I speak Polish, German, Swedish and English. 3 of them are Germanic languages so they were easy to learn because they are so closely related. Polish and German I learned as a child so it was kind of automatic.
Now I have to learn Korean and struggle so much! After 3 months I have learned about 100 words. Any tips how to get to the first 1000 words Ina reasonable time? Especially in a language where none of the words seem to resamle anything from my previous languages.
TTBOMK, there are 3 things which change-the-rules, significantly.
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Pimsleur. Get the Pimsleur app, get the all-languages subscription, & do 1 session per day.
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Flashcards, or Anki, to get the visual imprinted into your automatic-mind, for any language you are trying to learn
Later…
- Tandem, where you find a speech-learning partner, you help other people learn your languages better, other people help you learn your target-language better.
Begin with Pimsleur & with some yt videos.
( they have no Sanskrit, which is the one I want, unfortunately )
Do well!
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Anki is incredible for learning, it’s one of my favourite tools.
If you’re able to, make your own flashcards— it makes a huge difference. Bonus tip, if you’re making your own flashcards, it can be useful to use pictures rather than a language you already know for the answer. For example, if I was making a card for the word “apple” in French, I’d have one side saying “une pomme”, and another side with a picture of an apple. It makes it so that the new language isn’t mediated by English as much, and I’ve found I get better at thinking in that language much quicker (especially for languages with grammar that’s different to other languages I’ve studied)
Have you tried playing video games in the language you’re learning?
There’s a bunch of bilingual people in my life and they told me that’s how they learned English.
The key to adquire vocab is to find a method that you’re comfortable with, and that you don’t mind repeating in a timely manner. Two that I personally like are:
semantic map
As you learn a new word, you write it down, with an explanation (translation, drawing, up to you), and then connect it to words that are conceptually related, that you already learned.
So for example. Let’s say that you were learning English instead of Korean. And you just learned the word “chicken”. You could do something like this:
You can extend those maps as big as you want, and also include other useful bits of info, like grammar - because you’ll need that info later on. Also note what I did there with “(ptak)”, leaving a blank for a word that you’d be planning to learn later on; when you do it, you simply write “bird” over it and done, another word in the map.
It’s important to review your old semantic maps; either to add new words or to review the old ones.
flashcards
Prepare a bunch of small pieces of paper. Harder paper is typically better. Add the following to each:
- a Korean word
- a translation in a language that you’re proficient with (it’s fine to mix)
- small usage details, as translations are almost never 100% accurate
- some grammatical tidbit (e.g. is this a verb or a noun? If a verb: stative, descriptive, active, or copulative?)
- a simple example sentence using that word
- [optional] some simple drawing
Then as you have some free time (just after lunch, in the metro, etc.), you review those cards.
I’m doing the flashcards but only with the word in Korean and English. Perhaps I should add more things to it.
The mindmap I’ve never heard of it, but it seems interesting because you make clusters of words in topics. I will try that out too.
Thanks for your practical tips!
Especially in a language where none of the words seem to resamle anything from my previous languages.
It’s challenging, but if you can get a handle on the etymology of the language you’re studying, that may help. I’m learning Chinese and the characters got a lot less intimidating once I learned about the radicals. Basically there are smaller characters embedded within all but the most simple characters, and often the character is telling some kind of story that uses all of the radicals to illustrate the meaning of the character.
For example 看 means “look”, which seems pretty nonsensical. But then if you know that 手 means “hand” and 目 means “eye”, then you can see that the “look” character is made up of the hand character over top of the eye character, like someone shielding their eyes from the sun as they look at something. And the hand and eye characters both look a bit more like the things they represent.
Similarly, if one was learning English, it may behoove them to learn a little bit about Latin and Greek roots, since a lot of our vocabulary comes from those. Maybe even read about some of the most common PIE roots. Once you learn about PIE roots you can start noticing them in all kinds of places in our language.
I spoke Polish until I went to primary school as well as being a native English speaker.
