Trying to get decent in Korean, 한 단어 at a time
Happy 2026! It’s been a while since I last posted something on here. In this post I’ll be covering:
Let's take a look at my Kimchi Reader stats as of today, January 16th 2026:
As you can see compared to my last post, there hasn’t been a lot of change. The reason is pretty simple:
I didn’t do any Korean from September till November. No immersion, besides watching a video occasionally. Life got in the way. It was a combination of being busy with other things while also struggling to find motivation. Working on Korean daily has been a habit, but once I stop consistently doing it, it’s easy for me to get into this state of just skipping doing it all together.
However! As of December of 2025, I picked up the pace again. I don’t remember what triggered it, but after a week of immersing again it made me realize that I kind of missed it. There’s still so much Korean to be learned, so I decided to get back on the grind again.Since I didn’t do any Korean during the second half of 2025, you can probably imagine what my Anki heatmap looks like.
Yeah… empty. At some point the backlog was about 1600 cards. I’ve seen language learners in various Discord servers tackle hundreds of Anki cards daily, but for me 1600 is a lot. However, I didn’t want to either:
So I had to bite the bullet… and work through those 1600 reviews. I managed to do all of them in about two weeks. Each day I tackled at least 200 cards. Some I had the energy to do more, which resulted in 300 ~ 400 cards for those days.
After about ~2 weeks, I finally got through all of them. 드-디-어.
Now I can finally start working on all those newly mined cards that have been sitting in my deck for months.
If you check out my /books page, you can see that I’ve been picking up reading again as of December. In my last post I’ve mentioned how I was working through Harry Potter. Unfortunately.. I got a bit burnt out on it. I’m not sure why. I enjoy the story, but reading it in Korean is just not as enjoyable. Maybe due to the story getting more and more difficult as the series progresses? Either way, I’m currently at 92% of the fourth book and tried to push through to the end, but I can’t do it. So Harry Potter has been dropped for now.
I’ve decided to switch things up a bit and am now focusing on smaller novels instead. In the first half of 2025 I’ve read 세계를 건너 너에게 갈게 by 이꽃님. I really enjoyed that book! My comprehension according to Kimchi Reader was somewhere around 85 to 90 percent so I was able to follow along what was happening. I also enjoyed the writing style. I figured, why not read more books from that author instead? So that’s what I am doing now. I’ve currently read 5 books, and have 5 more on my list that I intend to go through.
I do intend to go back to reading longer series at some point. Ideally I’d pick up something like 드래곤 라자 or 나는 아직 살아있다, but according to Kimchi reader, comprehension doesn’t seem to be that high right now. So I’d first have to pump my vocab numbers up a bit before I’ll dive into those.
I’m not too keen on doing new year’s resolutions. You can (and should!) start new habits at any time during the year. But I thought to myself.. why not come up with some 2026 language goals! It will be fun to revisit this post at the beginning of 2027 while also giving me some direction on what to work on. I’d love to achieve some super ambitious things. For example:
However.. I’m not going to! I know myself well enough that life might get in the way again at some point. Also, my gut says that if I intend to commit to these ambitious goals, I might get burnt out.
Therefore, my goal will simply be to read 1 hour a day for 365 days. I'm mostly focused on reading currently, and it's the form of immersion that I'm enjoying the most. It will require a little discipline (which is good!), while at the same time being totally doable. All hours I immerse on top of that are a bonus!
Oh and one more goal: for the dozens of people reading this blog, I’ll try to write more on here in 2026!