I’ve been living in Korea for about three and a half years now. I have the language around me, my partner and her daughter speak it at home. But for some reason I am not learning anything from being exposed to it for such a long time.
I tried using apps like Duolingo, Drops, etc. but practically nothing really stuck, perhaps a word here or there. I watched Korean Dramas with English subtitles, but because the order of the words in a Korean sentence is the opposite to English I would never be able to know which word is which.
Two month ago I saw some Korean Teacher advertising 1-1 teaching of Korean so I decided to try it and to pay for help, because I feel I’m really stuck. Now after 2 months she expressed frustration about my progress. She asked me why it’s so slow, if it’s the first time I’m learning a new language (no, this is my 5th language I’m learning).
It’s very frustrating. I feel I invest a lot of the little free time I have into it and it’s embarrassing how little I have to show for it. The Korean words are so totally different from the words in my other Languages (Polish, German, Swedish, English) that they more often than not blend together and I remember and hear mostly gibberish.
I always hated learning grammar and vocabulary in every language. And somehow with the other languages I magically got to a level where I would just be exposed to the language and could watch TV and talk to people and would get better at it without much effort.
But Korean proves to be very difficult for me to get to this point. I get that I only will get there with consistency and a lot of grinding, there seems no other way for me.
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Well, the other 4 languages you mentioned are all closely related. They are all Indo-European and 3/4 are Germanic. So I would guess that you had a lot more scaffolding to climb while learning those, in the form of similar grammar, syntax and word roots.
Korean is so completely different that you’re really starting from scratch this time. It’s going to take a lot more time to get to that level where you start to improve naturally without much effort, because you’re literally starting from 0.
Do you converse with your partner and her daughter in Korean at home? If not, I would highly recommend taking advantage of that opportunity, because it seems like a good way to speed up your learning.
I don’t speak Korean with them because I don’t know the words and when they speak to each other it’s so fast with so many words that I can’t follow anything.
But yeah I agree, if we could figure out how to integrate me it would be very helpful.
Can you memorize vocabulary? It sounds like you might be letting anxiety give you a mental block.
I’m trying but after seeing the word for the 50iest time sometimes I still don’t remember it, because it’s so different from anything I know.
Try to put it to music or make an association with words you already know
Yeah, I learned a children’s song last week and it was easier to remember, I will do that more in the future.
I feel you, OP. Same here with Japanese. I started out so young and I can read and somewhat write it now but it’s incredibly hard to listen to when it’s anything more than a few short sentences. I realized that my biggest weakness was vocabulary when reading the news, so I got to that and it seems to have paid off a bit. However, it still feels painfully slow and difficult.
