Korean Job Discussion Forums

[rabidcake]

What's your daily maximum amount of words that you can learn in a day?

I find that if I focus and make an effort to memorize the words, I can learn at tops 10 words a day. At this rate I only need 200 days to be able to pass the level 2 TOPIK test...

[modernseoul]

I agree 10 a day every day is about the max I can learn. However at my last school the kids were learning at least 30 words per day 3 times a week so 90 a week.

IMO is it possible to learn Korean quickly, yes. Can most people, no.

Good luck.

[nate1983]

Short-term retention (over a few hours or days) of simple words, you can get in a few hundred per day, no question (talking a full day here, not 2 hours with breaks checking your facebook).

Don't think about words per day. Try to "see" about 50 new words per day, you will forget a lot, but then subsequently see them again, maybe forget a few more, but then see them again, and they'll get more and more reinforced into your long-term vocabulary.

I had no clue what the Korean alphabet looked like, and 9 months later passed TOPIK level 3 while in grad school full time (never having been to Korea). After 2 years of living in Korea, passed level 5, and scored 70+ on two sections including vocab/grammar. My vocab has gotten worse since that point from non-use. My advice is try to see things in context as much as possible.

[akcrono]

For long term retention, and I'm serious here: 1. I can only retain about 1 word a day. There are some exceptions, like if 2 words are similar. I've always been horrible with languages.

[SNR83]

Each person is different in terms of how many words they can go through, but I strongly recommend the use of free software such as Mnemosyne to help you prepare for the TOPIK. It is an electronic flashcard system but lets you grade each card according to how well you know it. Cards you know well will appear less and less, the ones you forget, more and more. I've used it when preparing for the TOPIK and JLPT and it has served me well.
If you are diligent and use it every day you will find you will remember virtually everything within a few months.

http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

[Squire]

[furtakk]

[rabidcake]

[YTMND]

Learning Japanese allows you to see the origin of words. Just yesterday a Chinese owner put up a sign which I was able to automatically understand in context as "mungusa" (those small kids stores with school supplies). This definitely helps when learning words.

The problem with Korean is that it is just syllables. There is not an exact 1:1 correspondence with the hanja, but it helps a lot to collect information. It looks like a lot of work to learn them, but I remember Korean words when I can see the Chinese characters just like I can remember Japanese words when I can see the kanji. It's like seeing a person's face and recognizing them. If I only saw their arm or leg, it could be anyone with the same skin color. That's what Korean learning is like, when you blindly remember a bank of sounds. You are surely going to forget them unless you see their face.

The Koreans have taken way too many shortcuts, hiding these faces, to write their language that unless you see it in context, it will be extremely difficult to retain and retrieve later on. If you are looking at 10 per day, that means 1,000 words will take you 100 days (more than 3 months). Instead, what you should do is look at 100 per day (flashcard style) moving the ones you have mastered to the back.