Korean language study group?

[Lutrinae]

Hi

I already attempt to learn korean before but then stopped and now that I have quit some free time, I'm diving in again.

I'm absolute beginner, and I don't want only to know basic sentences but also learn the alphabet so I can read and write.
So I'm going quite slowly because I memorize better when I can write.

I'm using Teach yourself complete Korean (book+audio), Cours de Coréen (very nice book + audio) and Talk to me in korean (podcast)

Anyway, if there are other people who are also learning korean right now, I thought it could be interesting to have a study group so we could share our progress and work method?

Have a nice day

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Salut

J'ai déjà essayé d'apprendre le coréen auparavant, puis arrêté, et maintenant que j'ai pas mal de temps libre je m'y replonge.

Je suis 100% débutante, et ça ne m'intéresse pas de connaître seulement les phrases de base, je veux aussi apprendre l'alphabet pour pouvoir lire et écrire.
Du coup je progresse assez lentement parce que je mémorise beaucoup mieux quand j'écris.

J'utilise Teach yourself complete Korean (livre+audio), Cours de Coréen (super livre + audio) et Talk to me in korean (podcast).

Si il y a d'autres personnes qui étudient cette langue en ce moment, j'ai pensé que ça pourrait être sympa d'avoir un group d'étude et de comparer notre évolution et nos méthodes et de s'entraider.

Bonne journée

[aforl]

Hi! I'm learning Korean too, but I've been learning for two years now... Nice to meet a fellow Korean learner! What kind of study group do you suggest?

[Lutrinae]

Hi aforl,

Wow 2 years, you must be pretty advanced now! Did you actually get to talk to someone in korean already?

I'm not sure, I'v never done that before, but a group where we can share our progress, any tips or trick that can be helpful to learn some specific things, maybe we can also do some exercises to practice.

Any ideas are welcome

[Karavinka]

If you have any questions, leave them here on this forum. I'll answer when I see them.

[Lutrinae]

Thank you, so far i ´m at the beginning so i don ´t have YET any grammar questions ^^

[aforl]

Hi aforl,

Wow 2 years, you must be pretty advanced now! Did you actually get to talk to someone in korean already?

I'm not sure, I'v never done that before, but a group where we can share our progress, any tips or trick that can be helpful to learn some specific things, maybe we can also do some exercises to practice.

Any ideas are welcome

Hey, I don't consider myself advance yet. My progress has been pretty slow, I feel. As a gauge, I'm having difficulties passing TOPIK level 4 past papers.

Cool, I'm open to such a group. I'm fine with Facebook or anywhere. Let me know!

[Lutrinae]

I guess it's always slower when, in addition to grammar and vocabulary we need to learn a whole new alphabet ^^

Do you think it's useful to learn romanization to progress faster? I feel that reading directly (with audio support) hangul is a bit slower but more efficient!

[linguoboy]

Do you think it's useful to learn romanization to progress faster?

No. It's a simple alphabet and a shallow orthography. The only real difficulties are the morphemic spellings and the morphophonological changes. (The first term refers to the tendency to write particular morphemes as blocks and the second to the changes in underlying sounds according to what other sounds they appear next to. So for instance 닭 "chicken", which by itself is pronounced as if spelled 닥. But at the topic marker 은 and it is pronounced 달근, though still written 닭은. But add 발 "foot" and compound is pronounced 닥빨.)

Korean phonology is so different from that of English or other languages that any romanisation system ends up being terribly misleading. I think it's much better to learn to associate the Han'geul directly with their Korean sounds.

[aforl]

Yes, Linguoboy is right. Romanisation is not a good way to go about learning Korean. You should just continue doing as you did readings with Hangul. In fact romanisation will only hinder you.

Building on what Linguoboy has said, an easier example to illustration this is 것 - "geot". When used with 이, you don't say "geoti", but rather "geosi".

Not to mention, the romanisation can get ridiculously long because of the nature of the language. For example, 저는 싱가포르사람인데요 is gonna get transliterated as "jeoneun singgaporeusaramindeyo".

[Lutrinae]

Aforl If you are ok with it I think we can do this here since we aren ´t so many

Linguoboy that´s what I thought too

This is a good thing about this book "Cours de coréen", it does not use romanization at all.
And there are plenty of exercises listen & write kind. I can manage more or less to read the words by the alphabet but I still have issues when listening to make the difference between ㅍandㅂ, ㄱanㅋ, even if I know the theory. After 6 times I still make the same mistake on the same word!
Are you yourself from Korea?

[linguoboy]

Building on what Linguoboy has said, an easier example to illustration this is 것 - "geot". When used with 이, you don't say "geoti", but rather "geosi".

Or sometimes the ㅅ drops out and you say 게. Romanisation makes it harder to grasp this by rendering 것이 as geosi (or kŏshi) and 게 as ge (or key).

[Lutrinae]

저는 싱가포르사람인데요 is gonna get transliterated as "jeoneun singgaporeusaramindeyo".

What is인데요?

I'm just in the part when you start to say where you are from and I got 저는 프랑스 서람이예요. Is it a different language level?

[aforl]

저는 싱가포르사람인데요 is gonna get transliterated as "jeoneun singgaporeusaramindeyo".

What is인데요?

I'm just in the part when you start to say where you are from and I got 저는 프랑스 서람이예요. Is it a different language level?

It's just an ending to "express an introduction or an explanation before you ask a question, give an instruction or propose an action". For example...
When calling someone's home: "여보세요? 저는 영수인데요. 수민 씨는 집에 있어요?"

I'm sure you will learn it in due course. There's nothing wrong with using 이예요, but 인데요 does make your sentence more softer and less direct.

By the way I'm not from Korea, not a Korean, and not living in Korea right now

[Lutrinae]

Ok I think I understand

In the mean time I'm reading about. Korean history (not in Korean unfortunatly ^^) one book it´s about Korea history from BC to these days and the other is about Sejong. He was so interesting!!!! Beside the fact that he created 한글 to educate his people, he was really doing his best as a sovereign and was compassionate. And his servants had maternity AND paternity leaves, in 15th century!!!

You're from Singapore? Do you speak mandarin or Malay? Or both ?

[Karavinka]

How you end a sentence makes a big difference in Korean, though they're hard to capture in translations and very dependent on context. In addition to what aforl said above, ending in -인데요 adds an extra connotation that the sentence is incomplete, since it is meant to serve as an introduction or to set the context. If you stop your sentence there, the interlocutor would most likely wait for the completion or feel like "so?"

[Lutrinae]

So it could be translated by “...“ ?

[aforl]

So it could be translated by “...“ ?

Well, sort of, yet not quite. I wouldn't think of a translation in English or any other languages, since they are fundamentally different. Just try to learn the language as it is without references from other languages. Its often hard if not impossible to find a direct one-to-one correspondence between two very different languages, especially in terms of grammar.

By the way, yes I'm from Singapore! Let me introduce myself. I speak:
English (Singapore's Lingua Franca)
Chinese Mandarin (Lingua Franca between different Chineses)
Chinese Hokkien (Mother Tongue in the strictest sense)
Korean (Of course, still learning!).

I can't speak Malay.
Singaporeans (like me) learn English, and Mandarin or Malay or Tamil (depending on ethnicity) in schools though. Picked up my Hokkien from my grandma and older relatives who never had education and therefore can't speak English nor Mandarin.

I also speak Singlish, formally known as Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), a creole spoken in Singapore and mutually intellegible with Manglish (Malaysian Colloquial English MCE). It is however at times very different from Standard English, especially in terms of grammar.

[Lutrinae]

Its often hard if not impossible to find a direct one-to-one correspondence between two very different languages, especially in terms of grammar.

Yes, i get that. Often I ´m perfectly able to understand something in english, though when someone is asking me "what does it mean in french". I can ´t answer right away, like if my brain just switches from one language to another with no connections in between

I also speak Singlish, formally known as Colloquial Singapore English (CSE), a creole spoken in Singapore and mutually intellegible with Manglish (Malaysian Colloquial English MCE). It is however at times very different from Standard English, especially in terms of grammar.

I ´ve heard about this one! Is it simplified grammar like with creole from Martinique or other Caribbean islands? I love countries like this where you get two mother/official languages from birth!
I have a friend from Singapore, he used to help me when I was learning Indonesian since it´s a bit similar to Malay (i think Malay is an kind of an older version?)

As for chinese languages, they really scare me, it seems as hard to learn as russian!


Back to grammar

Can I use -하고 in a negative sentence, for example, is it correct if I want to say:

I'm neither a student, a singer or a journalist.
전은 대학원생하고 가수하고 기자가 아니에요.

[aforl]

Yes, i get that. Often I ´m perfectly able to understand something in english, though when someone is asking me "what does it mean in french". I can ´t answer right away, like if my brain just switches from one language to another with no connections in between

I ´ve heard about this one! Is it simplified grammar like with creole from Martinique or other Caribbean islands? I love countries like this where you get two mother/official languages from birth!
I have a friend from Singapore, he used to help me when I was learning Indonesian since it´s a bit similar to Malay (i think Malay is an kind of an older version?)

As for chinese languages, they really scare me, it seems as hard to learn as russian!


Back to grammar

Can I use -하고 in a negative sentence, for example, is it correct if I want to say:

I'm neither a student, a singer or a journalist.
전은 대학원생하고 가수하고 기자가 아니에요.

Yes you should aim for that kind of "non-connection" for Korean too!

I'm not too familiar with Martinique creole since I don't speak French. But I suppose its similar. Nevertheless, Singlish grammar can be rather complicated to explain to a non-native speaker.

Let me give you an example.
"You makan liao ma? I haven makan leh."
="Have you eaten? I haven't eaten."

Here, liao emphasizes on the fact that something has already been done, ma is a marker used to signify a yes-no question, and leh is used when explaining something unexpected and the speaker is expecting the listener to understand him/her. As for syntax, it closely resembles Chinese; while vocabulary is often borrowed from Chinese or Malay. Since you have learnt Indonesian, I suppose you know what makan here means. English words such as "haven't" are often spelled as "haven" to reflect the pronunciation used in Singlish.

Ok back to Korean.

For "I'm neither a student, a singer nor a journalist.", I would translate it to 저는 학생이나 가수나 기자가 아니에요.

하고 is "and", whereas 나/이나 refers to choices.

[Lutrinae]

I'm not too familiar with Martinique creole since I don't speak French. But I suppose its similar. Nevertheless, Singlish grammar can be rather complicated to explain to a non-native speaker.

Let me give you an example.
"You makan liao ma? I haven makan leh."
="Have you eaten? I haven't eaten."

Here, liao emphasizes on the fact that something has already been done, ma is a marker used to signify a yes-no question, and leh is used when explaining something unexpected and the speaker is expecting the listener to understand him/her. As for syntax, it closely resembles Chinese; while vocabulary is often borrowed from Chinese or Malay. Since you have learnt Indonesian, I suppose you know what makan here means. English words such as "haven't" are often spelled as "haven" to reflect the pronunciation used in Singlish.

Aku mau makan, yes, definitely one of the first thing I learn in any language (reminds me I should learn it in Korean ^^)

Ok back to Korean.

For "I'm neither a student, a singer nor a journalist.", I would translate it to 저는 학생이나 가수나 기자가 아니에요.

하고 is "and", whereas 나/이나 refers to choices.

Thanks for the correction in english I don't know why I keep learning other languages when I can't even masterize ONE of them!!

Anyway, I will remember this 나/이나 . Can it also be used with a verb?
I don't know why I wrote 전은 instead of 저는 !!