Korean Day 0

I started learning Korean this week (on Sunday, actually). The idea is to try not to take it too seriously, but knowing me I'll be ripping my hair out within a month and think I need to quit it plus half of the other things I do in order to recover. (No.)

I thought about not talking about any of this at all, but I actually feel like recommending the apps below.

Anyways, here are some starting observations...

Hangul is cool. I don't want to blindly praise King Sejong only for Hangul before I learn about whatever else he did, but dang, Hangul is easy to learn, especially compared to Japanese writing (or Chinese).

I need to learn the keyboard SOON. I guess I might get some stickers to help. I can't deal with romanization.

KoreanClass101 has the best lessons I've seen so far. I might sign up when my free trial ends. I've been watching Hana Hana Hangul and Korean in 3 Minutes. UPDATE: The only thing is that I'm nervous about their sales methods and the fact that they send passwords in plain text. I sent some feedback about that.

The apps I am using for Hangul.  (These are not the only ones I tried/looked up, but the ones that survived the cut.)

This one - One thing I like is that it introduces the names of the letters as well as the writing and pronunciations. Lots of vocab collections, too, but the vocab is not gonna stick unless I start learning some grammar to go with it.

Kambu Hangul Games - No, I never know what they are saying to me outside of the pictures, but it's still fun and eventually I will. Bonus is that the theme song is really cheerful. I mean, the words could be anything, but….the music and the kids singing make me happy. The characters are cute, too.

Here is my Korean Twitter account. I'm only going to speak Korean on it, so it'll be pretty quiet to start, but…yeah.

Today I looked at the Korean section of a big bookstore and was considering the 出来る韓国語 series, since it seemed easy-to-use and some people said nice things about it on Amazon, but as it happens a friend of mine has a friend who is starting private lessons soon. The group can be up to three people, so they are going to let me in. Seems like Saturday afternoons will be spent in Korea Town. (Now that I look again, I realized the school we're going to uses those books, so it's highly possible I'll end up getting them.)

I made a deal with myself that I could only study Korean if I study equal time in Japanese. I kind of want to get a JLPT coach and shoot for 1 in December. Maybe everything will come together after all.




Well, probably not everything…