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
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.
Korean
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%!
(I totally didn’t read just one more 두루책방 book to get my L20-26 pages proportion from 19,9% to 20. Obviously, I would never do that.)
Italian
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.
Japanese
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.
- hide them
- show everything
- other (comment)
. All those book club opportunities!)
In my opinion, I think it’s best to use some resources specifically for the TOPIK, as the questions for each level have a really specific type of format and there is also specific vocabulary associated with each. I used the textbook 토픽 합격 레시피 last year and would recommend it. It covered everything having to do with the test and I felt like I could’ve passed with a good score. It’s split by level, so you can just study the materials up to the level you’re aiming for and save the advanced stuff for later.
