Hi everyone, long time no see! This is Lindie. Today's video is about how I study Korean vocabulary
These days I'm studying for the TOPIK Korean exam
There are about 3 months to go
So I made a study plan
And I'll talk about that as well today.
Right now I'm just focusing on vocabulary
But of course, one should study many things at once (not just vocabulary)
I watch a lot of KDramas, listen to Korean music and call my friends in Korean as a way to learn more Korean
but this video will just be about my method for learning vocabulary
Here's my notebook from a video I made ages ago about learning Korean vocab (link in description)
but I don't think this is a very effective way of learning because there are no example sentences, just words and meanings
so from now I'm studying with a bit of a different method.
I decorated it very cutely with flags from Mundo Lingo (even though it's just for Korean)
so I'm actually gonna continue the rest of the video in English because it is easier to make this accessible to a wider audience and
It really takes a super long time to make subtitles
So if you're able to contribute to subtitles there is a link in the description
Thank you so much
For those of you who always helped with subtitling, but for now
Let's continue in English
the very first thing I did
while making my schedule was to count how many weeks are left until the TOPIK exams by planning on taking it in April (jk it was posponed to May actually)
Which means from right about now, there are 16 weeks left
Help. Alright, I have written all of the weeks here until the exam
so I put the exam at the top and then I've counted back to where we are right now or
where I was when I made the schedule and I've given myself 10 weeks to complete a TOPIK test prep textbook
and within those 10 weeks two of those weeks are spent
just learning the vocabulary from that book and then I will do the activities
and then I've given myself time to do past exams and pass papers
In addition to that I have created a weekly plan where I write the days of the week and then all of my activities for that week
Right now when I study vocabulary there are only a few tools I use
Number one is Quizlet, which a lot of you have asked about on Instagram, which is a flashcard app
Which I love to use for learning vocab
and I also use a small pocket book that came with my textbook that lists all the vocab words and
I'll tell you right now how I split those words up
And the other tool I use it's just my notebook and a few pens. So I'm keeping it super simple for now
I don't want to stress by using too many resources at this moment
This is the cute little pocket book. The handbook that comes with my textbook and right in the beginning they have lists of
vocabulary words that appear in the textbook and at the end are the grammar structures
So it's more of a reference guide to go along with the textbook
But since it's so small and I can carry it with me wherever I go
I've decided let's study the words from here first and then we'll attempt to use the textbook
I take the bus to work and I realized I can actually go through two pages of vocabulary
on the way to work, and then back from work I do another two pages.
So I study four pages of vocab a day. Over here I've written the day of the week
So Hwa means Tuesday and it was the 17th. With a yellow marker
I mark the words that are unfamiliar to me
So I don't just focus on the main words, but if there's anything in the example sentences and I'll highlight that as well
What I do on the bus is I just have this with me and a yellow pen and all I do is I read
Obviously, there's the English meaning there. So I'll try and get a bit of that meaning into my head
But at this point I don't try to memorize anything. That's very tedious. I'm on the way to work. I just wanna make a list of what I know and what I don't
Once I've completed that, I go home and then I take these words and input them into the Quizlet app and I create flashcards
immediately after that I start playing all the games on Quizlet, so matching, a test, the learn mode...
There's a whole bunch of functions that you can explore.
After I've gotten at least 90% accuracy or retention, that means after you take a test or do matching games
It tells you how much percentage of the words you got correct. Once I reached about 90%,
then I take these words and I write them in my notebook
The reason I do Quizlet first is because I don't want to waste time just writing words mindlessly
I really want to try actively get them into my memory
So once I feel very comfortable with word, I'll just write the words down that are still difficult to me
Now for Quizlet. because there will inevitably be so many words for me to learn
I've decided to kind of split my studying into two-day sections. So Monday and Tuesday go together
Wednesday and Thursday go together and Friday and Saturday go together
so I create decks for two days flash card decks for two days only and I try and
study them throughout the day like no and I'm in the bathroom or when I'm just walking or when I'm standing in the queue that
That is when I will be doing these flashcards
Welcome to the Quizlet app. At the top I have all of my flashcards here. I don't usually use this function
Something unique that I enjoy about Quizlet is the fact that they have audio
Now the reason I enjoy this is not because it's teaching me how to pronounce the word
but because every time I hear a word, I remember it better so just by repeating this over and over
I'll remember the lady's voice and the man's voice and for some reason that helps solidify the word in my memory
Learn this is just the normal flashcard mode. You have to say what the meaning of the word is
My favorite game to play is the matching game
You have a bunch of flashcards and you have to match the meaning to the definition
Let's take a test
Something I like about Quizlet is it also tells you what your last score was of a test
so you can do this progressively and see if you are improving or not improving and that helps you remember
which decks you should be focusing on. So this is a bit hard for me to do because I'm looking through my camera screen. Uh
Whoops-a-daisy
I cannot see through my camera screen let me just try that again
To be furnished,... Ohhh what is this one?
Hmm
Forgot that one
Ah, I made a mistake, okay, that's too bad. Unfortunately you cannot go back this will quit the whole test, so that sucks
90%. I think I made a few mistakes.
Everything else was right. Okay, so I technically got one wrong
but because I did one by accident I got two wrong. Now I've gone down to 90%, oh dear.
Yep, that is basically how I use Quizlet. Let's go through how I set up this notebook
First of all, I write the Korean vocabulary word in pink
I write the definition in English in blue and the example sentences in black
There's no theory or structure to behind why I do this. It's just something I like doing
I like seeing different colors. Many people ask me "exactly how are you supposed to set up a notebook?"
"What's the best pen to use"...these are all very subjective points. You can do whatever feels right for you!
This is just what I enjoy.
Here is day one. Day one has a little less words than the other days because I spent a lot of time going through Quizlet first
so the amount of foreign or unknown words to me was less because I'd already
learnt them to some extent where as you can see day 3 actually has maybe 2 or
Yeah, 2 pages and day 4 has 3 pages
I didn't spend enough time on Quizlet before I wrote the words in here
As you see I never translate my example sentences to English. It wastes my time
and I also am at a level decent enough to not need to translate example sentences
but rather just focus on specific words that I don't know. I make little cues for myself as well
So "hwajae", you'll see I didn't put the English here because it's easy for me to break it up
Hwajae means the topic of what you're talking about, right?
So jujae means topic and daehwa is a conversation
So hwajae takes the hwa from daehwa, conversation
and jae from from jujae, topic. So, hwajae is the
point of what you're talking about.
I've also realized it's a lot easier for me to remember words in short phrases
If I just try and memorize that
"yeogida" means to regard something, I'm never gonna remember it
So I put an example phrase
which means to regard something preciously or
think highly of something. As you can see over here I try not to put the
definition in blue for all of the words.
I try and infer the word from context if I have an example sentence
sometimes there will be words and example sentences that are not part of this handbook and then I will look those up separately and
And write the meaning in Korean in pink
Now how I get the definition of these words is by using my favorite dictionary app called Naver dictionary
It comes with a lot of example sentences as well as Chinese characters Hanja. That helps me remember words a lot more easily
because it's kind of like puzzle pieces that build up words
so if you know that "hak" means anything to do with study...
blah blah something about hanja I'm lazy to make subtitles sorry guys lol
With my little bit of background in Japanese and Chinese it helps me remember where it's a lot faster
So that's why I love using Naver dictionary
I split up these pages by days
I write the day of the week and the date here and I also say what day it is
Generally it ends up being about two pages per day. I try and review these example sentences when I can
but because I am busy I have a full-time job, I pretty much just use Quizlet most of the time
I've also realized that it will take me two weeks to complete all of the vocabulary in here
So I'm halfway through week two right now, and then I'm going to give myself one week to kind of rest my brain,
but also go through everything I learned. I don't want to put too much information into my head yet
so, two weeks of study and then one week of reviewing everything
On the fourth week, I will start using the textbook also in my schedule
I have marked out space that I can review the words from the previous day as well
So I'm not just constantly putting in new information, but I'm taking a little time to review previous words as well
That's it for how I study vocabulary in preparation for the TOPIK exam!
If you're wondering I'm aiming for about level four realistically, I might get three at the level
I'm at right now and it would be amazing if I could get level five, but let's see
I don't want to put my sights too high and be disappointed. I'm only taking this exam to really have motivation to study and learn more,
Otherwise, I'm just gonna stay at the same level in Korean for years
So yeah, I'm pretty much just using it a study motivation rather than trying to prove a point
All right before I finish, first of all, thank you so much for watching!!
I'd like to remind you that I also have an FAQ
I have a website (www.lindiebotes.com where I write a lot of articles about language learning and
I have a tumblr blog where I answer all of your questions (rinkodesu.tumblr.com)
so if you want to interact with me more or if you want to ask something head over to my websites and
lots of information will be there. See you guys in the next video! Byeeee