If you have read any of my previous articles, you may already know that I am a big proponent of reading for foreign language acquisition. I started reading proper Korean books some time around March 2019, around 6 months into learning, which when I think about it is too late and one of my biggest regrets is not reading earlier.
Initially, I found a very nice series of history books aimed at a younger audience, 그림으로 보는 세계사, that just so happened to be on Ridiselect. Seeing as it was cheaper to use Ridiselect than to pay for each book individually I subscribed to the service, which was back then $6.99 per month. As they were the first books I read, it took me a while to get through them.
Once I finished them, I looked at what else was available through Ridiselect and stumbled upon a few books that were so far beyond my level that I could only pick up bits. However my main aim when reading them was to read them to see the words in context and try to pick up as many as I could. I spent a few months reading these before deciding to come back down to lower level books.
In September I found this great series also by 계림북스 who created the 그림으로 보는 series, called 계림세계명작, which is a series of 50 classic literature translated into Korean and abridged for younger audiences. These took me from September 2019 until April 2020. Although the entire collection was not on Ridiselect, I read in total 36 books from this series. I will go into more detail in the next section.
So having developed a reading habit, as early as I could but not as early as I would have liked. From the period of September 2019 until now I have read almost daily for anywhere between 1 hour and 3 hours but on average around 1 and 45 minutes per day. I have had some days where I have missed a day or took a rest due to being busy or wanting to do something else, you can see those in my tracking sheet.
What I read through 2020
As stated before, when 2020 rolled round, I was making my way through the 세계명작 series, which was great for me as I was learning tonnes of new words with just enough comprehensibility that I could easily learn them and due to the series being aimed towards younger readers they weren't overly complicated. I was still however coming across 50-150 words while reading the remaining 19 books. As they were relatively short I had started finishing them quickly only taking about 3 days on average.
After this series I remember searching for Korean literature and someone linked me to the 창비 publisher young adult fiction awards. Which I decided to read some of them as they must be at least okay, as they have managed to win an award. I read 완득이, 위저드 베이커리 and 아몬드. At this point I could kind of understand what was happening but it was still mostly vague and when I think back to them now I can't remember what happened in them at all, which is great because I can reread them at a later date.
At the beginning of May I saw that the webtoon for 나 혼자만 레벨업 was getting popular so I had started reading it. I had gotten to chapter 46, when I found out that it was originally a webnovel, which led me to reading 3 huge webnovel series this year. I paused reading the webtoon and started the book version of the webnovel through ridibooks. I adjusted the size of text and spacing to get the amount of pages as close to the physical books as possible and I was reading around 50 pages a day. I was finishing one book every 5-6 days depending on the length.
Towards the end of 나 혼자만 레벨업 I started checking how long I was reading as per the Digital Wellbeing app on android phones, which is where I found out that I was reading between 1 hour and 30 minutes to 2 hours a day. Since then I have been tracking it daily and have read 282 hours from August to December, around 56 hours per month on average.
As I was coming toward the end, I had started to look for more fantasy webnovels to read and decided to search on Ridibooks by the most reviewed as I figured if a lot of people have read it and it's rated highly it must be worth reading. Luckily the first book for most webnovels is completely free, which is great if you don't want to spend any money and I have used these free first books to fill reading in between huge series.
August was filled with 4 free books. 2 of which I have read the full series. I read 킬 더 드래곤, which was very highly rated and only 9 books long, so I decided to read that all the way through. After finishing once again I read a few of the free books and now since october until December I have made my way through most of 바바리안 퀘스트 which I should be able to finish the final 2 books in the first 2 weeks of 2021.
In total I was able to read 61 books all completely in Korean and obviously with varying understanding. After tracking all the highlighted words, of which some are repeats, although I would delete a highlight if I already had the word in Anki. Currently without the final book, I have highlighted 11,233 words in 2020. By comparison I had highlighted 7663 words but that does not include words from the 세계사 series as I could not highlight them although I imagine it would have been closer to this years number.
If we take that on average I read for 50 hours per month, taking into account any days off and that I was probably reading slightly less at the start of the year, I would have read around 600 hours this year in books alone. This does not include any reading done from blogs, navigating websites, playing video games. Even reading for just 1 hour a day really adds up and will give you 365 hours more experience than your old self.
Was it worth it?
For me reading is the input method that gives me the most tangible improvement. I'm sure this would be the same of everyone and yes I am putting the same possibly even more time into watching TV shows without subtitles and listening to podcasts or watching random videos on YouTube.
The time I felt the most improvement was maybe a few books into 나 혼자만 레벨업. Although previously I could feel what I was reading was getting easier it was still content aimed for younger audiences and still had a lot of words to learn to get to the point where I could read content at a higher level easier.
The reason I felt the most improvement at this stage is because this is when I could start to visualise, not just vaguely, but extremely vividly what was happening. Even with sections where I did not know some words it was still enough that I could visualise mostly what was happening and over time this has improved.
Currently while reading 바바리안 퀘스트, I can visualise mostly everything that is happening and I have only a few unknown words every other page, some of which I can figure out from the Hanja. I don't know how difficult you may find this book but I'm sure you can read the preview.
With so much reading and seeing of new words and descriptions. The main thing I noticed outside of reading was that because I knew more words listening became much easier, I will say though that for me listening is not so much difficult just vague when it comes to people talking in conversations. However listening to music and audio descriptions or narration I can understand maybe 99% of what is being said.
For me the time invested into reading was 100% worth it. My goal is to understand as much as I possibly can and reading is the quickest way to build up vocabulary. My first presumption is that a native will know all these words that are being used in a book, especially a webnovel which is not exactly the highest echelon of language usage.
I do not deliberately try to remember every single word I see as some of them only show up one time or even once a month at times. If a word gets repeated enough you will remember it, either from remembering the meaning or remembering that you looked it up 10 times.
Plans and expectations for 2021
So for this next year I already have a bunch of books that I would like to read. I plan to resubscribe to ridiselect and read some translated classics for adults and check out some of the fantasy novels written by 이영도. Because it has been a few months since I read a new book, I am fully expecting to run into more new words and hopefully this will continue throughout this year.
I am currently tomorrow, a week under 2 years and 3 months learning Korean, so I will hit my 3 year mark in September. I'm hoping the amount of words slows down to a crawl by that time and if not definitely by the end of my 4th year. This year I want to watch more things that have subtitles as opposed to just watching, as I feel like I can make some progress with those few words that I couldn't pick out from hearing them.
This last month, I have also started doing some Italian reading of a night time before bed, for around 30 minutes to an hour and looking up the words I didn't know. With my experience of doing this exact thing with Korean I know I will be able to make progress as long as I stick with it.
I currently have 14 books in Italian that I think I will be able to finish. What makes this slightly easier and hopefully quicker than Korean, is that there are many words I instantly know the meaning of due to them being so similar to English.
As I become even more accustomed to Korean I would like to eventually slow down the amount I am reading and switch all that time with listening. This will be my method for maintaining Korean and attempting to switch my ratio of Korean and Italian. This may not be until year 4 or 5 of Korean as I can still feel the gap between me and a native. There are still many words to be learnt and a big gap of being able to hear everything clearly to bridge.
I think a good target for 2021 will be 50 books for Korean and aiming to finish the 14 Italian books. But I also want to add more reading of other materials such as news and blogs. Which is part of the reason for my plan to go back to the classics because the genre will change between each book giving me more variety of language to come across.
I do want to get more comfortable with super common spoken language (which is why I listen to podcasts), as I feel my current knowledge is very wide although this could still just be because I am not completely comfortable with Korean yet.
For related posts please check out these pages:
- How to Start Reading in a Foreign Language
- Nintendo Switch Games to play in Korean
- The Monolingual Transition and How to Approach it
- Realistically How Long Does it Take to Learn a Language?
- How to Use Ridibooks(Korean Ebook Store)
- Olly Richards' Short Stories in Korean for Intermediate Learners Review
- Billy Go's Korean Reading Made Simple Review
- Should You Learn Korean?
- How to Learn Korean in 2021
- I read 61 Korean books in 2020
- 7 Reading Tips to Accelerate Your Korean Learning
- 7 Fantasy Webtoons You Should Read in 2021
- Tuttle's Korean Stories for Language Learners Review
This is really impressive! Looking back, is there a series you would recommend to start with? I’m tempted to start the abridged classics series, mainly because I’m already familiar with the stories. Good luck with your goals for 2021!
ReplyDeleteThats a good choice, the abridged classics are a good start. The only problem is they use a children's story telling form instead of plain form but it doesn't matter that much because conjugation is easy.
DeleteIf you check the fluency path, I recommend using yonsei reading, which you can find pdf's of. It's not exactly the most fun but the first 2 you can quickly finish but they're better for people who are just starting.
I actually just finished yonsei 3. I was looking at starting 4, but I'd like to switch to something else if I can because it's pretty boring haha. I'll check out the classics and see if I can push though them. Thanks for writing all this out!
DeleteOh, ye just go for it. They shouldn't be too hard if you can read Yonsei reading 3.
DeleteAny story is definitely more fun than those kinds of texts. Really you can just pick anything you want to read. It will always be a little challenging to start with.
Very inspriring.
ReplyDeleteDo you look up and highlight all the words you don't know or guess some from context?
I highlight all the words I dont know even if I can guess it. Later on when I go through them I delete the ones I guessed correctly if I have seen the word before but if I feel like I haven't seen it I will leave it highlighted anyway.
DeleteI see. So do you all add them to Anki later on? Extensive reading makes for a lot of words and not all of them are so common. Advice on how to decide which words are worth learning would be helpful. For example 사자성어 are rather rare and a pain to remember, so I like to drop them.
DeleteI'm aware of the star system the naver and krdict have, but more often than not the unknown words that pop up have no star. Obviously that's not a bad sign, but I'm always torn between adding some random vocab to my deck or letting it go ><
No, I only add words to anki if I can find a picture for them, I write all the other words in a notebook with the description, usually shortened. For 사자성어 I recommend finding out what the components mean this adds an extra piece of information to help remember them with.
DeletePersonally I think if you learn everything you will be in a better position than not. I think in 5 years it wont really matter because if you stick with it there's a high chance that you will know most of these words through repetition by then anyway. Memory is fickle anyway I wouldn't get too caught up in thinking that just because it's in Anki you know it.
I wouldn't feel bad at all for giving up on an Anki deck, I only use it for picture cards and I would never go back to sentences because I can just read content instead. Imo Anki is just there to get your knowledge up so that you can read and watch stuff to learn.