Korean Fluency Path

What is the Korean Fluency Path?

The Korean Fluency Path was devised to help guide learners who are starting out to give them an idea of how to go about learning Korean in the fastest way possible and which resources to use to achieve that. It was based off of mine and a couple other learners experience using various resources and methods. As I and many others are still learning, new resources continue to be released and new ideas discovered, the path will be ever changing as people test out the current ideas. I will try to regularly update the path and keep this page up to date with updated information.

Try not to focus too much on the time frames as they are mainly a guideline for those who are willing to put in a lot of time. You may find that you differ in various areas, perhaps you even make progress quicker than the path suggests. Do not feel bad if you are behind the schedule or even if you started to use the content in the guide later into your journey. Please contact me with feedback if you think things can be better optimised or explained.

Korean Fluency Path for korean learners

Grammar

A detailed overview of my ideas on grammar an be found here.

For Grammar the main method is to go through the resources as quick as possible. Chances are you won't be able to fill your entire day with grammar study so you should allot a time a portion of your time where you go through grammar resources quickly and fill the rest of your day with watching TV shows and listening to the language. You do not need to do any exercises or review for grammar as getting exposure to the language will give a refresher on the meaning. 

Hearing things multiple times without knowing what it is will also spark your curiosity and will make you seek out those specific things that you would like to know. If you want to know something that you remember being explained well in one of the resources you can always go back the memory of seeing it should stay with you and will give you the knowledge to notice these structures while immersing in the language. 

Reading

My article on how to begin reading in a foreign language.

Reading is by far the most effective way to increase your vocabulary in a language. It is very easy to read massive amounts of content in little amounts of time. This obviously gives you more exposure to the various ways in which words and grammar forms are used. One of the best parts of reading is that due to the ease of Hangeul you can start very early on to read simple texts. Reading makes learning new words much easier, you can clearly see how a word is spelt, which makes it easy to search in a dictionary.

I highly recommend using some kind of university textbook as graded readers do not really exist for Korean yet and these are a great substitute. If you can schedule at least an hour for reading you will see your ability sky rocket. Having the written version of a word in your head is just another anchor you can use to remember words and the more words you come across the more words you can notice while using your other 2 forms of immersion; listening and watching.

As korean has a ridiculous amount of words and synonyms, it is highly recommended to do a lot of reading as you will need to grow your vocabulary as quick as possible to deal with this. There are a few disadvantages that come just reading. 

You definitely need to be listening on the side as you still need to know exactly how words sound, with the sound of words comes intonation and inflection that can really help you understand the words and grammar better.

Another big disadvantage for reading is that you will not always come across the most common way of expressing an idea, in fact some grammar forms are rarely or never used in the spoken form of the language. If your goals are to output as early as possible I highly recommend doing reading but skew yourself to watching more with subtitles as the words and expressions will be slightly more useful for output.

The more reading you do the quicker you will improve but it is very hard to do lots of reading as it is very demanding on the brain. You will notice once you do a few hours of reading that your concentration starts to wane. For this reason I recommend only doing around 1-2 hours of reading per day and then you can spend the rest focusing on watching and listening to content. This also gives you more variety in your learning.

Watching

Article about watching shows and how best to use subtitles.

Ideally you should make as much time for watching as possible. The amount of clues you get from the seeing what is occurring on screen, the ability to see the way that peoples mouths move when they speak and the ability to have subtitles timed with what is being said make it perfect for learning when you do not have someone who can show you actions for verbs and tell you what everything is called. 

When first beginning your learning journey it is not a bad idea to use native language subtitles while you watch through the content. First of all this will give you 100% comprehension while still being able to hear the sounds of the language. Secondly it will give you a base of content from which you can return to later on, this is great because you will already know what is going to happen so you can focus on the words being said. While the subs may be slightly distracting it still gives you time to look at the mannerisms of natives and the intonation of the language.

As you progress and start to learn more of the language through deliberate study it is highly recommended to either change to korean subtitles or use no subtitles at all. These have 2 different roles as actually being able to pick out words will require you to have a fairly large vocabulary in the first place.

Subtitles are highly recommended if you are using your watching time to pick up new words as you will be able to see exactly what is said on the screen and be able to link the words with the sounds, although reading subtitles is quite hard as people talk quick and often subtitles do not remain on the screen for very long. This works best if you also have time to spend on listening separately as that will give you practice for the sounds without relying on the written form of the language.

Listening raw(without subs), is highly recommended if you want to focus on the sounds of the language and the way that people speak without tying it all to the written language. It is highly recommended that you try to break away from subtitles at some point as people can get addicted to the understanding and rely on them meaning they have difficulty with the listening portion of the language. If you spend a lot of time listening this will not be so much of a problem but many learners use watching with subtitles as their only exposure to the verbal form of the language which should be considered as reading at best.

Listening

More detailed explanation of listening.

Listening is one of the easiest passive activities to do and is a great way to rack up hours of exposure especially if you find you are a busy person with little free time. Personally I found repetitive listening to be very effective at the start of your learning journey but now I mostly just listening extensively to random podcasts and radio shows.

There is not current way to what length or amount of content is best to use for repetitive listening but content that will last 15-20 minutes will always be a good bet. In the early stages I listened to 20-30 one minute tracks for multiple hours racking up many hours listening to the same content at least 80-100 times, which helped a few words stick in my memory permanently. Repetitive listening is a hard sell, it's very effective because you're giving yourself exposure to the same content over and over again but the benefits take a long time to reap. It can take hundreds of listens to 1 piece of content before you have exhausted what you can gain from it. Many also find it boring although that is down to the mindset of the learner.

It has also been recommended to use content that you have already watched and listening to that as your repetitive listening content. This gives you the advantage of already knowing what happened so you have the context and can imagine what is happening better. I personally have not done this and am not sure of it's effectiveness to using other content. 

The only downside I can see from this is that the content that you watch will not be short 1-5 minutes but somewhere between 30-40 minutes or even 20 minutes when condensed. Personally I recommend shorter clips such as those of TTMIK's easy reading series or Yonsei 1/2's audio. These also have the advantage of being easy content.

As you become more proficient with your listening abilities it is likely just as effective to do extensive listening where you listen to a lot of different things or longer clips without repetition. This works because the language in itself will be repetitive. There will always be common phrases and common words which get repeated often effectively changing your repetition to the language as a whole rather than just the short clips that you have designated as your listening content.

Speaking

I do not have much experience on this subject as I have not had long enough conversations to say what works best or what is great for bumping up your speaking ability. However I will comment on what I recommend in the early stages.

Every 3 or so months, I highly recommend reading a passage and asking a Korean to to tell you what sounds off and how you can improve. The corrections you receive should help you tune your listening better. The more we listen the better our pronunciation will be as we attune ourselves to the exact sounds of the target language. 

If we can hear a sound perfectly, effectively we should be able to pronounce the word correctly ourselves with some practice, not forgetting we have muscles in our mouths that also need to be trained. Knowing which sounds we can and cannot pronounce can help us figure out if we are correctly hearing the sound.

Reading aloud means that we do not have to create language so you will not be fossilising any grammatical mistakes. I recommend reading aloud to help train your mouth muscles, although be cautious not to do this too often without correction as you may find it hard to correct a pronunciation later on as your mouth is already used to moving in a specific way. 

If your aim is to output and have conversations with natives then you may find you deviate hugely from the path. This is fine everyone has different goals for their journey. The guide is written with the mindset that you will want to feel as comfortable as possible in the language before you start to output, especially verbally which is considered the hardest skill to improve, as it requires high comfort with the language to sound natural and be understood easily. 

If your native language is very far from Korean you will find it takes multiple years to be comfortable, sadly this is the reality, if you want to output early or gain experience outputting in a foreign language, I highly recommend learning a closely related language to your native language first as it will be way quicker to get to the point where you can output. Languages like Dutch,  German, Italian, Spanish will probably take less than a year before you will feel like you can output successfully and probably around 2-3 years before you feel extremely comfortable with immersion and outputting.

Writing 

When I refer to writing I mean the act of outputting the language via the writing system, not simply being able to physically write it well. This is the easier skill to output with, you do not need to be as quick as you can take your time with replies to conversations or any writings you may be working on. 

If you want to have meaningful conversations with native speakers without pressure, I highly recommend texting apps to start with as you can learn natural ways to ask questions and say things from their responses and also see which parts of the language you do not quite understand and pay more attention to them while immersing. 

Do not mistake texting for a form of effective input, while you could consider it as input, it is very low quality in terms of density and content. Many people who go for a conversational approach will find they cant actually say a lot they just get good at say some very common everyday phrases and questions.

One of the worst mistakes you can take from written output is that because a native understood it, does not mean it is natural or correct. If you are a native English speaker you will likely have a huge understanding of this concept, many English speakers are very poor yet you can still infer what they mean a lot of the time without too much effort. You will also notice you don't correct them because you would have to stop them every sentence and this ruins the flow of a conversation.

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4 comments:

  1. Hi! For the listening section you mentioned lots of short 1-2 minute clips. Do you have a favorite YouTube channel or textbook with audio that you recommend for this?

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    1. I actually don't, I rarely repeat content. I just tend to listen to podcasts which are usually over an hour long. However I did use the ttmik audio for their "Easy Korean Reading" and "News in Korean" you can get the audio for free from here:https://talktomeinkorean.com/audio/ or you can use the versions I have cut down on my google drive which can be found on the second tab of the Fluency Path Sheet.

      I think you could even use up to 5 minute clips, I can suggest checking out MotivateKorean on Youtube he mentions repetitive listening a lot and has a bunch of tips as it was his main method for learning I believe.

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  2. can u do reviews on darakwon korean books? like vitamin korean or korean made easy? thank u

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    1. Most of them are not worth the price. I could I will have a look at reviewing their leveled story books. A lot of the grammar ones are all pretty similar if you can get hold of them for free then just give them a try but really all the resources I've listed here are enough. You're not going to be missing out on anything they all have the same information in them.

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