Trying to get decent in Korean, 한 단어 at a time
My very first update post! I just felt like writing down my progress for the past month for no reason whatsoever. I might write more of these in the future.
Here are my stats according to Kimchi Reader:
I've been mining a ton, but not that many new known words.
Last month's highlights:
At the start of the month I purchased a Boox Palma. It's a smartphone sized e-reader that runs Android. It's basically a phone with an e-reader screen, but without any 4G/5G capabilities. I bought this to make it easier to read Korean on the go. I've used Kimchi Reader on my phone already quite a bit for this, but the screen of the Boox is just way nicer to read on. It also doesn't have all the distractions (and especially notifications) that my phone has.
I purchased it for €200,-, which is a bit expensive in my opinion. But luckily I'm pretty happy with the purchase so far! I've read about some people experiencing their Boox Palma bricking for no reason, so hoping that doesn't happen to mine.
My focus with immersion is currently on reading. My current goal is to work through all the Harry Potter books before the end of the year. I managed to finish Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban this week, and it took me the entire month of July. I was able to read it at a decent speed with pretty good comprehension. Of course, I've seen the movie when I was younger, so it helped that I was somewhat familiar with the plot. But all in all, I'm pretty happy with finishing it! I tried reading this book last year but had to end up dropping it due to not making good progress.
I've started reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire this week and I'm currently at ~20%. Each book in the Harry Potter series gets more complicated in terms of language and plot. This is the first book where I can really notice that. So far, it's going great! I've also seen this movie when I was younger, but I don't remember the plot at all. I hope I'm able to follow along until the end. Although the book has a lot more pages than the Prisoner of Azkaban, I'm aiming to finish it by the end of August. Let's see if we can make that!
You can find all the books I've read on my books page.
This past month I've had a few weeks where I didn't work on any Korean at all. So of course, I broke my Anki streak. As a result, my Anki heatmap looks like this:
When I started working through this backlog of cards, I had 722 reviews to do. I've already tried working a bit through them this week, and I'm currently sitting at ~500. I'm aiming to work through them throughout this week by upping my daily review count. I don't feel like I'm at the point where I can drop Anki in favour of just acquiring vocabulary through immersion. Anki still results in a lot of gains for me, so I'll just have to work through these cards.
That's it for this month!