November 25 
Dear language diary…
A normal Monday and a normal day of studying! 
Korean Listening: 1.25 hours (386.72/500 hours) + 20 minutes shadowing
Vocabulary: キクタン韓国語上級編 Day 29 + review of days 27 & 28
All-Purpose Textbook: 本気で学ぶ韓国語上級 5.3(Transcription)
Korean Vocabulary & Japanese Handwriting
I did one new lesson of キクタン韓国語上級編 today, and reviewed two that I did over the weekend.
Since my routine and concentration got messed up last week, I wanted to spend more time than usual quizzing myself for feedback on how well I’m learning the words. Sometimes I write a word down, say it out loud, think I’ve learned it, and then when I go to quiz myself it’s like poof - the word is completely gone and it can’t remember it at all. So, in the spirit of catching those words and drilling them before they disappear into the void, I took the list of Japanese translations and tried to write the corresponding Korean word from memory. Then I did the same but for Korean to Japanese!
I probably went a good 7-8 years of my Japanese learning life never writing anything by hand and when I did have to write it was kind of embarrassing because it looked so bad and I never remembered how to write most kanji. 
I eventually spent time during the pandemic relearning a lot of basic kanji and the basics of having nice handwriting, but the single best thing I ever did for my Japanese writing was learning Korean! 
That’s because I write the translation to every single exercise or new word or sentence I find in my textbooks down in my notebook by hand, and over time I got better. Now, most of the time I still glance at the Japanese words while I’m writing which is kind of cheating. Writing things completely from recall like I tried today is a nice challenge that I should probably do more (and will do more)! It’s not impossible, but it makes me stretch my mind to the very edge of my memory, which is the growth zone! The fact that I can also double dip with that mind stretching and learn Korean vocabulary is great and also really the cornerstone of my “write everything by hand strategy” - I should lean into it even more with my reviews and quizzing.
Ahem, now that I went on a tangent about writing stuff by hand… I did an alternating mix of KR → JP or JP → KR across all three lessons I reviewed and circled all the words I couldn’t remember in red ink so that they stood out to me, then I reviewed them again and focused on the example sentences, reading them out loud. Tomorrow I’ll check them again and try to write either the Japanese or Korean translation by hand from memory and see if my retention improved. 
All-Purpose Textbook
I transcribed the 3 paragraph reading section from 本気で学ぶ韓国語 Chapter 5.3 today too! I’m full of motivation to not spend another month in this chapter, so I’ll try to get more dictation/transcription (I keep using these interchangeably…just understand what I mean haha) knocked out this week.
Transcribing long paragraphs is actually kind of annoying. It’s like doing lunges or squats - it builds your large muscle groups, but it’s painful. In the spirit of exercising, though, I try to focus on the benefits and how it makes me feel afterwards, just like with physical exercise.
It’s quite satisfying going in with a red pen after I’m done and finding all the things I didn’t get or spelled wrong, and I think I’m already improving a bit after doing a couple of these lately. Transcribing the lessons from this textbook + the other textbook I have where you use four different colored pens to transcribe what you hear is really reminding me just how much of listening is your brain on auto-pilot mode and using existing patterns to process sounds based on what it expects to come next. I think I don’t have a large enough bank of Korean knowledge to rely on for making predictions, but I also don’t have a well-trained enough ear for parsing all the phonetics and sound changes - this is where my listening is breaking down.
How to improve? I’m not really sure. I probably need to read and watch native content a lot more to build up the patterns I have available to me, like I did with Japanese*… but Korean sounds are harder, so I want to also try and take a more active role in what I’m listening to - like learning phonetics, transcribing and checking what I missed for corrective feedback, and forcing myself to guess more. The four colored pen transcription book I have even suggested to not do 4 rounds of listening to part of the audio, but to instead do 0 rounds and try to guess what comes next and write it down without even listening to the clip. As usual, the author is onto something. 
*I rely far too much on pattern recognition in Japanese and can’t always reliably hear sounds, by the way. The other day I was watching a get ready with me video on YouTube and the woman in the video was describing how her lip tint creates a 膜 over her lips so the color doesn’t rub off, and I wasn’t expecting to hear the word membrane in that context (it’s new technology for lip products y’all, the future of makeup is now 
), so my brain didn’t parse it right away and I thought of the word マック instead and wondered why McDonald’s? Until I realized. Korean has so many words than can end up sounding similar due to sound change rules that I feel like I need to try a bit harder. 
Just a bit, though.
but back then I was definitely quicker at writing. It’s 100% a use it or lose it skill… 
(probably related to the ‘only old people type like this’)
introducing extra pain to help internalize the vocab! 
(That sounds so weird)
There is no bigger sense of accomplishment for me than from going from barely understanding the audio or text on a read through to being able to understand without any problems. That feeling is why I do what I do and spend years learning languages like this. 
), so the fact I walked away only adding around 10% of those into anki feels like a big win. Better 58 new cards than 600! I may forget some of the words I don’t put in anki, but I’ve spent time shadowing them and transcribing them and reading and writing them so I’m sure they’d come back quick.
I don’t even have any reflective thoughts about this one because it’s just that good as a resource. The method is clearly explained, laid out, and the audio clips chosen make total sense and are self reinforcing since certain difficult to hear sound patterns are repeated. There is nothing I could improve with this, just gotta keep doing it consistently. No notes! 
