My comment was for @eefara re: crushed to death by an avalanche of books.
I still never managed to finish 本好き (my most recent attempt derailed b/c of a scene in the audiobook that happened to be triggering for me), but it’s a good book. Hope you enjoy it whenever you get to it!
I also adore books and I love Honzuki! I highly recommend checking it out when it’s more in your reach; I’ve read 8 volumes so far and am working on number 9 (in Japanese - I would absolutely die if I tried to read it in Korean with my level haha).
A bit of a mid month update:
I have bought quite a lot of books since the beginning of the month. My book budget may or may not have exceeded my food budget at this point. And the weekly used book sale and multiple bookstores right next to my appartment are not helping.
I managed to get some books from my grandma from back when she used to teach Italian though. So at least I don’t have to buy any Italian textbooks!
I feel like I’ve been less productive than last month with language learning. It’s just a lot going on, and when I come back home after my day I’m too tired to do much. I’ve fallen a bit back on bookclubs, so I hope I’ll be able to catch up soon. Two new bookclubs are starting next week, one in Korean and one in Spanish! The Spanish one at least should not be too time consuming. I’ll be doing some active reading (for probably the first time ever for me in Spanish, I just never bothered to) but hopefully it won’t slow me down too much.
| A | Book  Week  |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 |
소리를 보는 소년 | ||||||||||
|
이상한 과자 가게 전천당 1 | ||||||||||
|
또다시 같은 꿈을 꾸었어 | ||||||||||
|
전우치전 (outside of Natively) | ||||||||||
|
죽이고 싶은 아이 | ||||||||||
 |
La Ciudad de las Bestias |
Good news for Spanish however, I started reading Los detectives salvajes | L42. I felt a bit apprehensive at the level at first, but it isn’t actually too hard for me to read right now. By the time I’m finished, I should reach (or almost reach) the 4000 pages mark. And then I’ll have other books waiting for me to continue! I’ll see if I’m crazy enough to go for Rayuela | L45 or Don Quijote de la Mancha | L45?? right after.
My house is getting this way 
I’ve been hyper focused in the past week or so on finishing 마녀를 잡아라 | L23. I was supposed to start another bookclub for Korean, and catch up on my other bookclubs. Also, I haven’t really been reading in Spanish in this past week. But hey, I managed to read 239 pages of either children’s novels (마녀를 잡아라 and 구멍놀이 친구 | L19) or a B2 graded reader (전우치전 | L22).
I’m really glad that I decided to entirely log my reading speed for this one. I can visually see my progress through that curve of reading speed, as I was becoming more and more familiar with the vocab and needed to look up less and less words.
I’ve just hit 5000 pages for Korean! Technically, I’m at 5114 pages, but well, I was determined to finish 마녀를 잡아라 before posting about it here.
Also, a thought for @brandon. I have been struggling (and failing) to get an R code to run for this past week. I solve one bug and then it gets stuck again right away with another one, so I am slowly turning crazy. That being said, kudos to you for sticking with this, dealing with all the bugs that just keep reappearing out of nowhere.
A recap for the month of March!
For Spanish, I didn’t do much, only 188 pages read, which isn’t great on it’s own, however, almost all of that was a L42 book, so I’m counting it as a win anyway.
Italian I am hoping to get the motivation to tackle more starting this month, as I’ve barely listened to a couple LingQ ministories.
Korean is where I spent most of my time. Despite that, this is actually my lowest month since I joined Natively in terms of pages read, with “only” 604 pages. And that is actually a good thing because it shows that I’m well on my way to transitionning from picture books to novels! This is also present in my level stats, as I read 337 pages in the L20-26 bracket.
Just compared to my post on March 1st, where I was at 10% pages in the L20-26 bracket, this is crazy!
Most of what I read this month can be attributed to a couple novels:
Among these, I’ve finished the first two, and I’m almost finished with the following two. What’s great is that I can finally enjoy sitting down and reading something interesting, without having to stop to think about every single word or sentence. A lot of things still cause me trouble, but I’m able to ignore most of it and continue on with a broad understanding of what’s happening, that I didn’t even have before.
| A | Book Week |
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
소리를 보는 소년 | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
이상한 과자 가게 전천당 1 | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
또다시 같은 꿈을 꾸었어 | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
전우치전 (outside of Natively) | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
죽이고 싶은 아이 | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
La Ciudad de las Bestias | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
https://learnnatively.com/book/a278577fca | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
해리 포터와 마법사의 돌 | L30?? |
Lots of bookclubs, this is starting to look a bit crazy but hopefully I’ll manage to finish some of them soon, so that I can tackle the other ones.
Edit: I also just started a Storytel subscription, so I hope that I’ll be able to make use of it to get more listening practice in. The gap between my reading and listening level for Korean is starting to get a little too wide for comfort.
Since I’m trying to push myself to take Italian more seriously, I bought some graded readers!
I’ve just realized that I was sorta tricked, because all four off them are supposed to have audio, but while for two of them the audio is available online for free, you need to buy a separate CD for the other two. Of course, no one told me at the bookstore, and there were no CDs to be seen, so I don’t know what happened to them. I even paid the full price anyways, so yeah, not great.
So far, I’ve read two very short stories from “Dieci raconti”, by Marco Dominici. This is one of the books where I don’t have any audio. Besides that, they’ve been as fun as you can expect 2-3 pages long stories with simple vocab to be. They’re built as actual short stories, so you get a nice plot twist at the end too. What’s nice is that they’re clearly built with language learners in mind as well, so there’s some repetition of sentence structures, with a couple things that change, so it’s great for figuring out vocab from context and to get used to the grammar as well.
I’ve just finished my first audiobook in Korean that isn’t a graded reader and where I hadn’t read the book first, 책이 사라진 날 | L20. So, so far, this Storytel subscription has actually been useful! I wasn’t expecting that it would make me this tired though, but I should’ve. After all, there is a reason as to why I almost never watch anything without subtitles.
Also, some funny stats I thought I’d share here. I’m at exactly one book a day! Plus, after almost five months on Natively, I’ve barely missed a couple days of reading each month in Korean.
I figured I would read a little before going to bed, just a couple pages in Spanish, nice and easy, right? And yet this is the monster sentence that I ended up finding. Now why do I feel like Los detectives salvajes Hispánica | L42 is messing with me?
(Not to scare anyone away from reading this, it’s great, just know that the high level is NOT exaggerated.)
Wow; does that manage to be an entire page, if it weren’t split over two?
About that yeah I think.
As I’ll be moving tomorrow, I’ve gathered all of the books that I’ve bought since I got here, seven weeks ago. And while I knew I got a lot of books, I didn’t think it would be this much. Somehow, I have obtained 23 physical books (a mix of new and second hand books), plus 3 ebooks bought, and storytel of course. Among those are 10 books in Spanish, 7 in Korean and 4 in Italian. Luckily I’m moving to a slightly larger apartment, so that means more space for books!
I’m just realizing that I forgot to do a mid-month update between all the craziness that was my personal life this month. But hey, at least, I managed to bring all of my books with me, and reunite with some books that I’d left in various cities. (I also no longer have an excuse not to finish Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners | L12, that I actually started reading as a beginner! I really find the plot that boring, but at least now I should be able to get through the rest of it pretty quickly.)
Now come the bigger news. I’ve been eyeing the Japanese section of Natively for a while, telling myself that it’s not reasonable to start learning yet another language now, when my level of Korean is still not B2, and when I just started Italian as well. I figured I would start next year, but as it turns out, my willpower for this sort of thing isn’t strong enough. Or rather, my passion for languages (and books!) overcame everything else. So here I am, just starting to learn Japanese.
Funnily enough, I have a feeling that it’s actually going to help me somewhat with Korean, because through learning kanji, I’ll finally be able to recognize more hanja! I just started on Wanikani, and well, let’s just say that I now understand why learning those chinese characters stroke by stroke is tedious and seems downright impossible sometimes, and why I was mostly failing at learning hanja that way. So I might just start a system where for every new kanji, I check to see if there’s a corresponding hanja and what words it’s in, killing two birds with one stone.
I was just eyeing the Korean side of Natively yesterday, and googling things like “does knowing Japanese make learning Korean easier?” despite the fact that my French is supposed to be a B2 before I can start a new language… I have a bad feeling that I will be following your lead soon 
It’s monthly update time! This month was a bit of a mess, both in my personal life and for language learning. Nevertheless, I managed to do a lot, but with a really random spread of energy between languages.
Spanish was… not great. I read one full novel, Sin noticias de Gurb | L33?? , which I loved. Other than that however, I just read some of La Ciudad de las Bestias | L30?? for the bookclub and randomly some litterary analysis. That amounts to 234 pages, which is surprisingly better than the previous month, but all in all not that much. I definitely need to catch up on bookclubs, I’m starting to get slightly overwhelmed by the amount of books I’m reading at the same time.
While this isn’t the month for Spanish, it is for Korean. I’ve managed to read over 1000 pages this month. Or well, mostly read, since I also listened to two audiobooks. So far, that Storytel subscription has been very useful, and I’ve listened to two books in the 사라진 날 | L20 series. It’s actually surprisingly palatable, and the level is pretty nice. I did suffer a little bit with 엄마가 사라진 날 | L20 , but that’s on me, I should’ve figured that missing mom = crying kids, and that’s something to avoid in audiobooks.
Of note, I’ve finally finished 이상한 과자 가게 전천당 1 | L24 , so that’s my first Natively book club book officially finished! I finished another (outside of Natively) book club book as well, 전우치전 | L22 . I also bought the next graded reader in the series, 심청전 | L27??, but as it’s supposed to be at C1, I don’t know when I’ll tackle it.
But that’s not all. I’ve read (and listened to afterwards) a pretty good chunk of 다이어트 학교 | L22??. I have to admit, it’s not the best thing to read while trying to lose weight, as it’s filled with pretty much every possible weight related trigger. So I took a small break from that in favor of 매일매일 아침밥 먹으리 | L15?? , which is actually not as easy as I thought at all. That’s a TOPIK4 book for sure, but we’ll see where it ends up exactly soon. I also just started Harry Potter, but I am reading at a pitifully slow pace (my stats don’t look that bad, but my edition also uses a giant font, with about twice as many pages as my French edition).
Now it’s stats time! I only missed two days of reading this month, and I’m continuing to read more and more higher levels, with 462 L20-26 pages against 343 last month. Comparing to last month, that level appointed to only 15% of my total pages, and we’re now at 20%!
Not much to say here. I went through the first 5 short stories of one of the graded readers I bought, but otherwise I haven’t done much besides watching a couple grammar videos.
This is the newest addition to the family. You’d think that in the week (not even that really) that I’ve decided to learn Japanese, I wouldn’t have really been able to do anything, but you’d be wrong. I thought I was starting from a completely blank slate appart from an ease with grammar concepts, but I was not prepared for this to happen. Apparently I remember way more than I thought from the time when I watched anime, and I haven’t watched any in a hot minute (pre 2020 probably). So that was helpful, plus my meager hanja knowledge.
I’ve decided to use Tae Kim’s guide to learning Japanese along with some Cure Dolly videos as my main ressources for grammar. For kanji, I’ve started using wanikani, and I can already tell that those mnemonics work great for me. As long as that continues into L2-3, I will be continuing with Wanikani. For vocab, I started using an anki deck based on Tae Kim’s guide which is quite nice as well as a deck specifically containing Crystal hunters content.
I’ve also tried reading some https://learnnatively.com/series/c78f246213/ graded readers, for now L0-2, and I could actually understand a lot! I even started Crystal hunters and read through chapter 1. It’s crazy how much reading does to help with language learning, because I can already tell that I’m going to be improving a lot more quickly with Japanese than with Korean. Of course, part of that is the grammar understanding, but reading as an absolute beginner isn’t something that I’d ever tried to do and I can already tell that it’s doing wonders for my vocab and grammar knowledge.
Some celebratory stats. Of course, it’s graded readers, so not many words per page, but I am honestly baffled at how this could even be possible.
Other - it’s your log, do what pleases you. The important question is do you like formatting it like that?
Maybe one day I’ll do the reverse thing and learn Korean. Grammar-wise it should be similar to Japanese, right? I’m just a bit scared of the pronunciation thing.
That’s the thing, to me there are pros and cons to both, hence why I did the poll. The completely open posts look nice, but then if I want to look back on something, with four languages, it’s starting to get pretty unpractical.
Join us Korean learners! Grammar should be easier for you, the whole concept of the particles is super similar in Korean, and sentence structure to some extent as well. Also your kanji knowledge would translate into Hanja knowledge, as long as you look up the pronunciation of the most common ones, so it should be immensely helpful to learn vocab quickly. (As a bonus, there are only 1000 commonly used Hanja.)
As for pronunciation, I’m obviously biased, but I don’t think it’s that hard? There are a couple sound change rules, but those are clearly outlined and otherwise it’s pretty simple. Some vowel changes are pretty common as well, diphtongues disappearing and slightly different verb endings depending on gender and how cute you want to sound. But you can start with just learning the standard pronunciation, and you’ll get the rest through exposure.
Most things that deviate from that in standard Korean you’ll find actually follow the former spelling of the word, so you just have to recognize the pattern and words it applies to. And then obviously there’s dialect, but you’ll probably start with standard Korean, and if you’re interested in a specific dialect you can look up pronunciation guides. Generally they have certain vowel sounds that they change and different verb endings, so it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
I’m just realizing that I could’ve put this all along, but oh well… So here are my learning time stats for Korean this month. It’s both pretty good, at 32 hours this month, but also a lot lower than it’s been. Okay, maybe comparing it to my best month is unfair, but in November 2023 (when I joined Natively), I somehow managed to do 74 hours of Korean. How, I honestly don’t know, but it happened, I have proof 
That ratio is pretty ironic though, but it represents my learning style well. It’s always going to be books first, the occasional drama episode or audiobook, and a sprinkle of grammar here and there, since I mostly just look things up as I come across them now.
I voted for “hide them” since I like the aspect of anticipation that comes from seeing a stack of language-related tabs, haha. It’s like opening gifts every time I open one.
Man, that’s awesome! I can’t wait to see where you go from here!
