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- I'm Struggling with Korean
I'm Struggling with Korean
I'm having a much harder time with the Korean tree than with other trees I've done on Duolingo.
I know Korean is a totally different animal than Spanish or French, but I find that I'm not memorizing words nearly as quickly with Korean as I did with previous languages, and am having to rely WAY too much on the dictionary hints to complete lessons and practices. Even with my best attempts to remember the vocabulary, I'm having no luck.
Is anyone else going through this? Any advice? I really want to learn Korean, but I feel like I've hit a learner's block.
12 Comments
I had this problem initially when trying to learn all non-Western languages, i.e. Japanese and Chinese. Initially it seems super intimidating.
Familiarity and exposure will make it much better...and you WILL develop an intuition for the language, it just takes more exposure because, unlike Western languages, you have less implicit familiarity due to similarities to your native tongue or other languages you already know.
This is one way that listening to radio or other audio can help a lot; it will accustom your brain to the sound and structure of the speech. You will start hearing certain words repeated, and recognize them as a word, even if you don't know what they mean.
Then, when you come across these words in a lesson, you'll be like, "OH YEAH it's that word!" and it'll be much easier to remember.
I'm having a little bit of a time too, but I honestly thought it was partly because I was doing it on mobile and not able to access the hints. However, I just completed Japanese prior to tackling this and the one thing I learned from the Japanese course (aside from Japanese lol) is that there's a breaking point. Somewhere, if you are really really trying, it will suddenly "pop" and it will go from 'why can't I do this?' to 'yeah, okay, here we go!' That's what is motivating me right now... just waiting for the pop. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K49agKL3MOs&t=20s This fellow's short videos are fun to watch (partly because of his artistic ability), and a very efficient way of getting a feel for the language (both pronunciation and basic vocab) and the culture. If you want to get deeper into the grammar, try https://www.howtostudykorean.com/unit1/ and then the Memrise course that go along with it to reenforce the vocabulary presented in each lesson.