, and talk/variety skills), kang daniel ( wow he deserves to number one), lee dae-hwi ( i only noticed him in the beginning for obvious reasons) , lai guan-lin ( loved his troublemaker routine with this trainee friend from cube and the part when they played charades and he was like i don’t know what that means and said PASS). So I will be very busy in the future trying to watch all the talk/variety show appearances by the members of WANNAONE (radio star, happy together, snl, WEEKLY IDOL – wow I can’t believe they made them perform nayana at 2x… etc etc LOL NEVER mind snl made them perform it at 8x ) because I want to learn more about them and my MO for talk/variety shows is usually watching the episodes that feature guests who pique my interest.

I decided to look up the meaning of words and take screenshots while watching the show so I can keep watching show instead of pausing to make anki cards. I think this might be more efficient since I’ll make the anki cards later on and just focus on that task instead of going back and forth between watching and making anki cards. Also giving myself that week between taking the screenshot and making the anki card may help in deciding to not add cards that aren’t worth adding if let’s say they use the word 10 times after I took the screenshot (at that point I may feel like I don’t need to make an anki card since I heard it being used so many times or make less cloze deletions). And as always native material didn’t fail me and I got some really cool and useful words/grammar (mostly vocab ) from this show!  I don’t understand those people that still do textbooks despite having gained enough proficiency to go after native stuff.

On a random note, I heard that show me the money season 7 is actually 777 which made me think that it’s airing on 7-7-2018 (okay I realize now that the year is 2018 so it doesn’t match up 100% lol) and I got excited and overwhelmed because I feel like I have my hands full with produce 48 because the episodes are so long. But then I realized nothing aired on that day and I find out that the auditions are kicking off on 7-7 and the show is airing in September.

on another random note I love learning Korean from song lyrics especially rap stuff like ZICO because there’s wayaku available (japanese translation) and also english translations available. It saves me a lot of time because the problem is either I don’t know the words or I don’t know how to interpret or infer the intended meaning of the lyrics (since there’s no subject so you gotta infer that and more + any new cool, hip, lingo that I am not savvy on. I seem to have more problem understanding korean song lyrics since korean grammar is more complex than Japanese grammar to say the least lol. I think I read somewhere there’s 10x more grammar somewhere but who knows… japanese has less grammar and keeps it simple but has pitch accent to make up for the difficulty level lol) and I notice this happens way more frequently rap stuff and trying to tackle this with only a dictionary (especially korean korean one depending on the word ) or google is just time-consuming.  This is kinda related since wanna one members collaborated with zico for the sub unit song and I mined from the wayaku while referencing the english translation.

random links

Dongho feat Megaton Bar
byu/pige0n- inBroduce101

https://kpople.com/hidden-meaning-behind-open-up-choreography-produce-101/

An appreciation of Never
byu/aikawanoonase inBroduce101

An appreciation of Never
byu/aikawanoonase inBroduce101

Translated comments from the Knetz Favorite Trainees Survey post
byu/hibaobao inBroduce101

A Korean online community made a post about our Favorite Trainees Survey
byu/tastetherainbeau inBroduce101

My Holy Grail CLOZE DELETION Anki card format for Korean TV SHOWS

UPDATE to this ENTRY

My HG format is multiple clozes with huge intervals!

** Click here for my anki settings that I use with this card format

word or word in a sentence, definition in japanese/korean/english, screenshot WITHOUT text

This is my anki card for GGADDAK

Back of the card

answer to cloze, more definitions from wordquery, screenshot from Korean show.

Front for card 2 of the same note. It  only has the ttk blanked out with the {{c2:}} code

*-{{c1::까}}{{c2::딱}}-*하면
*-{{c1::ひょ}}-*っとすると、や*-{{c1::や}}-*もすれば、ともすれば

まかり間違えば、危うく、しきりにうなずくように、こくりこくり

well what I see is black and white since I use an ereader but it’s legible nonetheless.

HS RAPPER (spoiler below)

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HIGH SCHOOL RAPPER

t I didn’t want young b to win high school rapper for the sole reason that I liked his song the least out of everyone who performed in the finals. I acknowledge that he’s great at rapping but I was confused as to how he got the most votes. Maybe it was different seeing the performance in person or maybe his popularity/fame from show me the money had a bearing on the results. I knew for the longest time he won this show because they mentioned it a million times on show me the money so when he finished performing on the HS finale I thought that’s it??? since he was the last to perform and the ante had been getting upped time and time again.

+++++ end of spoiler

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another example:

FRONT: ++++++++++

the Korean definition was generated by hanseido. I don’t obsesses and waste time trying to go 1000% monolingual dic especially for korean ( I love what steve kauffman says in his youtube vids about the issue.)

On an unrelated note I learned why for certain korean/japanese words it’s so much easier just to learn the english word…. it was because the word was ORIGINALLY IN ENGLISH and it was translated to Japanese and then the korean people just took the words that japanese people painstakingly translated and brought the words into korean by reading the words with their hanja readings . I found about it from a japanese book I was reading last month which talked about how Japan was obsessed with learning from other countries in the 1800s?? 1700s?? in the various advanced fields like science and so they had to translate all that shit from other languages to Japanese and of course they came across words that don’t exist in Japanese so they had to invent them using the kanji that they have. So that is why with some words it’s easier to use English because it was the original word (but then again they translated from many languages…. not just english. there were so many countries with booming culture and sciences back in the day) and the 1 word is so much easier to remember than an explanation/essay. ).

I set up anki so that Hanseido look-ups come to the front of the card since I won’t even read it let alone remember it if it’s in the back). I usually don’t put screenshots in the front because it’s too much work (for this one I just felt like it and I thought it would help me remember) and I will never put a screenshot with text on the front.

Back:+++++++++++++++

Edit field just to show the multiple cloze deletions I have going on here. sometimes I do c3 for the definition. it all depends on what I feel like doing.

the c2 card:

FIRSTLY, I find cloze deletion and anki great for upper intermediate/advanced and may even more upper intermediate (these terms all just broad… ). I don’t recommend it for beginners or intermediate. I think it’s self-evident whether or not this card format is viable at your current Korean level.

I recently came up with a brilliant format and process for making anki cards for Korean while watching korean talk/variety shows. I’m sure it could be applicable to other languages too. I love cloze deletion cards and they are especially effective for me for Korean. This is in part due to my level, my vocabulary because I would think it’d be very taxing and painful to do cloze deletion cards as a beginner or intermediate even. If anything though I think you’re better off doing other things like actual reading/listening to build your vocab than making and reviewing srs cards if you’re a beginner　（I think that using anki to learn the top 1000 words of a language to be really inefficient compared not using it especially if you have a lot of free time). I find it to be really helpful as an advanced korean learner. I hate the traditional sentence/plain word vocab card formats for Korean when using anki because to me it makes no sense to be testing yourself in anki the way you’re testing yourself whenever you watch any native material containing unknown words which is the majority of native material since you’re not gonna 100% of the words native speakers use in speech. Of course that was my go to format for Korean in the beginning! At the time, as far I knew it was either look up words and make anki cards when I watch the show or look up words and not make anki CArds (this will guarantee that you will end looking up the same word 5-10 times if not more). It was clear to me that I’d rather make anki cards than look up the same word 20 times in the dictionary (this made me inexplicably angry probably since I’m not as passionate about Korean as I am about Japanese and because half the words were sino-words).  At the time of  I didn’t even conceive the possibility of other ways of using anki ie other formats besides the usual flashcard format.

ie:

Front: Word

Back : definition in english/japanese and maybe a screenshot of the sentence from a Korean tv show

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Front: Sentence

Back: Japanese definition entry from naver j-k dictinoary of the word in the sentence that I don’t know (from lingoes) and maybe a screenshot of the sentence from a korean tv show

The way I see it is that the whole point of doing anki cards is so that when i add word x to anki and do the reviews I expect myself to recognize it (and remember the meaning) or at least know that it’s in my deck when I see it in the wild again. By recognizing I mean instantaneous recognition so anything longer than 5 seconds is really BAD. If I add word x by itself on the front or the sentence containing word x on the front of a card with the answer on the back (the usual flashcard/anki format) I’m essentially putting myself in the same exact situation as when I initially come across unknown words on a tv show or novel or article etc. for example, I’ll watch a tv show, they’ll say something I don’t know and they also happened to have the text across the screen and I care enough so I look it up in lingoes or google or naver etc. What usually happens is if I find the correct definition everything is crystal clear and I understood it and I may or may not completely forget the word or definition or both 5 minutes/30 seconds later if I don’t use anki. For me, the traditional format is too much work and it’s not effective. What happens is I either I don’t engage with it properly so I’m not really doing the reviews or I do engage with it properly and do the painful thing where I force myself to conjure the definition out of thin air since the only clue is the word or sentence containing the word only to mark AGAIN a month later or just draw a blank go no f’in idea (the former with the thinking hard thing is especially awful and ineffective in my experience). When I half-ass it I either read the sentence or half-read it (reading it in a lazy way) or don’t read it (but don’t realize I’m not reading it) or only read it a little of it (not enough) and I usually press the SHOW answer after 0.5 seconds (barely enough time to actually engage/think about it but I am impulsive like that especially when I am not into it and maybe I grew irritated at this format over the years), read the answer go yeah that seems familiar but for some reason I can’t remember it at all (or it’s like the first time I’m reading it) and proceed to press hard ASAP (again barely enough to read it or I half-read it) until I feel like hitting AGAIN in some future session. So of course this didn’t happen with all my korean cards but it happened frequently enough to make me not give a shit and keep marking hard, then again depending on how I felt rather than if I actually knew the answer. I acknowledge that my disenchantment towards Anki played a role in rendering the traditional format ineffective for me. That was inevitable from having used anki all these years and having a lazy disposition. However, I recall that even when I did my reviews seriously (using the traditional format of sentence/word on the front and definition on the back) I could tell some of it was just not working and I was wasting my energy. Also, I felt that anki was less effective for Korean compared to Japanese when I made cards in the traditional format even taking into account the disparity between amount of time spent watching korean tv vs japanese tv (everyday while korean is like every few weeks, months etc). I think the the writing systems played a part in that.

If I add word x to anki and I want to be able to recognize it/remember the meaning when it pops up in native media in the future, the best way to remember it using it anki is NOT testing myself in the exact way that I encountered the word minus the sound ( I never considered adding audio to my korean cards because I don’t need IT and it takes up time. I only record if I’m going to ask people “what did this person say” ) or putting a word I encountered on the front and the answer on the back. Doing either of those things makes no sense. It took me a long time to recognize this and do something about it unfortunately! One reason I don’t feel inclined to read the sentence in my deck is that it’s BORING! My disinclination quadruples when that sentence is written in hangeul vs. Japanese or English for good reason. I’ve tried bolding and underlining the word in the sentence to see if that would lower the burden and motivate me to read the anki card and it didn’t make much of a difference. It was because it did not change the fact that it’s boring to make myself to read a sentence. You’re subjecting yourself to the same experience minus the audio. I feel that much more unmotivated to read something I already read especially if it has an unknown word in it. Also reading sentences written in hangeul is very labor-intensive to me because I have points of comparison (READING Japanese versus Korean is like night and day or 月とスッポン in  Japanese since Korean is a phonetic alphabet while Japanese uses kanji which represents sound and meaning. Also Japanese has katakana and hiragana which makes reading Japanese more learner-friendly since it let’s you know what’s up and makes parsing sentences less of a chore ).

I’ve also made the observation that there are words/sentences in my deck in the basic format that I know I read at least 10x times in my anki deck,  yet i still have no idea that the word/sentence is in my deck and don’t know the meaning of the “unknown” word the cards are testing me on either. I think it’s because I find the information extremely arbitrary due to all vowel/syllable/bacchim/etc combinations in Korean…  It’d be probably 100x more arbitrary if I was illiterate in Japanese (=hanja literacy) and was completely oblivious to the hanja behind the hangeul. However this would never happen with the cloze deletion format. It’s just impossible since you’re presented a card with something blanked out. In the traditional format I am presented the word or sentence in its entirety so there are cards where regardless of how many times I’ve read it or seen it, I don’t remember the word and/or the meaning etc. The act of recalling information that is blanked out is more powerful than passively reading something over and over again over a long, extended period of time even if the interval is scheduled by anki.  Also just seeing an anki card with something blanked out is inherently more memorable than seeing an anki word with nothing blanked out especially when you blank a part of a word rather than the whole word. Basic anki card formats are especially prone to failure with Korean since there are a myraid of vowel/consonant/bacchim combinations are possible.  It creates a very big problem where I go why do I give a shit about this card/word. Making a cloze magically makes it into a card I care about. I’ve read in a book that you can remember stuff better if you practice recall which I agree with whole-heartedly and I find the cloze deletion format more conducive towards practicing recall than the basic sentence/word on the front.  By reading I mean I listened to the audiobook at 1.5x or 1.25x BY USING one of my 4 library cards! Oh wait I have 5 since I have my internet korean library card. Also, here’s  another book review with a summary of the points. And another

You have to practice SMART not HARD. Training and performing are completely different activities. Basketball players do other things besides play basketball to train and pianists don’t play the song over and over again from start to finish to practice (that’s what i did lol since i hate practicing!!!) . They do stuff in training that they don’t do during the performance because it’s effective. You could write out each of the regular usage kanji ( about 2000) a thousand times and still not be able to write all of them out off the top of your head (OF course I’m recommending RTK for this very reason) but I think in Korea they encourage nonsense like this last I heard because they love working hard (they should focus on working smart more). However in all seriousness learning 2000 hanja is not hard when you’re fluent in Korean provided you’re using effective methods that does not involve copying/writing each character and its meaning/readings a couple hundred times. You have to approach it in a strategic manner or you’re just wasting time. It’s great that you’re hard-working and you have all this energy and drive to reach your goal but if you’re going it about it in the wrong way it can be ineffective and tortuous! It’s not always no pain, no gain. I knew it was more effective than the traditional formats for me but I couldn’t explain why until now.

Clozing multiple syllables of the word (I usually do the first 2 syllables of a word since most words are 2 syllables) makes korean anki cards more effective. When the word is long ie 3 or more syllables I usually choose 2 syllables to blank out. If the word is really bad I cloze more than 2 syllables. The only time I kill a whole word is if the word is one syllable and if it’s hard i give myself a hint with a letter from English alphabet like j for 지. I prefer the English alphabet to using hangeul for hints since English stands out among the sea of Korean and Japanese therefore takes less effort to notice/read. Erasing the whole word and trying to remember that is TOO MUCH WORK and I don’t think it’s worth it. I even put in hints for particularly challenging 2 syllable cloze cards during review if I can tell that I will never remember the word from having failed it a few times ( I can just tell!) . Coming up with the Korean syllable using the hint is challenging since there could be bacchim and Korean has a lot of vowel and consonant sounds. I don’t mark all cards I got wrong AGAIN. I mainly employ this strategy for the sake of conserving time and energy since my number of cards to relearn would double or triple if I were to truly answer AGAIN for anything I got wrong (this time and effort is not proportional to the benefits at all in my opinion. 99% of the time it doesn’t matter if mark the card AGAIN now or 5 days from now or 3 months from now ). I’m kinda balancing my load myself without the plugin insofar as failed cards are concerned. I have my step set to 2400 as it is so I don’t see failed cards until 2-3 days later (this is to help build my excitement and enthusiasm to read the failed cards). Also, if I’m close to the answer ie the bacchim is wrong or the vowel sound is wrong or the consonant sound is wrong I usually don’t mark AGAIN since it’s very much possible I could get it right the next time since I just got an exposure to the word or maybe I’ll read it or hear it somewhere in Korean media before the next review. Korean just has a lot of vowel and consonant sounds so it just so happens that sometimes I’m CLOSE but not correct. However there are times where I will mark the card wrong if I got it wrong because of bacchim because I felt compelled to see the card again sooner because remembering that particular word exactly is important to me. Taking a lax approach to failing cards allows me to focus on words/sentences that I truly want to learn. Furthermore, sometimes I can’t tell how useful/important the word is since what dictates that is Korean native material and I don’t watch Korean tv 10 hours a day everyday let alone everyday etc (I can try to guess or make assumptions based on the meaning of the word for all I know… However, the word I considered most unlikely to be useful could show up over and over again and the word I thought would be the most useful may not be encountered again until 5 months later etc)… NOT ALL CARDS ARE EQUAL. Prioritizing saves me a lot of time and optimizes anki usage to the nth degree. I notice more easily now with the huge intervals that some cards stick well from repetition of seeing it multiple times ie 6x times over a long period of time (I’m talking months or a year here) while other cards don’t stick well despite the repetitions because that’s as far as that anki card will take me for that particular card (and it probably didn’t show up again in my reading/watching since I added it) and it’s obvious that I have to see it being used however many more times in native material in emotional, compelling ways. I recognize the limitations of anki and this is yet anther reason I don’t press FAIL strictly based on whether or not I actually failed the card.

An example with 3 clozes!

front:

back:

clozes:

I initially tried out the multiple cloze format for Korean on a whim because I like being lazy and half-assing anki as much as possible to get the benefit without racking my brain excessively. I noticed that making 1 cloze doesn’t work so I started my experiment by making 3 clozes for each word I added to anki since it would make reviews easier. Of course I pondered to myself if that would mean that reviews triple which probably means that it’s not worth making 3 cards per word (I quickly reached the conclusion that they would not since I have huge intervals and gave it a shot. I’m sure my reviews would’ve quadrupled if I used the default anki settings *shudder* the default steps are so awful). The first 2 clozes each clozed a syllable of the word and the 3rd cloze clozed part(s) of the definition. Later on I tried making 2 clozes instead of 3 by making the cloze for part(s) of the definition the same cloze number as the cloze that is clozing the EASIER syllable. I had to try it out to see if it’s as effective as clozing 3 syllables since 3 cloze cards sound like over-kill. As far a I can tell 2 clozes is as effective 3 clozes for the most part so I only make 3 clozes if I feel like the word/definition etc is that tricky to remember. I realized that for words that seem easy I’m still better off clozing 2 syllables  of the word as opposed to one syllable because I gain familiarity with the word better with 2 clozes than 1 cloze. I only only only make 1 cloze for the korean word if the word is a single syllable or it’s a double-syllable word that’s ridiculously easy  (the word itself is easy to remember) but I still want it in my deck and WANT to ensure that I remember the definition. I almost always have at least 2 clozes for Korean anki cards because I have to practice recall with the word and the definition otherwise I feel like I’m wasting my time. After all, what’s the point if I don’t remember the word itself or don’t remember the definition or neither…

You’d think that making 1 card is better than making 3 but it’s the exact OPPOSITE in my experience if you do it right (the time difference for making 3 cards vs 1 is a matter of 2 seconds and reviews for cloze deletions cards are much easier, faster, and more fun. Regarding the fun factor, clozing is the only significant thing I’ve encountered that makes anki reviews more fun (the colors, fonts, nonsense anki add-ons abt conquering crap etc don’t do shit in terms of fun factor). Multiple cloze cards is like doing steps in ANKI except it’s better and more effective SINCE YOU are seeing variations of the card. Additionally, I can change the ease intervals, minimum interval, graduation interval etc so it really takes up less time than the traditional format. It requires production from me but it’s not burdensome. In fact, the traditional format of sentence on the front with the definition on the back is so burdensome I can’t even get myself to do the review properly since I can’t make myself read the sentence lol… AND I painfully go through the cycle of not remembering or mis-remembering – this is a waste of time and you most definitely never do this with multiple cloze cards provided that you don’t cloze the whole word).  I went through a phase where I made Korean anki cards like I made Japanese anki cards and had to acknowledge that it’s just not working for Korean. For Japanese I usually have only one cloze that’s one syllable (hiragana) of the word by itself or the word in the sentence with the full definition in japanese and english below it. When I tried to adopt the strategy for Korean it was still too difficult and I came to the realization that ONE SYLLABLE in Korean is more complicated than the one syllable in Japanese. That is because Korean has spelling and all these vowels and consonant sounds that don’t exist in Japanese and of course there are Japanese sounds that cannot be properly represented by Hangeul. You’d think that blanking out a syllable is as easy as it gets but it turns out that is not the case for Korean.

I had been misunderestimating Korean and Hangeul all this time haha… Korean is not Japanese so obviously I have to modify my strategy for maximum efficiency and efficacy!  something about the bacchim and number of possible vowel and sound combinations just make it hard to remember the word or maybe it’s better to say that much easier to forget it or remember it vaguely or incorrectly (vague to the point that I don’t know if the word is in my deck or not or i have no idea what the f the word means even though the word has been in my deck for x years with a screenshot from the korean tv show) ie 3 or 4 syllable words that with syllables that all have different vowel sounds and some or all have different bacchim in them. hell even 2 syllable words can be tough to remember due to the myriad of bacchim/vowel combinations (though I know Japanese so I take full advantage of hanja to easily remember the sino-words ie not thinking of the vowel of the sound as an arbitrary vowel since I know the damn hanja. but half the time words don’t even have sino backgrounds!! ) Guess I love me some bacchim-less multi-syllable words that have repeating vowel sounds for the syllables like 비나리, 사이비,거시기,누리 lol (these words are random but easy to remember lol).

Furthermore, CLOZE deletion is wickedly effective for onomatopoeia and the four hanja character stuff compared to the traditional format. Maybe the traditional format isn’t complete trash if you generate tts and have it play it 20 times when you flip to the back lol.  Cloze deletion cards help me notice things that I wouldn’t notice in the traditional format or immersion (by immersion I mean I watch shit I like and care about and understand 90%+ without look-ups). Cloze deletion format is a MUST for me for Korean.

Example:

まことしやか = MAKOTOSHIYAKA… cannot be broken down any further… there’s no small tsu, long vowels, etc so it’s pretty damn straightforward.

얼렁뚱떵 (ㅇ+ㅓ + ㄹ, ㄹ+ㅓ+ㅇ ㄸ+ㅜ +ㅇ, ㄸ +ㅓ +ㅇ) – eol   leong   ttung  tteong

here you gotta remember the vowel sound (THERE are 11-20 vowels in korean vs 5 in japanese), bacchim (if there’s double bacchim then it’s even more burdensome lol), consonant sound, whether the consonant is double or not double (and of course it’s half and half and not all or nothing here) etc etc even if I were to make one cloze card….. It’s very to easy to mis-remember/not remember the syllable of the word. For Japanese I can get away with clozing one syllable like ___ことしやか for the example but for Korean making ONE cloze is still WAY TOO much demanding ___렁뚱떵 and I get poor results. It’ll feel like it’s working for a month or a couple months and then I totally blank out and go back to square one, play some guessing games (alternating between the 2 strong contenders usually due to a vowel sounds ) and rinse and repeat for eternity to never remember. It’s wasted energy. HOWEVER I noticed that when I made 2 clozes ie __렁뚱떵 and 얼__뚱떵 I remembered it much better. I learn/read the word in parts which makes me remember/read the word as whole much more easily. It makes me attentive, notice, and connect the dots in a way that immersion or traditional flashcard formats or reading cannot because I am practing ACTIVE RECALL. It’s the only way I can kinda emulate what children can do which is to remember stuff word by word, syllable by syllable with little effort and therefore notice crap easily (ie for korean kids it’s easy to remember and recall hangeul “blocks” for a 4 syllable word, for chinese kids it’s easy to remember the tone with the sound. while for me everything is arbitrary af and i will either not remember it or mis-remember it or keep guessing at certain parts like the vowel sound). As an adult I take the laziest way possible so I will mis-remember and forget the words if I were to test them in the traditional anki format because it’s so easy to not remember it exactly as its written. Additionally, by using this cloze format, I am essentially abiding by the cardinal rule of making flashcards which is KEEP IT SHORT AND SIMPLE (KISS for short).

The only way to make the cloze card effective for Korean is to make multiple cloze cards (c1 c2 c3) to break the information down. I didn’t like the idea of multiple cloze cards because you’re making 2 or 3 cards instead of one but from doing the single c1 cloze with Korean I realize making multiple clozes actually takes less time overall since my anki settings are super lax. Compared to making one cloze card, multiple cloze cards are  less burdensome, I spend less time on anki than if I had created ONE card even though I created 2 or 3 cards for one word since I fail it less frequently and press easy that much more often. Even if I press OKAY, anki will still send the cards out far. Currently my settings are set that for new cards it’s 7 days for okay and 11 days for good. I think my settings for japanese is like 9 days and 14 days?? Also the step is 2900 minutes. I was initially hesitant about making my intervals that huge for Korean but it turned out that I underestimated my memory skills. My fail rate did not increase astronomically and in fact the big, initial intervals are a boon because I can truly focus my energies on cards that are difficult rather than begrudgingly press easy on easy cards too frequently which was exactly what I would’ve experienced even with my original lax anki settings. If I was using the DEFAULT anki settings I’d be wasting a lot of time! Those settings are overkill especially for languages.

Of course my retention rate is not 100% with the cloze deletion format but it’s definitely higher than the rate for the traditional format. And I don’t think you should be aiming for a 100% anyway… I don’t know what the exact ideal number is but I would rather be undertested than overtested. I want to reap the benefits from anki without the unnecessary time sink.

If It’s not obvious, the point of this anki format is not to practice output; it’s to ensure that I properly engage with the information, digest the information in bite-sized pieces. Yes, I am asking myself to fill in the SYLLABLE which is output in a limited capacity (I have the whole sentence, the other syllable, the meaning, definition in english, a clue with the English letter telling me what the consonant sound is etc) but it’s nothing compared to actual output when you’re conjuring something out of thin air. I certainly don’t expect myself to be able to conjure up words in writing or speaking because I have it in my deck in this clozed deletion format. Cards I see periodically via this format definitely leave enough of an impression where I know whether or not a word is in my deck or not if I come across it again while watching a Korean TV show or reading a Korean book etc. I CANNOT say the same about the cards that are the usual word on the front and definition on the back or sentence on the front and definition in the back (I can barely get myself to read the sentence let alone make sure I remember the WORD, the SENTENCE, the MEANING, etc and there’s a reason for that which I’ve written about in great length in my hanjaro post.  Luckily nowadays I can at least have sentences I mined from reading have hanja inserted in before importing into anki.   ). I think learning words involves remembering the word itself, the meaning, and how you use it so that’s why I like breaking it down like this. I use this format is for my passive Korean ability. It’s between passive and active in a way since it does stuff for me that just watching/reading/hearing Korean (stuff I like. Stuff I may rewind while watching etc. I do not indiscriminately watch tv regardless of the language ) doesn’t do for me. Anki helps me either build or strengthen my “relationship” with words! Without anki, I get exposed to words WHICH I would immediately forget after looking it up or not encounter for months or a year. However, if I use anki, these words inevitably leave an impression on me in most cases since they are presented in this relatively easy QUIZ format. As a title says, I find this anki format to be the best for learning korean from TV SHOWS. It’s a great way to prime the words and make them memorable since ultimately I’m relying on the korean TV shows/books/articles/etc to help the words stick via memorable/emotional contexts but the words are not used that frequently ( I’m past those words and the words I’m trying to learn aren’t useless since they are words a native knows. ).

Using anki is better than mass-watching thousands of hours of korean tv passively (look up nothing, not rewind, use no subs with the exception of korean subs etc) and expect to magically understand everything 100% (which won’t happen since Korean culture is probably very different from your culture for one thing), watching korean tv looking up the majority of unknown words in google/dictionary while not making any anki cards or copying shit into a notebook to never review the aforementioned shit. Finally, half-ass anking is better than no anking. (UNLESS YOU SPEND WAY TOO MUCH TIME ON ANKI. in that case you may be better off just not using anki) On a similar note, it could be construed that multiple cloze cards IS half-assing anki compared  to the much recommended sentences cards or word cards (target language on the front, definition/explanation on the back), but when it comes down to it multiple cloze cards  are more effective for me. Difficulty is desirable when doing anki reviews since it makes the memories that much stronger but it shouldn’t be excessive. Excessive difficulty ultimately wastes your time because if it’s too hard, you can’t do your anki reviews properly and you waste time and effort trying to make it work and lying to yourself that it’s you and not the format or you lie to yourself it would work if you’d just torture yourself and push harder for abyssmal results.  I strive for an ideal level of difficulty and the multiple cloze deletion format facilitates that. I’ve come to the conclusion that for me half-ass anking is better than no anking for learning languages!!

I’ve found some great ways to STREAMLINE THE PROCESS for generating cards while watching KOREAN talk/variety shows. I have a different for process for stuff I mine from reading because I go after efficiency.

I recommend and use the following:

lingoes dictionary – I use the naver japnese/korean dictionary from 2009 (?)(that’s the date on lingoes if I remember correctly.) as well as the k-e ones.  I like it because it’s really fast since it’s off-line and searches as you type. You can also set it up so it looks up text you double-click on, look up a word in the definition with a shortcut,etc but it does not know how to unconjugate so it’s only helpful for nouns for the pop-up function. You can bring the lingoes program to the front and to the back with a shortcut. I also wrote an autohotkey script to send korean text to lingos.

Also recently I’ve fallen in love with the example sentences. I always ignored them until this year lol. I always ignored them because I only cared about what the word means in the instance that I came across.

AUTOHOTKEY (set to naver/daum/some korean-english dictionary/naver k-e example sentences/naver j-k examples sentences/ and my HG and OG Japanese google imi wa appended to the word). as I mentioned the lingoes dictionary is not up to date. I wish it was up to date! I got the idea from this blog https://mykorea.blog/look-up-a-word-or-phrase-in-a-korean-dictionary-using-autohotkey/ PAIR This with a gaming mouse with the macros set up and you WILL save a lot of time and feel more motivated to stuff up

WORD QUERY  – on anki 2.0- this anki plugin is amazing. after installing it you find and install the dictionaries then go to word-query when you’re in anki and set-up a card-template for the look-up. You put the word in the specified field and it generates the defintion entry in the specified field ! it does not know how to unconjugate since it searches the dictionary. It can be run in EDITING window and BROWSE window. that means you can batch defintions in browse on premade decks etc etc. it’s also possible to do that with HANSEIDO. sanseido plugin is officially dead though 😦 .  The only downside is that for some of the dictionaries it will only insert 1 matching entry when there are more ie any word that is a homonym. I can circumvent the homonym issue for naver J-k by pasting from lingoes since the lingoes dictionary file is the same as the stardict naver JK dictionary file. Also, some dictionaries put all the definitions under 1 entry (the korean-english ones) which sometimes makes the entry extremely long. However, I do not spend time editing/trimming that stuff since I don’t have the time and it doesn’t bother me. I set it up so the wordquery stuff shows up on the back of the card. The clutter doesn’t bother me. EDIT 04-2021    : it’s available on anki 2.1 – it works on the add card window but it doesn’t do the batching in the browse window. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1030932490  the other word query plugin on anki 2.1 plugins page doesn’t work, the fast wordquery on anki 2.1 partially works (it only detects 2 of the dictionaries… no idea why so it’s trash)

06.2021  mediafire link for cloze each character, hanseido, wordquery for anki 2.0

mediafire link to cloze autohotkey and excel

paste into

C:\Users\_____\AppData\Roaming\Anki2\addons

to install them.

 thank god i can use both anki 2.0 and 2.1!

click here for the mediafire link that contains  13 dictionaries that I use

to break it down

• vicom is korean-english (from lingoes)

• edocu is korean-english ( from lingoes)

• quick-kor-ENG is korean-english

• naverkrjp is korean-japanese

• koreandic is korean-korean – 147,000+ entries from stardict
  

• hanja just inserts all the homonyms

• kn is naver korean-english from lingoes – about 89,000 entries. has example sentences

• dong-a-eng – korean law – 사지성어 – i combined all of them since i figured they probably won’t overlap

• biggest korean dictionary online with 900,000+ entries – k/k  – has pronunciation

• standard k-dic – korean/korean and example sentences – pronunciation! – added October of 2020 – 표준국어대사전 by eu81273. he or she is an ANGEL. 366,508 total entries

and more…

the one titled github was a tsv file that I converted from this github page

I think there might be a duplicate there….

Lingoes converter that I used to generate stardict dictionaries

Or maybe it was from here??

下载

1. Windows版： http://lingoes-extractor.googlecode.com/files/lingoes-extractor-1.0.exe

2. Java版:http://lingoes-extractor.googlecode.com/files/lingoes-extractor-1.0.jar

stardict dic  | editing stardict dic

WORDQUERY EXamples

#2 https://postimg.cc/RNLz3WmF

word-query set up is easy and straight-forward…

For Korean I use korean-english/ korean-korean and naver korean-japanese dictionary and the hanja dictionary (sometimes it’s helpful or maybe I just do it for the shits and giggles. it generates all the homophones in hanja form! I usually don’t pay attention to this).

I also use it in conjunction with readlang and rikaisama (Japanese) since I import cards using those programs/services. Readlang doesn’t know how to unconjugate so you’d have to painstackingly unconjugate the verbs so I only use it on certain cards which I mark via tagging before importing.

HANSEIDO – This gives you korean definitions. I use it to mass generate defintions. I select all the korean cards in browse and generate the definition. again, it does not know how to unconjugate. you can not use it in the EDITING FIELD. It can only be executed in the browse field. I was curious and tested it to see if it would look up hanja since there are lotta of homophones depending on the word and it WORKED!

CLOZE DELETION SHORTCUT PLUGIN called BASIC C1 WRAPPER- I installed other plugins I would never use and replaced the code with the cloze deletion shortcut for c2 and c3 and c4 etc. so for me it’s control + 2, control +3, control + 4 to make the highlighted text clozed. there’s also the space bar one

CLOZE EACH CHARACTER PLUGIN – it’s based off the cloze shortcut plugin which uses control + space bar AS THE shortcut for c1. Therefore, the spacebar cloze plugin stops working if I install cloze each character. So, I chose this over the spacebar plugin!)

as is this (I use the new button/short-cut for clearing all the clozes in the field) and this

PAINT.NET PROGRAM – for cutting out the text from the screenshots. I like this over gimp and MS paint and this other program. I use the shortcut key “s” to select a chunk of the picture so I can cut it and paste it into anki. Also I use the macro mouse for copy pasting (control c, control v). Unlike the other programs, paint.net has shortcuts for accessing a specific picture when you open up multiple pictures. Sometimes I take screenshots and save them to generate cards later and so after I open a handful of pictures I switch between the pictures by using the shortcuts control + 1 for the first pic open, control + 2 for the second pic open, etc etc

EDIT: I now use sharex. check out mattvsjapan’s youtube vid about the program!

TWEAK ANKI SETTINGS

This isn’t a plugin or a program but anki is completely different with different settings. I used to be overtested like crazy from the default settings as well as the damn steps. So I don’t feel burdened or ashamed of generating multiple cloze deletion cards simply because my settings are set so I can push easy cards far out rather quickly and cloze deletion cards are easier to remember than regular cards and I did regular cards already and know they don’t work as well. My settings for Japanese are even more lax since I’m that much more confident and comfortable with Japanese. I have different settings for each deck depending my level and the format (THE CLOZE DELETION card format has huge ease intervals etc for obvious reasons!). as you get better at a language at the language you should increase the ease interval/etc.the default settings are just too much. and if you need those default settings to retain a decent percentage than you’re probably better off not using anki and YOU SHOULD instead read and listen consistently to learn/familiarize yourself with the common words/sentence patterns/ etc.

https://vladsperspective.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/optimize-your-anki-youre-overtesting-yourself-on-too-few-cards-make-huge-gains/

and don’t forget to change the STEPS. I hate steps! My step is just one and it’s usually 2900 minutes. If I fail a card I do not want to see it 1 minute later since it will interrupt the flow of my anki review mojo. I love anki now. But seriously why the hell do people want to see anki cards 1 minute and 10 minutes after failing… that just sounds like torture (It literally ruins anki reviews because I get CONSTANT interruptions not to mention I can’t fathom how anyone can consider 1 minute and 10 minutes intervals to be SPACED. if you need to see it that frequently that maybe you shouldn’t have added that card. I feel more motivated to read my anki card after failing it if anki shows it to me 2 or 3 days from when I initially saw it rather than the next day or 5 minutes later.

When the dictionary and google and naver translate fail me I go to chiebukuro, reddit, korean discord, or korean stack exchange. I prefer chiebukuro solely for the fact that it’s less of a pain in the ass. Also Japanese people are very kind and sometimes Japanese is better than English for the explanation since the 2 languages are grammatically similar but Japanese and Korean are very different languages and some shit is just is hard to translate to Japanese and vice versa. the stack exchange wants me to write a paragraph in the question field or something. it always bitches about how I don’t have enough text. It’s ridiculous.

So I usually download the episode than watch it on youtube or ondemandkorea etc because it’s so much more convenient with rewinding and fast-wording or even looping. I use kmplayer because I can set it up so that I can rewind and fastforward by scrolling my mouse and that is very convenient. Also I can press f5 and f6 to set point a and point b respectively so I can loop the video (I don’t use this often). also if I press control + c kmplayer will take a screenshot and put it in my clipboard which I can paste into paint/gimp/etc. KMPLAYER takes the screenshot of the video at full screen which makes the text BIGGER so it’s really convenient since korean shows are notorious for having small text. Meanwhile Japanese shows have HUGE text literally covering 20 % of the screen as you can see all over this post which I like for practical reasons ie reading/putting it into anki though sometimes I wish it were a little smaller but it’s still better than Korean TV text. I always gotta make the Japanese video smaller before taking a screenshot to add to anki while for Korean it’s ALWAYS fullscreen just to get that tiny text as big as possible.

So when i come across something that I want to add to anki I…

1) press control + c on kmplayer. I either let the video play ( I can rewind if I want to etc) or loop it at a specified scene.
2) paste in paint
3) search lingoes
4) run word query with control + enter (right enter). I set it up so that the word-query dictionary fields do not show up during reviews. they take up a lot of space so I just copy whatever I want into the cloze field.

5) if that doesn’t work I go to google or whatever. Or I could add a tag to it to go back to fill the definition in later so I can just keep watching the episode. sometimes I have to ask on chiebukuro or korean stack exchange and the responses can take days sometimes.

6) I cut out a square or rectangle that contains the text and paste into the screenshot field of my anki card. I set this to show up in the BACK. Sometimes I find the scene itself ( without the text) helpful to remember so i’ll include it on top of the text.

7) if I find something in lingoes with an example sentence I paste the definition, example sentence, japanese translation all on the same field. then I use the shortcut for cloze deleting and cloze delete each syllable of the word (usually 2), and a part of the definition (a syllable or two). I try not to make too many cloze deletion cards. I usually generate 2 cloze deletion cards since first card is for the syllable of the word & syllable(s) of the defintion and second card is for the second syllable. I cloze the definition under the cloze of the syllable that’s EASIER to remember. If the word is particularly hard I will make 2 clozes with 2 syllables of the word and a 3rd cloze with only parts of the definition clozed out ( I rarely do this one because I don’t like making 3 cards for a word unless the word is particularly tricky or challenging). it all depends on how I perceive the difficulty of the word in terms of remembering it.

I repeat the steps if the word has another meaning (which was not used in the talk/variety show) that I think is easy to remember/ it seems worth remembering. kill 2 birds with one stone.

b) if lingoes doesn’t find anything but word query dictionary finds something then I use that. If i don’t have the sentence I just use word and definition with stuff clozed out.

** when I initially discovered the wonder of cloze deletion I was between a rock and a hard place because cloze-deleting a screenshot of a tv show is time-consuming (compared to clozing text with the ms paint and copy-pasting. i sure as hell won’t type out the sentence) but effective since the screenshot is memorable and I actually get something out of my anki review since something is blanked out. Inserting a screenshot that contains text without blanking anything out does nothing for me for korean. I realized one day that I can cloze the definition entry and put the screenshot on the back as a reminder/test as to why I care about the word. That’s why I love clozing the example sentences in lingoes. I feel more motivated to read the sentence or phrase in the screenshot knowing that I read the definition or explanation just a few seconds ago.

8) as I’m adding my cloze deletion cards I also add the word by itself to another field so I can look up all the crap on hanseido later on. I put the hanseido definition on the front since it’s a different definition than the one I grabbed from the other dictionaries and I’m more likely to read it if it’s on the front of the card. no scratch that; i will not read it if it’s on the back. it’s some psychological/conditioning thing! I’m very impulsive with the pressing.

9) after I’m done adding for the day I run hanseido in browse

10 ) be amazed by the number of cards I Made (remember one word could have 2 or 3 cards) in one day and actually remember shit! If you want to know how many NOTES you have rather than number of cards, type Card:1 in your card browser after selecting the deck.

Anyway, going back to the initial example I gave courtesy of some episode of HIGH SCHOOL RAPPER. I know that if I did the traditional format of pasting the screenshot let’s say on the front and the answer on the back I may not remember the word or the meaning despite countless reviews on anki. For example what I get out of the anki reviews could be that it’s a 2 syllable word i failed a bunch of times, or a 2 syllable word that starts a with a gg sound, or I’ll remember the definition but not the word itself ( so I may not recognize thy the word when I see it in the wild) , or I’ll remember. the word but not remember the meaning ( or assign the meaning to that word). There’s too much going on in those 2 syllables to just make ONE CARD.  There are double consonants, one syllable has bacchim, the other syllable doesn’t, i gotta remember which syllable has the bacchim and which doesn’t, i gotta remember the hangeul that makes up the bacchim,  definition is not as simple and straightforward as concrete nouns like pig etc (I think ggaddak is an adjective? korean grammar is confusin’).  I gotta break it down to get something out of it and I wish I figured that out sooner.

=====

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BACK:

<- I actually already had this word in my deck from months or years back.

I found it!

So it was set up as

---

Front:

이도 저도

---

Back:

I linked the youtube link for the sake of satisfying anyone’s curiosity but i did not add any linkst o the anki card and I almost always never bother to add links to anki cards especially youtube vids since those links die. omg holy shit the vid has KOREAN SOFTSUBS now…. those definitely didn’t exist in 2012. the vid has subs in like 12 diff languages.

So when I initially looked up the word the meaning of the word, the meaning was crystal clear since I looked up the word while watching Strong Heart in 2012 or 2013?? I definitely remembered the meaning and the definition for at least 30 minutes in my head due to short-term memory since I heard it/read it/looked up the definition, it made COMPLETE sense, and it was used in a funny way in native speech. I added it to anki and reviews for this word went swimmingly for a while but eventually I completely forgot the meaning of the word and the word probably a few months or a year later. It was on the default, overkill anki settings with the steps and everything so it’s obvious it’s the card format that’s sucking not to mention the default steps are soul-sucking and just completely unnecessary for cards you make yourself. At that point I entered the cycle of learning and remembering and forgetting the word and the meaning and I’m sure half the time I was half-assing my reviews which includes not even reading the back of the card (like I said impulsively press enter or spacebar after 0.5 seconds). Passively reading stuff doesn’t do shit in this particular case. active recall is what counts! I ended up never regaining the initial crystal clear comprehension and  familiarity with the word and the meaning that I possessed when  I first looked it up. Actually maybe I did regain that level of clarity to some extent transiently when I would read the card in its entirety but that memory never lasted a significant amount of time because I am not practicing active recall with this very common anki format. It’s a lot of wasted time and effort. You’d think the active recall is more demanding and difficult and time-consuming but the passsive-reading is more demanding, difficult and time-consuming since it does not work. you gotta look at the FOREST NOT THE DAMN TREES!!  It seems like a simple enough task to extend my memory of this word/phrase and its meaning that I learned almost effortlessly by encountering it in a memorable context but in hindsight it’s clear that this anki format is terrible for that. I’m sure if I added the card in the multiple cloze deletion format I would’ve remembered/learned this word and its meaning first and foremost and with less time and effort and I most certainly wouldn’t have looked it up while watching PRODUCE 48! I’m not implying that if I added the card in 2012 in multiple cloze format then never saw it outside my deck that I should know it in 2019. What I think happened was that I encountered the phrase HOWEVER many times after adding it to anki in 2012/2013 and probably looked it up again even though it’s in my anki deck since the anki reviews weren’t effective then decided to not add it again since it’s already in anki. I am aware that I left out “anida” in the front and I’m not surprised I did that since as I mentioned before I half-assed anking when it came to Korean. I did anything and everything possible to cut corners to minimize time I spend making cards in anki because time = money. I don’t think the presence of “anida” on the front of the card would’ve made a big difference in the end result x months/years later since the anki format is inherently lacking. ido-juhdo is the meat of the phrase anyway! I was dead-set on half-assing anking as much as possible for Korean whether it’s making cards or doin reviews because I knew that anki does work and it’s helpful but I knew deep inside that the card format was inherently lacking.  I eventually figured out the better format and the reasons why it’s superior in every way.

I added this word AGAIN in 2019 while watching Produce 48 either knowing that I already have it in my deck (it’s easier to make a card than to search, find, and edit a card or suspend a card) or while not even being aware. I knew it wasn’t my first time encountering this word or looking up the definition but I also knew that I was looking it up now since I had no idea what the hell it meant. In this clozed format I learned the word and its meaning easily (THERE’S NO BACCHIM OR DOUBLE CONSONANTS ETC and the context is memorable) and I kept hitting easy and that enabled me to could focus my energy on other cards that are harder. I have come across Korean words in Korean tv shows (2012 to now) that are used in fun and memorable ways but because I didn’t add it in the clozed format, I missed out on learning the words!!! Trying to learn the word (remembering Korean words is not the same thing as remembering Japanese words or English words or Spanish words etc etc. It’s demanding in its own way ), the meaning, the usage (Korean grammar/conjugation/etc is no damn joke. I nodded when I read someone say it’s Japanese grammar times ten. it’s not an exaggeration actually), etc all at the same time is not following the principle of KEEP IT SHORT AND SIMPLE.  
one thing I can say for sure as someone who learned languages using anki and native material, sentence cards work better with Japanese than korean since it can be quite the shitshow for korean. The reason for that is the difference in the writing systems which I kinda wrote about in the hanjaro post.

OMG my anki dreams have come true!

<- took pics of my cards with pictures since they looked cool to me!

IF YOU HATE HOW YOUR EYES GET IRRITATED FROM DOING ANKI REVIEWS ON THE COMPUTER CHECK THIS OUT!

So I found out on this OLD THREAD that ankidroid can be run on android-based ereaders!  This excites me a lot because I’ve always hated how the computer screen makes my eyes tired and irritated. :O Of course you can mitigate this by buying computer screens that are specifically designed to be more comfortable to your eyes like the ASUS or BENQ brand or wearing computer glasses or using f.lux or taking a break every 20 minutes or all of the above. However, for the most part if I’m reading or doing an anki deck I want to use an eink screen because it’s so much comfortable on my eyes. I did my research and the cheapest option is the refurbished nook glowlight plus on ebay for around $50. Only problem is you gotta ROOT IT after you get it. All the other ones are like 100$ or like $200 or even more but you don’t need to root them since you already have access to google play or whatever it is to download android apps! Of course they come with more features like bluetooth or an audiojack. Ankidroid on nookglowlight will enable you to do anki reviews that are solely picture or text. It cannot do sounds since it doesn’t have the capability to play sounds.

I bought this nook with the sole purpose of using it to do anki reviews. As an ereader I definitely prefer the kindle paperwhite 3 and I will make a post about it in the near future as it is a GREAT resource learning many languages except for Korean because there’s no dictionary for Korean. I’ve always appreciated and loved anki for what it’s enabled me to accomplish in my busy life. I see these language learners or polyglots that have shitty learning methods with the writing and copying crap excessively as in they don’t seem to understand the concept of language learning on a fundamental level (This is why I’m such a big fan of Steve Kaufmann because he really spreads the truth about language learning and dispels the god awful myths on youtube. I absolutely hate the myths that are constantly being perpetuated about language learning and fluency and language learning methods.).  And these people seem very content and complacent and brain-washed and conditioned to believe that the ineffective, time-consuming educational methods they were subjected to during their formative years was actually effective in some way. I was more cynical and depressed than those people during those years and plus I went to an American School & I just knew I was being subjected to bullshit. I shudder when I hear the word “language learning notebook.” Of course not everyone has to use anki but in my personal experience it’s very effective and helpful and you can easily misuse it or torture yourself with it. I recommend using anki when you get intermediate or upper intermediate because I think it’s more efficient to learn all the common words from encountering them many times rather than through anki torture. Also, I have so much experience with anki at this point I know what works for the most part. I get a lot of bang for my buck. I owe a lot to anki because I know for a fact I would’ve NEVER bothered to learn Korean. Psychologically I would totally tell myself wtf is the point with the going backwards aka 1 step forward, 2 steps back bullshit. Because I have anki there’s no f’in possible way to go BACKWARDS in Korean no matter how much I neglect it lol. It’s not just anki. I think it’s because I know my kanji and I use anki. Psychologically I would’ve have never bothered to learn Korean unless I set myself up in such a way that I cannot regress. I do not understand people who set themselves up for failure and experience the 1 step forward, 2 steps back over and over again and continue on with ineffective methods (again  not saying you gotta use anki but it really says something about the ineffectiveness of your methods if you’re going backwards so many times. you really don’t need anki for fluency if you can put in the immersion time *which is a lot * which requires you to do stuff you actually like NOT stuff you think you should be doing or stuff you think you like or stuff you’re trying to make yourself like etc etc.  I see this crap all the time and people are like why is my passion for x language gone? I’m like uh you’re subjecting yourself to torture while lying to yourself about it. THAT’S WHAT’S UP. ).

ANYWAYS

figuring out the rooting was kinda time-consuming and annoying but I figured it out with google. My biggest problem was step one which was enabling USB-debugging or something like that which is addressed in the link below.  After that you gotta learn how to install android apps via side loading which means Downloading the Latest ADB and Fastboot SDK Platform-Tools and googling directions  and downloading the “apk” for the app (via google).  For windows after you get the platform tools folder you go in the folder PRESS SHIFT AND RIGHT CLICK on the window (NOT on a file) and click the option for “open powershell window here.” At minimum you need nova launcher and ankidroid installed. I was also interested in NAVER COMICS because the drawing isn’t that good anyway and it’s a great way to learn korean and I refuse to stare at a computer screen for that. But for the nook glowlight plus it’s a NO GO. You can’t scroll (well you can but it looks like crap… just a lot of lag and waiting). you cannot install norefresh or a2 mode. IT’s a horrible experience since you have to scroll since it’s just one long ass picture file. I only use it for ankidroid for that reason.

I will say that the initial DOWNLOAD of my deck took 1 hour because it kept shutting off because it thinks you’re idle and my deck is huge with the pictures and sound files ( I used to make cards with sound). Before downloading your deck onto your nook I suggest going on your DESKTOP ANKI and going to options check database; it might help. afterwards it’s just smooth-sailing since all it needs to do is sync. I think syncing takes a few minutes.

I have no intention of making or editing anki cards on this whatsoever. IT’s not worth the pain. If it really bothers me I’ll write down the card on a paper and then fix it on the computer anki.

Check out the links on this reddit thread and you may have to google a bit more to get the info but just make sure you’re googling for the specific nook that you have. Hint you gotta install nova launcher or some other launcher to actually access the apps you sideload onto your nook.

As an ereader, the nook glowlight plus is really lacking. I haven’t tried downloading an ebook reading app and reading a book on it but I did read a book on the default nook ebook software because I wanted to read an epub book that is not accessible on the kindle paperwhite. First of all the dictionary sucks because it takes you outta the book (time waster) while the kindle pops it open and you close it by tapping the screen. Also the screen response is just faster and better on the kindle and flipping pages is a nightmare on the nook lol. It feels like you gotta click on that exact patch of screen otherwise it takes you to the options or whatever. But for the purpose of DOING ANKI and considering that it cost around $50 it’s totally a great buy in my book.

Ankidroid has gestures which means I do anki reviews much faster!

Here are more pictures! The ghosting doesn’t look as noticeable in person and doesn’t distract me. I don’t notice it and the ereader refreshes periodically as I do the reviews.

and as always I have a lot of ideas for posts but don’t have time or motivation to flesh them out for good reasons.

HAPPY ANKING!

 

https://www.xda-developers.com/install-adb-windows-macos-linux/

./adb.exe devices” instead of just “adb devices” powershell kept saying that adb was not a known command or script, etc.

Korean 101 : part 3?

I think this is my 3rd post entitled Korean 101. I just share Korean words or sentences that I still don’t know or don’t understand yet they seem basic or common. I find it interesting how I can watch Korean variety/talk tv with lingoes dictionary and understand it 95 to 100% and still not know certain useful things.

The first thing is from a song from Hyorin’s solo album. the song is 꺼져

니가 내게 해줬던
그 말들
그딴 말들 다 필요 없어

뒤돌아보면 미쳤던 거지

The word I didn’t know was the one that’s underlined. The general meaning is clear from context but I definitely wouldn’t have figured out the nuance.

同じ「そんな」という意味ですが、
그딴の方は少し蔑んだ言い方です。

 

( Zico was saying exactly what I was thinking because people make various facial expressions unconsciously and the camera is going to catch all that. But for this rapper I swear I never saw him smile or laugh until that particular scene which is quite an accomplishment lol)

The following sentence was said by a rapper on SHOW ME THE MONEY 6. I think the situation was his performance/rapping didn’t go that well. So when I heard it I was kinda sure that it meant something “bad.” But then I saw the grammar somersaults (not not have, have) and thought I’m not so sure. I didn’t want to think about it so I asked someone on chiebukuro.

후련 한 감은 없지 않아 있어요.

１、후련 한（すっきりする、すかっとする）

２、감（感じ、気、気分）은

３、없지 않아 있어요.（直訳すれば少なからずある:否定の否定は 肯定でしょう？）

＊まとめ
すっかりする感じ（気分）がないものでもないんですよ
（むずかしです 笑い）

I included this in my korean 101 post because Japanese has constructions like this all the time but I don’t blink an eye and I comprehend it effortlessly and automatically. There’s nothing confusing about it for me.  But for some reason I haven’t come across this construction as much in Korean so I got intimidated and overwhelmed.

 His obachan shirt is CUUUTE or maybe ugly

musings regarding my recent Korean output

So I know a lot of language learners are obsessed with perfection almost to the point of irritation. no nobody gives a shit about how your handwriting improved for the katakana or the hanguel or whatever from writing it over and over or copying long ass passages of god knows what… perhaps you should put your time to better use. they just irritate me because in away they’re promoting awful learning methods and also seem oblivious or narrow-minded to other various methods of learning out there. my school of thought is I suffered at the hands of compulsory education with the mind-numbing, awful activities like work-sheets or copyings things etc etc…. why are you willing subjecting yourself to this torture on your free time? One of the biggest realizations I made when I was learning Japanese was that I was spending so much time learning about how to learn or various ways to learn or what are bad ways to learn despite years of compulsory conditioning trying to convince me that it’s effective. But I don’t regret spending that time learning about learning because I don’t want to waste any more time on shit and in the overall scheme of things you waste more time learning ineffectively by not learning about learning.

ANYWAYS recently I was outputting my Korean because I had to communicate with this korean person via email (by the way I see no appeal in “pen-pals” whatsoever… I am only communicating with someone if I have something to communicate to that specific person). I just wanted to communicate and deliver the information I wanted to deliver and I also wanted to get answers from this person. My attitude going into this is “ugh let’s just end this in the most painless, efficient way possible.” (I work full time, I have shit to do, it’s the just natural attitude for me to have)

In my view, it’s best to not give a shit and just do whatever is least painful and strenuous because that will lead to MORE output in volume compared to re-reading your sentences or clauses or using the dictinoary to look up crap you don’t have to or just stressing about it because you can’t write as eloquently as a native ( this is such a stupid and asinine and invalid worry. you should be asking yourself WHY WOULD I BE ABLE TO WROTE ELOQUENTLY seeing as you only spent x hours listening/reading/writing/speaking. i wish more people would read AJATT). Because I set this low standard for myself OF COMMUNICATION I did not waste my time looking up words in the dictinoary or re-reading and re-writing my sentences obsessively. I did do the final re-read just to make sure it made sense and my message would be understood by the receiving party. Ultimately I did “proof-read” albeit lazily and half-assedly and I later realized there were still typos when I sent it. But I did not care because my goal was communication and I knew despite whatever mistakes or typos or unnaturalnness or clunkiness of the sentence or fragment the person will understand what I’m saying. And I genuinely did not care if my Korean output seems worse than actually it is due to typos and lack of effort on my effort. There’s a level that you reach in the upper intermediate stage where you know your writing is full of mistakes and it’s unnatural but you know for sure that the native person will understand what you wrote ( I will link my only lang-8 entry that’s in Korean so you can get some idea of my ability to output but honestly depending what I want to output (writing an entry on lang-8 vs cmomunicating wtih someone via email is completely different) the shit can get real raw and terrible as any language learner knows … I’m sure the lang-8 entry gives the impression that my passive vocab/grammar is smaller than it actually is.) in fact the person i was communicating with via email started writing to me in english because my korean output is so bad lol. my korean comprehension ability is great though! ) . some of the stuff you can obsess over with writing well is so minor with respect to comprehension like the ㅅㅅㅅㅅ you put in to make sentences more formal and respectful. I just shoved the ㅅ shit in when I felt like it because this person’s isn’t going to get pissed at me for not using it when I shouldn’t have or not using it when I should have because he knows I’m not fluent in Korean and he should be able to tell my main goal is communication since he don’t speak fluent english.

<- she’s talking about games clearly.

So as we have our e-mail exchanges I start to give a shit unfortunately. I take this as a bad thing because I’m wasting time that could be put to better use and it’s just emails so it doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect since the only goal is communication. ALSO EVEN if I look up whatever my email will still have mistakes. what happened was I GOOGLED 오랫만 WITH QUOTES because I was unsure if it was correct or not and google says it’s a common mistake it’s actualy oreNNNN man. before I googled it I was thinking o-ret-man is correct and oreNNN is wrong or vice versa or they’re BOTH CORRECT. So after I did what I did I was kinda disappointed in myself for wasting my time googling. so then he responds and he opens his email with OREtttttT MAN so I feel even more irritated at myself wasting time on googling shit. it’s so minor, it don’t matter and he don’t even know if it’s incorrect or he knows but still wants to use it (I know that feeling). Hell I felt like using it and I should’ve just gone for it. You know what I’m gonna ask him about it… I only make a big deal of this because it will be if I get into this tunnel-vision mindset of obsessing over little shit and waste a gargantuan amount of time. It seems like it’s not a lot of time but it really adds up if you’re constantly obsessing over minuscule crap.

Anyways, my ability to output in Korean is stagnant and I tend to or rather I feel lazy so I output my Japanese-style Korean which doesn’t surprise me. Korean grammar just seems more complex and complicated than Japanese when it comes to outputting. The biggest reason of course is that I do not practice output in Korean. I have no need or desire so I don’t practice it so obviously I never improve. My comprehension has been improving leaps and bounds since it’s a passive ability that I’ve been cultivating effectively.  For Japanese I was so passionate about it, I practiced output ASAP as in trying to think in Japanese as much as possible which led me to think about how to express xyz in Japanese. In the beginning, I spoke to extremely choppy, short, SIMPLE sentences or fragments or even phrases because my Japanese was so limited and I didn’t want to fall into the trap of making up on “own Japanese.”  IT totally worked because my output in Japanese improved leaps and bounds from that and COMPREHENSIBLE/COMPELLING input & sooo input only (for KOrean) doesn’t work. I have no problem understanding Korean and noticing how stuff is expressed in a really Korean way (different from Japanese and English) but when it comes to output I don’t remember shit. It’s like trying to remember a fancy speech or some dialogue in a movie or tv show word for word. I always remember the general idea and flow… enough to pass a multiple choice test lol.

I don’t have a desire to output or think in Korean… it’s too hardcore lol. I don’t have that kind of passion.

Interesting Korean Article with AUDIO

They have the whole transcript of the audio!! It’s a goldmine for language learners. For me with my current level of Korean it doesn’t really matter if I have the audio or not but nonetheless I will definitely listen to this once I read this article and look up all the words. Plus I’m curious how calm and collected and composed everyone will be since sometimes debates get heated. One of my favorite things I love watching/listening to Japanese is people debating about something heatedly and the atmosphere gets tense and people start talking even faster and interrupt each other and start saying things that are kinda mean but in keigo etc etc lol… it’s just great entertainment and great for my Japanese learning.

The link to the interview is below. The topic is writing Korean using only hangeul VS writing Korean with hangeul and hanja mixed together. That’s a topic that’s really been of interest to me as as person who is learning Korean after Japanese (I’m still learning Japanese but  I am just saying it like this because I recommend learning one language at a time. I absolutely don’t see the point of learning 2 languages from scratch at the same time unless you love being inefficient!!! ). I’ve been able to find interesting articles to satisfy my curiosity in Japanese but there are articles that aren’t translated into Japanese for obvious reasons so I just had to read the Korean articles and discussions. This is the only one I found with audio so I felt that it was my duty as a fellow Korean learner to share in case anyone else finds this topic interesting. I personally have printed a lot of articles including this one to read… I’ve been looking up stuff using naver translate because that enables to generate anki cards in MCD format EFFICIENTLY.

http://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4590668#csidxd4064261da1b001b5a4543e4f382073 

I will paste one little excerpt from this interview-y thing that totally resonated with me.

그러면 한 가지 예만 듭시다. 어휘력이 상당히 떨어져서 상당히 외래어를 많이 쓰는데 제가 아주 답답하고 불쾌한 것은요. 바로 어제께도 뉴스에서 어떤 문제가 나오면 이슈라는 말 잘 써요. 당면문제, 시급한 현안 해도 될 것인데. 그 다음에 TF팀을 구성한다 그럽니다. TF라고 하는 걸 태스크포스라고 좀 더 분명하게 말하는 경우도 있는데 그것은 특별전담부서라고 하면 됩니다. 그러니까 점잖은 우리 말이 있는데도 불구하고 자꾸 외래어를 쓰고 하는 거는 우리말이 황폐화하고 있다는 증거예요.

원문보기:
http://www.nocutnews.co.kr/news/4590668#csidx0384ba9ef7c53588abf9a061eb1621c

There are some foreign words they use in Korean that I absolutely despise and “issue” is one of them! If I ever write in Korean and need to say issue I will definitely use one of the other words he suggested. BTW I wrote my very first lang-8 entry in Korean earlier this year out of necessity. I just had to ask for suggestions and of course nobody answered. I didn’t make much mistakes but the person was fixing all the spacing errors since I didn’t space anything lol.

Vocabulary lists

VOCABULARY LISTS
Vocab lists seem so tempting because it seems so efficient sorta like premade like anki decks. Of premade decks I’ve only used the heisig one successfully which I had to modify heavily to suit my needs. It’s tempting to go math crazy and do the 20 words a day x 356 days in a year = 7120 words or some other variation but I’ve learned the hard way the futility in doing that with my experience of misusing anki while learning Japanese.

I’m just posting about this topic because I just happened to come across these blogs that are an amazing fit for me to generate the anki cards in MCD format. These bloggers are sharing what they looked up on their blogs and they’re Japanese people learning Korean so this material is quite alluring to me.

http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html
http://yokorea.blog.fc2.com/blog-entry-62.html
http://erirang.blogspot.com/

****
6000 intermediate
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5d3a9f85-afd6-4466-82e5-9286d5e8d985/33a6ba3bb7d7c7ff42187680cb77f8c0

6000 advanced
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s167/sh/5b206c6c-9772-4199-9d2a-7f58d816549e/11a60d02ccedd27630da31b7d8a8dc9d

So I had saved this huge ass list of the top 6,000 Korean words from a some wiki website into my evernote. i had no intention of memorizing the list. I know how it may seem appealing for some hardworking rote-memorizing people but not to me. It just makes more sense to learn these words as you encounter them since they ARE SO GODDAMN COMMON AND USEFUL. also you may think top 6,000 words are mad useful!! but trust me they most likely aren’t. you need to figure out what YOUR TOP 6,000 KOREAN WORDS ARE as in the top 6000 words that come up in the korean media you enjoy. Anyways I kept it to sorta gauge my growth in korean vocabulary. for example a lot of the words were ha? the(japanese ha) or like wuh? from 2 years ago are now i know this shit. I’ll go “wow this shit is mad useful or i’ve seen it.” or i’ll be hardpresed to find words i have never seen or heard of. never mind it was from 4 years ago! 2012! If you still suck after 4 years you should reevaluate your methods and your goals.

Speak of the devil, here’s my worst nightmare realized

 

Has anyone reached proficiency through self-study outside of Korea?
byu/infringement153 inKorean

In my case by the time i reached 3000 cards in anki ( i didn’t anki for the first 3 or 6 months because i do not want to waste my time learning super common/useful words… that’s just stupid) I was understanding talk variety shows anywhere from 80 to 100% (depending on the show and how much I look up.. ). it’s not about the number of cards…

BTW memorizing all the words in this 6000 word list will not enable you to watch korean dramas without subtitles ( just looking through this list and thinking of all the words that i know on this list and all the words i know that i encounter that are not on this list… by encounter I mean strictly talk/variety shows). it’s literally the tip of the iceberg (all the awesome kickass words are obviously not in this list… not to mention korea is obsessed with trends so it feels like they invent 100 news words and that of that 90% die the next year, rinse and repeat. I’m just guessing here because I don’t keep up with that since I don’t watch korean dramas or korean shows on a consistent basis. in fact I’m chasing after random eps of shows that aired a few years ago or a fewdays ago or a few months ago… even with japanese I’ve read over 120 books and recently I looked up a few words from this new book I’m reading and I’m like woah these are some cool words why didn’t I hear about them sooner. this shit is never ending but at the same time I love how there’s so many awesome words out there that i do not know about. this applies to english as well OF COURSE). there’s so much vocab to know for korean dramas (even more for the saguk dramas) since as everyone knows the characters talk so much and they always drag out the dialogue and the scenes. literally every single character in korean dramas are chatterboxes. it’s a lot of vocab. well that level is fluency… in other words watching korean dramas without subtitles. I do know people who are Korean and fluent in Korean who watch it and understand/catch everything so that is what fluency is… for comprehension in my opinion anyway. I don’t like Korean dramas anyway so this doesn’t bother me but sometimes I like gauging my Korean by watching some clip of a korean drama to see my lack of vocabulary or my full comprehension if lightening strikes. sometimes it happens.

However as much as I find anking with mcd format to be effective for learning Korean at my Korean level (vocab, grammar, hours spent on Korean, etc) I can’t bring myself to use the material on these blogs to generate anki cards. It is intriguing to sorta gauge my level or rather see how much I don’t know from scrolling through these blogs.

I’ve been mostly getting words and whatnot for my anki deck from Korean that come out of people’s mouths on Korean TV and sometimes words on the screen that aren’t said ( I usually only do this if I feel really tempted because the word seems super easy to remember if it has no bacchim or I feel that I can associate something with the sound with the bacchim whether or not it is of sino-korean origin to remember the meaning). Partly that’s due to lack of motivation because I do not want to learn useless Korean. Maybe if you’re obsessed and driven to become fluent in Korean ASAP then maybe you have the urge to look up anything and everything but looking at it in the overall scheme of things that’s not an efficient way to go on about that.

The fact that I got something from a Korean show from a Korean person’s mouth imparts that word or grammar etc so much more value versus some word list with words that people think are useful based on their experiences with the English counterpart of those words or whatever variation of this. People just express things differently on a fundamental level depending on the language.

So anyways, some of the blogs that I linked did mine real Korean from a Korean article etc etc which imparts value on the list they share. However though it raises the value of the list in my eyes I personally didn’t read that article so I have no personal connection to any of those words and therefore no conviction that those words are useful. I won’t believe it unless I actually see it being used. But also I won’t force myself to read an article just so I can easily generate anki cards. I’ll only read the article if it interests me.

This site http://uprive1.rssing.com/chan-2640801/all_p15.html reminds me of textbooks. I am tempted for a second to learn from it but then the next second I realize there’s way too much awesome kickass tv show episodes of korean talk/variety shows to be watched. When it comes down to it, no matter what textbook it is, textbooks will never be more fun then native media. The whole point of textbooks is so you can stop using it and learn from Native material ASAP. If you think textbooks are fun you’ll probably faint from the shock of how much more interesting native material is. I see no problem using textbooks in the beginning stages but some people are like hey you got recs for intermediate/advanced? I’m thinking to myself do you want to learn korean for the sake of learning korean? how embarrassing.

If I had to choose between anking too much and anking too little I would choose anking too little. I think anking too much is worse because it’s proof that you are wasting your time that could be spent living your life doing things you enjoy whether it’s language learning related or not. To put a new perspective on it, I imagine what I would be doing if I were fluent in Korean and/or raised in Korea. The answer is not me reading from a textbook to improve my Korean. The answer would be I would be watching the exact same shows I’m watching now except I wouldn’t be looking up anything because I already know all those words and their nuances and their multiple meanings and the literal / figurative meanings of all the Korean because I’m fluent in Korean. I’d probably be multitasking like washing dishes while listening to it etc etc because it’s so effortless. I’m watching the show because I enjoy it. I don’t try to force myself to like a show or pretend that I like it or pretend that I like it or enjoy it more than I do just so I can find something to do in Korean…. I’m sure some people try AJATT and kinda think they’re doing it but they’re really not if they have to lie to themselves that they enjoy doing something or enjoy it more than they actually do.

When it comes down to it the number of anki cards I have or the percentage of mature cards is not an accurate measure of my Korean abilities. Ultimately it comes down to the amount of time I spent doing STUFF IN Korean while actively trying to figure out what I don’t understand or don’t know. Anki helps so much with making time I spent with Korean to be that much more fruitful and efficient with acquiring Korean vocab /grammar. I don’t have time to be watching Korean TV all day because I work full-time and I have other stuff I want to do that may not be in Korean. Why should I miss out on amazing stuff like Breaking Bad? Or God Tongue? Though I’m not able to spend a lot of time on Korean on a consistent basis (daily is ideal right?) due to time restraints and my volition that wants to do other things anki allows me to maximize whatever time I spent with the Korean show etc. I’ve never felt like I’ve moved backwards in Korean or even stagnant to be honest. The reason is that sometimes even if you don’t do something in Korean for let’s say 3 months, you still have Korean running through your brain that’s being digested. It’s some kind of delayed processing. I do still do anki on a daily basis or sometimes less frequently. It’s so strange how I feel like my Korean improved in certain ways despite cutting contact for x weeks or months. I’ve experienced this with Japanese as well in the past due to unfortunate circumstances. It was invigorating to hear other language learners talk about this EXPERIENCE on an episode on language mastery podcast. http://l2mastery.com/show/

you know I think the only possible way for my Korean to be stagnant or go backwards is if all I did was textbooks or cramming wordlists. I think to realize my efforts are for nil would be so devastating and disheartening AFTER x weeks or months despite torturing myself for x hours. One of the many reasons why I learned Korean after Japanese was that I did not want to waste my time with learning Korean. I equate stagnation and going backwards as wasting time. Learning in this order (with the foundation/scaffolding that is hanja and Japanese grammar) and using anki has ensured that I never feel like I’m going backwards with Korean. It’s just impossible. I never understood how people could motivate themselves to learn a language using methods that could possibly lead to stagnation or going backwards if they slacked or not get in contact with the language for x weeks or months.