My 11 Month Progress Video Learning The Korean Language

  • Donovan Nagel
    Written byDonovan Nagel
    Donovan NagelTeacher, translator, polyglot
    ๐ŸŽ“ B.A., Theology, Australian College of Theology, NSW
    ๐ŸŽ“ M.A., Applied Linguistics, University of New England, NSW

    Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator. Founder of The Mezzofanti Guild and Talk In Arabic.
  • Read time3 mins
  • Comments10
My 11 Month Progress Video Learning The Korean Language

Yay! ๐Ÿ™‚

Last September I had a great idea to put together a progress video of me speaking Korean every month during my time in Korea.

As much as I enjoy sharing it with you, it was mainly meant to be a way for me personally to track my gradual improvement in the language โ€“ something for me to look back at later on.

It didnโ€™t quite work out the way Iโ€™d hoped (for reasons I outlined here) so thereโ€™s a bit of a gap sadly since the last video but Iโ€™ve finally got the renewed vigour and time that I need to get everything up to date.

Is my current level anything remarkable?

I donโ€™t believe so.

Despite an unexpectedly tough year I did stick with it and pushed myself quite hard. As was the case with Irish, I refrained from studying any grammar until only two months ago (in preparation for TOPIK).

As Iโ€™ve said before, you donโ€™t need to study grammar to learn to speak a foreign language and yea I make plenty of mistakes and Iโ€™m miles from perfect but thatโ€™s natural!

I canโ€™t stress this enough โ€“ recording your own progress will help you a lot

Even if you feel a bit silly doing it! ๐Ÿ™‚

Iโ€™m a big believer in the benefits of making progress videos like this one and I encourage you to do the same.

You donโ€™t have to make them public like I do but just do it for your own benefit.

Itโ€™s very easy to think weโ€™re not improving but when you listen to yourself speaking off-the-cuff (unprepared) like this at different stages, you can start to see how much better youโ€™re getting and the areas you need to work on.

Donโ€™t think about what youโ€™re going to say โ€“ just hit record and say the first thing that comes to mind and let it flow out naturally.

Youโ€™ll quickly see how much you know (or donโ€™t know) by doing this.

I can hear loads of things I need to improve on just by watching this video now but when Iโ€™m with native speakers I donโ€™t always have a chance to stop and take note of things like this.

Back to Korea (briefly)!

I want to bring this language up another notch before I move on to my next project (Iโ€™ll be back to regular italki lessons to help me improve in the coming weeks).

Originally I was going to be moving to one of my favourite countries in Europe to learn that language this month (Iโ€™ll share more on those plans soon on my Facebook page! :wink:) but Iโ€™m just a wee bit unsatisfied with my Korean skills as they are.

So back I go for a little while longer. ๐Ÿ™‚

Tomorrow Iโ€™ll be hitting the road down the east coast of Australia all the way to Melbourne where Iโ€™m hoping to get plenty of language practise along the way with lots of interesting people.

Iโ€™ll update my Facebook and Twitter quite a bit too so if youโ€™re not already connected with me there, make sure you do!

UPDATE: I never made it back to Korea sadly (long story!). Instead I went to Russia and became fluent in Russian (see here).

๐ŸŽ“ Cite article

Share link Grab the link to this article
Copy Link
The Mezzofanti Guild

WANT HELP

Learning
Korean?

Who is this?The Mezzofanti Guild
Cardinal MezzofantiCardinal Guiseppe Mezzofanti was a 19th century polyglot who is believed to have spoken at least 39 languages!Learn more
Support me by sharing:
  • Reddit share
  • Facebook share
  • X / Twitter share

Let me help you learn Korean
JOIN THE GUILD:

Donovan Nagel
Donovan Nagel - B. Th, MA AppLing
I'm an Applied Linguistics graduate, teacher and translator with a passion for language learning (especially Arabic).
Currently learning: Greek
Greek

10 COMMENTS

Comment Policy: I love comments and feedback (positive and negative) but I have my limits. You're in my home here so act accordingly.
NO ADVERTISING. Links will be automatically flagged for moderation.
Craig

Craig

์•„์•„ ๋„๋„ˆ๋ฒˆ์”จ... ๋น„๋””์˜ค๋ฅผ๋ณด๋‹ˆ๊นŒ์กฐ๊ธˆ์Šฌํผ์š”. 11๊ฐœ์›”์—๋งŒ๊ทธ๋ ‡๊ฒŒ๋ฐฐ์šด๊ฒŒ์ •๋ง์ž˜๋ฐฐ์šฐ์…จ๋Š”๋ฐ์กฐ๊ธˆ๋”์˜ค๋ž˜ํ•œ๊ตญ์—์„œ์‚ด๊ณ ์กฐ๊ธˆ๋”๋…ธ๋ ฅ์„ํ•˜์‹œ๋ฉด์ •๋ง์ž˜ํ•˜์‹ค๊ฒƒ๊ฐ™์œผ๋‹ˆ๊นŒ์š”. ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๋Š”๊ฒฐ๊ตญ์‹œ๊ฐ„์ด์ข€์ง€๋‚˜์•ผ๋งŒ๋ฐฐ์šธ์ˆ˜์žˆ๊ณ ๋งˆ์Šคํ„ฐํ• ๋ ค๋ฉดํ‰์ƒ๊ฐ€์•ผ๋˜๊ฑฐ๋“ ์š”^^ ์ €๊ฐ™์€๊ฒฝ์šฐ๋Š”ํ˜ธ์ฃผ์‚ฌ๋žŒ์œผ๋กœ์„œ์‹ญ๋…„๋„˜๊ฒŒํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๋ฅผ๊ณต๋ถ€ํ–ˆ๋Š”๋ฐ์•„์ง๋ฉ€์—ˆ๋‹ค๊ณ ์ƒ๊ฐํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋„๋„ˆ๋ฒˆ์”จ์˜ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด์™€๋‹ค๋ฅธ๋‚˜๋ผ๋ง์–ดํ•™์—ฐ์ˆ˜์—๋Œ€์„ฑ๊ณต๋˜์‹œ๊ธธ! Iโ€™m the Australian guy who was in Gwangyang and was going to meet you in Gumi back then but didnโ€™t get around to it. ์ €๋„์ง€๊ธˆํ˜ธ์ฃผ์—์žˆ์Šต๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์ค‘๊ตญ์–ด์—ด๊ณต์ค‘์ž…๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ์•ž์œผ๋กœ๋„ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด๊ณต๋ถ€๋ฅผ์กฐ๊ธˆ์”ฉ๊ณ„์†ํ•˜์‹œ์ฃ . ํ™”์ดํŒ…! Craig.

Eleanor

Eleanor

Hello there, itโ€™s good to learn that progress video of your regarding your Korean learning process. Itโ€™s a tough language and since 2008 Iโ€™ve started learning it but till now struggling to speak fluently, but Iโ€™m enjoying whatever Iโ€™ve learned so far. Hope youโ€™re also enjoying learning Korean as well.

JJJ

JJJ

Learning Korean is like climbing up the Mt. Everest!! Itโ€™s a very difficult language to go through and Iโ€™m having hard time in my third month of Korean language training. Although your progress is very impressive!!

@LITMK

@LITMK

Thanks for this post. It seems like a good idea to record yourself like this. I also find it difficult to remember the mistakes I make during a conversation. I remember at the time, and then as the conversation progresses, I may forget. I will give it a try.

Olivia

Olivia

Progress video of your Korean language speaking is truly amazing. Iโ€™ve heard that Korean language is very tough to learn and they have lot of words and grammatical ways as well. Iโ€™ve intention to learn Korean but always feeling scary about the situation I will go through during such process.

James Duffy

James Duffy

๋Œ€๋‹จํ•ด์š”! 11๊ฐœ์›” ๋ฐ–์— ๊ณต๋ถ€ ์•ˆํ–ˆ๋Š”๋ฐ ๊ทธ๋ ‡๊ฒŒ ์ž˜ํ•ด์š”~ ์•ž์œผ๋กœ ์นœ๊ตฌ๋“ค์ด ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ์–ด๋ ต๋‹ค๊ณ  ๋ถˆํ‰ํ• ๋•Œ ๊ทธ๋ƒฅ ๊ทธ ๋น„๋””์˜ค๋ฅผ ๋ณด๋‚ด์ค„๊ฑฐ์—์š” ใ…‹ใ…‹

์ €๋„ ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ๊ณต๋ถ€ํ•˜๋Š”๋ฐ ์ด์ œ 5๋…„ ๋์–ด์š”. ์ œ ์ƒ๊ฐ์—” ์ œ์ผ ์–ด๋ ค์šด ์ ์ด ์žฌ๋ฏธ์žˆ๋Š” ๋ฏธ๋””์–ด ๋ถ€์กฑํ•˜๋Š”๊ฑฐ์—์š”... ์ผ๋ณธ์–ด ๊ณต๋ถ€ํ•˜๋ ค๊ณ  ํ•˜๋ฉด ์žฌ๋ฐŒ๋Š” ์•„๋‹ˆ๋ฉ”์ด์…˜์ด๋‚˜ ์˜ํ™”๊ฐ€ ๋˜๊ฒŒ ๋งŽ์ง€๋งŒ ํ•œ๊ตญ์–ด ๋ฏธ๋””์–ด ์ข€... ์ € ํ•œ๊ตญ ๋“œ๋ผ๋งˆ ์‹ซ๊ฑฐ๋“ ์š” ใ…‹ใ…‹

์•”ํŠผ ์ง„ํ–‰์„ ๊ณต์œ ํ•ด์ค˜์„œ ๊ฐ์‚ฌํ•ฉ๋‹ˆ๋‹ค. ๋‹ค์Œ ์–ธ์–ด ๋„์ „์ด ์ž˜ ๋˜๊ธธ ๋ฐ”๋ž˜์š”!

Lucian

Lucian

James, we donโ€™t know what you wrote! What language is this,korean?

Max Bronson

Max Bronson

์ด‰์•„ํ•ด์š” Donovan! Youโ€™re progress is pretty impressive. Hope you have a great time back in Aussie.

What was the thing about learning Korean that stands out as being extra difficult or interesting for you?

Donovan Nagel

Donovan Nagel

Thanks, Max! ^^

Definitely word order.

I think thatโ€™s hands down the most challenging thing for English speakers when learning a language like Korean. Other than that, I donโ€™t think itโ€™s a very difficult language.

How long have you been learning Korean yourself?

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
ยฉ The Mezzofanti Guild, 2024. NAGEL PTY LTD. All Rights Reserved.
Join The Guild

Let Me Help You Learn Korean

  • Get my exclusive Korean content delivered straight to your inbox.
  • Learn about the best Korean language resources that I've personally test-driven.
  • Get insider tips for learning Korean.

KoreanKorean

No spam. Ever.