The main topic of conversation during week 7 was plans for Fall Break. I described how my brother and dad were visiting me that week, and how we had been eating meals together every day. I then talked about how my friend texted me asking me to drive him to the train station, which was something I expected. Because that was a more abstract concept to describe, I really struggled with being able to articulately state it. How my and Alvin's lessons usually work is that I try to describe something, and if I say it wrong or if I am too wordy in trying to effectively describe it, he uses my vocabulary and gives me a more effective sentence. I then keep that sentence in my phone to learn the structure of the revised sentence, what makes it so effective (in my case, it is usually linking multiple verbs together that I find so difficult, which Alvin then helps me with so I can make my sentences more economical), and try to understand it so that I can use similar sentences in the future.
In trying to make sentences more economical, I also use subjects multiple times, and have to re-familiarize myself with the correct endings to add onto nouns in the sentence. Because I learned Korean so informally, you do not always need to put endings onto nouns, so I would drop them as I did not fully understand which noun ending is correct. By practicing speaking, I am able to learn what the right endings are.
I use an app called Memrise to learn vocabulary. It is a flashcard-based app through which you learn vocabulary and are then tested periodically on it. Learning Korean on my own before this class, I learned at least 1500 unique words through multiple vocabulary sets, and am slowly working my way through reviewing all of them to realize the full extent of my vocabulary to further vary the sentences I can use in casual conversation.
I also sometimes use a website called Talk to Me in Korean, which provides free vocabulary lessons, including usage of verbs, example sentences, and podcasts during which they say these example sentences out loud. I know a lot of their beginner lessons, so it has taken me a while to find a point to start at where I never learned a particular grammar structure, but I find the podcasts to be particularly helpful, as my spoken comprehension skills are weak and they provide the written sentences that are used in the podcast.
For my purposes, I do not think BYKI will be useful. Because I have progressed very far in my knowledge of vocabulary words, and because my pronunciation is already very good for the level I am at, I would not learn anything new from BYKI. It sounds like it is more suited toward beginners, which I am not. The same applies to Mango languages, as I already used a different source to learn basic vocabulary and I plan on sticking with that source.
The service that the University subscribes to that I think will be particularly helpful is one for learning basic conversation scripts, that includes both a recording and a transcript of the conversation. I forgot the name of the service, but as I need to improve my spoken comprehension, this is very relevant to my goals.
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