November 2nd 
After another long week, it’s finally the weekend! I sat down this morning with a cup of coffee for a nice long study session and was able to de-stress a bit from the work week. 
I love the weekend…
Japanese 
I continued with Modern Japanese Literature today, reading through the sections on the late Showa period and the war. I’ve read a few different things from this time period this year, such as various 太宰治 stories, 小さいおうち、and some 坂口安吾 essays, so it was good to correlate things I’m already familiar with with the history from another angle.
The next chapters are on post war literature from the 50s and 60s, which I’m excited about as I’m less familiar with the history of that time period. I don’t think I’ve read many books from that time period either, so it’ll be a lot of new information for me. Hopefully I’ll find some new authors I’m interested in, as post-war stuff has more approachable language than stuff from Meiji or Taishō. 
Korean 
Textbook studies
I did another section of chapter 5 from 本気で学ぶ韓国語上級 today. Section 5 is the longest in the whole chapter and had 110 vocabulary words about things like the mongol invasions, imperial Japanese rule, and other wartime related bits…pretty challenging. 
This book is so serious about being a serious book! I said it before and I’ll say it again - 本気で学ぶ for real!
I went through all the vocabulary and wrote it down, read the text, and reviewed the vocabulary, highlighting words that weren’t sticking again before switching over to a different textbook I have called ４色ボールペンを使って学ぶ 韓国語パワーアップドリル 初中級レベル, which is focused on transcription.
The idea of this textbook is that you use one of those pens that lets you slide down a lever and choose your ink color (I don’t own one of those, so I just use four different colored pens), and then you listen to the audio four different times, each time using a dedicated color so you can see what you are stronger at and what you missed the first, second or third time around.
One thing I LOVE about this textbook is that each chapter is focused around something that could cause you to have bad listening comprehension in Korean - such as specific types of 받침 sound changes, language from announcements or the news, or very formal speech. There is then additional information explaining the sound changes or how the phrases are used and it is all just very clever and well thought through. The author is a Japanese man who runs a Korean language academy and I can tell that he’s a veteran language learner himself - all his textbooks just make sense 
and are amazing for self-learners who want to those tackle tiny little blind spots that come up when you’re learning alone outside of the country where the language is spoken.
The chapter I did today was on nasalization and out of 6 audio clips, I only transcribed 3 properly. It seems like I sucked at hearing nasalized 받침 before today. 
The lesson helped me uncover some weaknesses and learn, though!
One specific thing I learned was in the third question. The phrase was:
핵 문제에 관한 기사를 찾는다면 신문사 사이트의 검색란을 이용하세요.
核問題に関する記事を探すなら、新聞社のサイトの検察欄を利用してください。
I can read the Korean sentence and understand it no problem, but when I went to transcribe it I missed some of the particles and even made spelling mistakes. However, I was interested in particular in the fact I did not catch and recognize “핵 문제” but did catch “검색란“, even though they are both nasalized.
Giving it some thought, I did not recognize 검색란 on the first listen, but I did after simply because it’s very close to the Japanese word 検索欄 (kensakuran vs keomsaekran) and I’m vaguely familiar with 받침 rules from exposure to be able to realize what word it is based on that.
With 핵 문제, I heard it and wrote it down as 행 문제, which is how it sounds but isn’t how it’s spelled. The reason why is simply that I wasn’t familiar enough with the phrase 핵 문제 in Korean or Japanese, which didn’t let me hack it like I could with 검색란.
So, I can conclude that if I’m kinda familiar with a word either from my Korean or Japanese experience, I can recognize it decently even if it has some funky 받침 stuff happening. But, by knowing the rules and knowing that certain consonants before the ㅁ sound undergo sound shifts, I could also work my way backwards to what the actual word should be. I do know the word 핵/核; if I had been cognizant of the fact the ㅇ I was hearing was in fact a ㄱ before a ㅁ, I could’ve deciphered it correctly.
That is all to say - knowledge of 받침 sound change rules are important for listening comprehension, so don’t neglect them! 
The book them had some explanations in Japanese about what happens in your mouth that causes the consonants to undergo a shift, as well as several different examples of words and phrases with nasalization and some listening drills.
On the listening drill, I totally could not hear the word 급료 (給料) and thought I was hearing 금욕 (禁欲)…which…lol someone take all the BL away from me please. 
The biggest takeaway for me for this supplementary section was how it explicitly covered the particle 만 (だけ) causing words ending in relevant consonants to undergo nasalization.
I knew this but I didn’t reallllly know it?!?
As an example: I like to go interact with some native media after studying in the hopes I encounter what I’ve learned in the wild, and later in the day I was listening to a random Spotify playlist when the kpop song Magnetic by ILLIT came up and and and:
I’ve heard this song a bunch of times (if you’ve been a kpop fan in the year 2024, I bet you have too…) and more or less understand all the Korean lyrics just from exposure, but there are a few fuzzy parts. At :22 there is the line: “거대한 자석이 된 것만 같아 my heart”, and I never caught the second half of it after 된…but today I heard it and understood, because 것만 is undergoing nasalization and becomes 겅만. I knew that, but I didn’t really know it! Now I can hear it so clearly!
것만 (ことだけ) is a common construction that comes up a lot - but this experience showed me that I wasn’t reliably hearing it until I went out of my way to explicitly review the sound change rule and learn the phonetics behind it. I’m glad I have this textbook to drill that type of thing so that I can hopefully fill the gaps little by little and have my listening catch up to my reading.
That’s it for today!
Tldr: if you can’t reliably hear things you are able to read, maybe you should learn some phonetics!
(How to wish an anki user a successful study sesh)
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