Hello and welcome back to The Bliss Bean
This is the second time that I'm filming this video
Which is becoming a common pattern. Last time it was because I realized all the footage was out of focus. This time
It was because I lost my SD card. So as you can tell I'm just really good at this YouTube thing
So this video is gonna be all about how I self study Korean, why I started learning it, what resources I'm using, my study routine
Everything like that
I am focusing on Korean
But I think a lot of the tips that I'm going to share are just gonna apply to any language that you might be learning
So hopefully you'll find this useful wherever you are in the language learning world. Let's get started. So
I'm gonna start with explaining why I started learning Korean. I'm not gonna lie
It was because of k-pop some people see this as an inferior reason to learn a language
Which doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Because when you learn a language you are contributing to the world's, like, shared understanding of different cultures
There's no bad reason to start learning a language,
, at least not that I can think of. Like, there are reasons that might be better in the sense that they're more motivating
But if something inspires you to pick up a language and start practicing it, you can't say that it's a bad reason
So k-pop or BTS was the primary reason for me starting to learn Korean
But then also I just really liked the idea of the challenge of learning an Asian language
So I kind of know like two and a half languages
my first language was
Lithuanian because I was born there, and then I learned English from my family and I immigrated to the US, but that was very natural
because I was so young
so my brain was just really plastic. And then I learned in Spanish at school by taking classes from about grades 7 to 11
I'm not confident enough in my Spanish skills though to call it three languages. So we're gonna go with two and a half
But yeah, as you can tell all of those languages are European languages
And I just really wanted to try and learn something that was totally different
And followed very different grammar rules and vocab and things like that
So as for the resources that I'm using to study Korean
I immediately knew I didn't want to use Duolingo because I used that a lot for Spanish
But I noticed that I liked it better for reviewing rather than actually learning new material
I just felt like the actual grammar content wasn't very comprehensive
I don't know, maybe I just didn't get far enough into it
But that was the experience that I had with it, Duolingo is still a great tool though
So but I tried a different app tried an app called Memrise. Memrise is also free
you can get a premium subscription and I did get one because it was on sale for like 50% off during the World Cup or
something and I tried the free version for a while and really liked it
So I used Memrise to take me through learning the Korean alphabet, which is called hangul
I'm so sorry if I butcher these pronunciations, I'm trying my best. So please just bear with me
So Memrise was really good at taking you through all of the letters of hangul and then teaching you some basic phrases like
Hello. Yes. No. Thank you
But as I kept using it
I just found myself frustrated again with how little depth there was to the lessons. When I'm learning something,
I'm the type of person who wants to know
everything. But like, for example, the app would ask you to give the infinitive form to be hungry as well as a
Conjugated form like I am hungry and while they taught you the words
They didn't explain how you got from the infinitive version to the the conjugated version. Again, maybe I just didn't get far enough,
but I really didn't like the way that it was being taught
I wanted to know how everything worked as soon as I was introduced to it
So I decided to only use Memrise as a tool for practicing vocab because it is really good for that
But I went out in search of a website that would actually teach me more of the grammatical concepts that I was looking for
I looked into a couple one of the more popular ones, it's called Talk to Me In Korean
Basically, I just dug around the internet a little bit but I settled on one called
www.howto studyKorean.com, a very clear web address
So howtostudykorean.com claims that it has everything that you need to learn Korean
And as far as I can tell, they deliver on that promise because they have so much information. Everything on there is free,
except I think if you want like some special workbooks or worksheets or downloadable audio files
But you can definitely get by without spending any money on that website, okay
So now for the tools that I use to study Korean
So obviously that website is one of the tools and then the second most important thing is my precious notebook
I used to have this really nice cover where I had written hangugeo which means Korean language
Unfortunately that fell off and now I guess I'm just promoting this university that I did a summer camp at
I'm not affiliated with them in any way. So my Korean notebook has three sections
The first section is for grammar. At the top of each page
I write the number of the lesson and then the title of it.
And then I just take notes, and I have a specific formatting system because I wanted it to all look cohesive
There's a certain way that I do headings, a certain way that I do bullet points, and most importantly there's a certain way that I
highlight
So before I started this notebook
I decided to pick a couple of highlighters and just decide right away what my system would be
That's one of the things that I talked about in my study tips video if you're interested
So as you can see
All of my headings are in capital letters, underlined, and then with a pink box around them
Information that is particularly important is in yellow, and then practice sentences are in green
So that really helps when I'm looking back and studying because one of the ways that I like to study is just by going back
To those practice sentences and re-translating them
So if I go back to this lesson,
I can immediately see which
sentences I can practice translating and I have the answers to those translations right there
When I'm doing practice sentences
There's usually so many of them that I don't want to fill up the grammar section of my notebook with them
So I put some of them in here so that I can look back and practice
But then most of the practice sentences I just do in like a spare notebook where I have blank pages
The next section is for vocab
Which is probably my favorite because it is so satisfying to look back at all the words
www.howtostudykorean.com gives you a list of like 50 vocab words, I believe, per lesson
So it's a lot of words and I just like to keep like a word bank in this section where I write every single
word that I'm introduced to. So my highlighting system for this section: purple is for nouns, red is for verbs and then blue is for
adjectives. I just write the Korean word, highlight it in the corresponding color, and then put an equal sign and the English translation
So this is a very simple list. I don't organize it by theme or anything
I just write them down as I've learned them
The last section is idioms and phrases which I haven't really used much but I think I will as I get to like a more
Advanced level of Korean. Alright, so the next thing is my flashcards. For studying vocab
sometimes I use Memrise and sometimes I just use plain paper flashcards
So basically, I just take those 3x5 index cards and I cut them into fourths because I do not need anything more than that
So I make a flashcard for each word
And then I combine all of the words from each group of three lessons into one deck
There's not really any reason for doing that like they're not related in any way, but I just like the size of these decks
So I just make one card be like a cover card that says which lessons it's for and then I
have the English word on the front highlighted based on whether it's a noun, verb, or adjective, and on the back
I have the Korean translation and I just put that in a gray box so that I can quickly see which side is English and
which side is Korean. So moving on to how I study, my study routine right now is- oh my gosh
I just dropped all of them
My study routine right now is 25 minutes per day Monday through Saturday, cause I take a break on Sunday
Usually I do this at school during my study hall because I don't have a ton to do for my other classes
And also I just feel like I'm in the mental mode for learning when I'm at school
Otherwise, if I don't do it then then I just find some time to do it at home
but what I do during that 25 minutes depends on what I feel like I need the most work on. Like for example,
if I'm on less than 8 and I feel like I've mastered the grammar
I don't want to move on to lesson 9 until I feel like I've also got the vocab down pat because sometimes I
just get too excited about, like, learning the grammatical concepts, and I want to rush through that but then I realize that I don't know
any of the vocab that I'm being asked to translate in the practice sentences. So when I sit down to study
I basically just think about what needs the most work. Sometimes I spend the entire time practicing vocab
So what I'll do is I'll use either Memrise or my flashcards
But either way I pull out a piece of paper or that notebook that I use and I just use it to write the words
as I'm testing myself on them because I find that I can memorize things a lot better if I see them, hear them, say them
and write them
I also try to incorporate some sort of memory trick for almost every word that I learn because I learned that an AP psych
It actually helps so much. Before I started doing that, I found that no matter how many times I ran through the vocab
I would just still forget the words
But then once I started trying to make like different connections in my brain, that would help me
remember those words, the memorization process went by so much faster
So yeah, I come up with memory tricks
I quiz myself
Write the words, and then I just keep running through them until I feel like I've got them. When I'm going trough the deck
I also like to pull out the words that I had trouble with so that at the end I can just run through those only
a couple of times and yeah, that's basically it. That's how I study vocab
Otherwise, if it is a grammar day and I feel like I need to work on that
I'll either be going through a new lesson and taking notes on it, or going back to old lessons that I feel like I need
a refresher on, just, like, rereading the notes,
redoing the practice sentences, things like that. howtostudykorean.com also gives you practice videos at the end of each lesson so usually
There's one video that takes you through translating bunch of practice sentences
And then another video where you listen to a native Korean speaker and then have to write down what they said
Both are really really helpful, so sometimes I work on those
That's my brother. But yeah, for now, that's my whole Korean study process
Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions about how I study, any questions about the other languages that I know,
if you want an accountabilibuddy for your Korean studying, and yeah, that's it
So hopefully take two of this video went well and you'll find this video helpful. If you did, please like and subscribe
I really really appreciate that and next week I'll be back with a video about how I design my thumbnails until then, goodbye!
Wait, no, I mean annyeong!