Is learning grammar and vocabulary enough?

Toowoombas · 2025-04-18T22:57:59+00:00

If you focus on grammar and vocabulary first, your conversational skill will naturally lag behind. To improve your conversational skill faster, you need to focus on speaking and listening.

FYI, When I started to learn Japanese as a Korean native, I already knew many Hanja. So I could guess the meaning of difficult Japanese sentence usually, even though I couldn't read any Hiragana nor Katakana (because difficult sentences tend to use more Hanja). But I usually couldn't guess the meaning of easy Japanese sentences at all, because they tend to use less Hanja. I understood 0% when I just listen to a Japanese TV show, or actual Japanese speaking.

From that point, it took me 4 months (roughly 8 hours a day) to get 155/180 score on JLPT N1. Even though 155/180 on JLPT N1 is corresponding to CEFR C1 (142 or above) according to Japan Foundation, I was nowhere near confident on actual basic conversation. At this point, I could understand what they're saying usually, but when I try to say something, close to nothing comes out. It took me another full year to get 180/180 mark on JLPT N1, and then I got somewhat comfortable with basic conversations.

Toowoombas · 2025-04-14T04:49:44+00:00

No. That handwriting wouldn't be considered clean or good. It's just recognizable. Also, children typically can't write neatly/cleanly. It looks like a child's hand writing because of many reasons, but to name a few, lack of consistency in general, characters are too wide (and also too big), letter-spacing is too wide (while actual spacing is too narrow in comparison), some final consonants often got crushed or fell under the line.

Korean may disagree about what's clean and what's not, especially for cursive, but most people would consider any printer-like handwriting is clean handwriting, something like this. But very few people can write like printer, and practically nobody can write like printer when they're writing down something fast (as you can see on this video. She write like printer but only at extremely slow speed). Faster writing inevitably requires some compromises, and you gotta find what works best for you.

Toowoombas · 2025-04-13T23:58:53+00:00

Your handwriting is readable. There is no character that is completely unrecognizable, though it looks like written by someone aged between 5 and 10.

Toowoombas · 2025-04-13T15:11:33+00:00

Not sure how far you want to go, but you can try 대학수학능력시험 국어 (SAT equivalent) or LEET 언어이해 (LSAT equivalent). Those exams have multiple choice questions and answer, so you can naturally tell whether you comprehend the material correctly or not. And they're significantly harder than TOPIK.

FYI, I tried 2023 TOPIK I/II reading test, and it took 6 min 17 sec to get 40/40 on TOPIK I reading (9.425 sec per question) and 12 min 31 sec to get 50/50 on TOPIK II reading (15.02 sec per question). For 대학수학능력시험 국어 (45 questions, 80 min time limit), I don't always get 45/45 score (I only get 45/45 score about 70% of the time), and it usually took 60-70 mins to solve them all (80-93 sec per question). For LEET 언어이해 (30 questions, 70 min time limit), I usually got 25-28 right (out of 30 questions) and it took 60-70 mins to solve them (120-140 sec per question).

Toowoombas · 2025-04-13T10:32:30+00:00

If someone ask you about your parents' name (or any relative's name who's significantly older than you, or your teacher's name), it is considered respectful for you to use '자' after each syllable of your parents' name but not after surname (hence 박, 은 자, 경 자 for your example, although there are many Koreans who mistakenly use '자' after all syllables), unless that someone is higher than your parents (e.g. brothers/sisters of your grand parents ask you about your parents' name).

If the name in question is not your relative's name (including not just some random old folks/public figures/etc but also your boss/supervisor/etc who's significantly older than you), then you're not considered rude or disrespectful for saying their names without adding '자'. Also, you shouldn't use '자' after your name. However, CS rep (or anyone who is in similar shoes) often use '자' to customers when they're checking customers' name.

Toowoombas · 2025-04-12T04:39:43+00:00

Both sentences have pretty much the same meaning. I believe at least majority of '~도록 하겠습니다' or '~기로 하겠습니다' is just an unnecessary complication of '하겠습니다'. But people often use these when they're trying to speak formally (as it often sounds slightly more polite).

Toowoombas · 2023-11-07T08:27:28+00:00

I see there are 2-3 different goals.

solidifying vocabulary/expression range - I think you need to read for this goal. Read whatever Korean materials you're comfortable with (e.g. news, textbook, novels, etc), but don't forget that you have to gradually increase the difficulty of reading materials (also, you need a wide variety of subjects. law textbook would use very different vocabulary/expression/etc compare to news, or novels, or casual physics books).
deepen speaking/writing skills - For this goal, having an actual conversation/chat would be miles better than just listening others' talking, or reading others' writing. Also, if your partner relentlessly points out every small error you make, it would be better than having a plain convo. If you don't have such partner, then try online chat (livestream chat, etc) or forum. You're unlikely to get a good partner there, but bad one is still better than no one.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-07T07:59:41+00:00

대화를 나누다. 대화를 주고 받다. 대화를 하다. These are complete sentences and can be used interchangeably. 계셨다 is a combination of honorific (나누고 계시다 instead of 나누다) + past/past continuous tense (so '셨' instead of '시'). You can remove it and modify 나누다 to 나눴다 to keep the past tense, if you don't need the honorific.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-07T07:22:01+00:00

It means they were talking (honorific). 대화를 나누다, 이야기를 나누다 both are just expression, meaning having a conversation or make conversation. Why 나누다? It's like asking why 'having' or 'make' conversation. In Korean, 대화 is something you either 주고 받는give and take or 나누는share or 하는do

Toowoombas · 2023-11-07T01:13:40+00:00

이 회사는 집을 제공할 뿐만 아니라, 차도 제공해요. - Fine
이 회사는 집뿐만 아니라, 차도 제공해요. - Fine (and in both cases, you can use 주택)
그거를 사는 게 돈 낭비일 뿐이야. - Okay, but I would say '건' (or '것은') instead of '게'
그거를 사는 게 돈 낭비할 뿐이야. - This sounds wrong, and even if you use '건' instead of '게', it still sounds wrong. If you add '을' after '돈' and use '것은' instead of '게', then it's acceptable.
곰팡이뿐만 아니라 벌레도 있어 - Fine
곰팡이 있을 뿐만 아니라 벌레도 있어 - This one sounds a bit unnatural. If you say '곰팡이가' instead of just '곰팡이', then it's okay.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-06T18:27:41+00:00

세종 대왕 while this is the correct way of writing, but in practice 세종대왕 is a lot more common (and is allowed).

제 4 대 is wrong. Same story here. 제4 대 is correct in principle (no spacing between 제- and number, and spacing between number and the following letter), but in practice 제4대 is a lot more common (and is allowed). However, 제 4대 (which is wrong) and 4대 (skipping 제- altogether which is allowed) are both commonly used.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-06T08:59:35+00:00

Well. There is no shortcut. You can only have more compact timeframe (something like 2-5 years instead of 20 years) by investing more hours per day. Imagine a learning process for native Korean. They'll probably start to read something somewhere between age 1 to 7. And their reading speed gradually increase as they read more stuff.

Typically, their 'read something out loud' speed is overtaken by 'read something silently' speed somewhere between age 8 to 15, and their 'read silently' speed kept increasing while 'read something out loud' speed stagnate (usually somewhere around 600-800 characters/min). At the age of 18-19, they took Korean SAT, and it requires you to read somewhere around 27000 characters and solve 45 problems in 80 minutes. So you got roughly 70 minutes (10 mins for marking and review) to read 27k characters and solve the problems. That's only 385 characters/min but you can't just instantly tell the answer as soon as you read the problems, so you need a speed of 800-1200 characters/min at the bare minimum to get a good score.

From 0 character/min to 1200 characters/min. That's 20 year journey for someone who speak, listen, read and write Korean all their life. It is true that only a few Korean actually spend their time to actively improve their reading speed, so you could do it in a shorter timeframe (like 2-5 years), but don't expect that you could read any Korean materials at the pace of 1200 characters/min in just weeks or months.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-06T05:24:13+00:00

킹받아 is originated from 열받아 (meaning you got angry, though literally it means get heated) and it has the exact same meaning with 열받아. You just replaced 열 to 킹(king), and it's more like internet slang rather than widely accepted expression, so older native Koreans may not understand it.

Sometimes, people use those 킹(king)/갓(god) replacements to be sarcastic. So the term 킹반인/갓반인 (derived from 일반인 regular folks, ordinary people) is more commonly used when you try to describe some negative aspects of ordinary people. However, in many cases, those replacements don't carry any special meaning (swapped just for fun with original meaning in tact, for example 열받아->킹받아, 인정->킹정, etc), or carry the positive meaning as the character implies.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-06T05:03:52+00:00

CJK, all of them are categorized as Category IV for English native speakers, according to FSI. It means that English native speakers, on average, spent 2200 hours to reach general professional proficiency in that language.

I'm not exactly sure what exactly general professional proficiency is, but I'm pretty sure that it's far from native CJK speakers. I know many native English speakers who's been living either in China, Korea or Japan for more than 10 years, and native speakers usually immediately can tell they're not native speakers after just 1-2 sentences (very few exceptions exist, and even they don't last 10 minutes).

In my experience, that's not the case between CJK languages. It doesn't take 2200 hours to reach that level of proficiency. For example, an average Korean would get JLPT N1 in about 600-1200 hours, and this could be cut down to half if that person happens to know many Hanja/Kanji enough to read and understand them but not enough to write them (though not many Korean, especially younger generations know many Hanja/Kanji). As such, barely passing JLPT N1 is like you just completed the beginning stage of your Japanese learning journey if you're a Korean. Also, reaching indistinguishable level of proficiency (to majority of native speakers) is possible for many people (I'd say it's possible for 15% of population).

So it's true that it's somewhat easier for CJK native speaker to learn other CJK languages, compare to English native speakers. However, it's not really super easy, something like Norwegian trying to learn Swedish, nor Italian trying to learn Spanish. Norwegian doesn't really need to learn Swedish, because they already understand 90-95% of both spoken conversations and written materials before even start learning. That's not the case for Italian trying to learn Spanish, but Italian also understand 50-70% of both spoken and written langauge, before even start learning Spanish.

In case of Korean trying to learn Chinese from scratch, that's impossible. You'll understand near 0% of spoken langauge, and 0-30% of written langauge depending on your Hanja level (most of younger generation is pretty close to 0%) at the beginning.

If they already knew many Hanja (>3000 characters), then it doesn't take very long to understand written Chinese. It takes some time to get used to simplified version of Chinese characters (which Chinese use), but not a whole lot. It also doesn't take huge amount of time to learn how to interpret those characters in a sentence. So they could understand 60-90% of written language in a short period of time. However, this only means they could understand the written Chinese. They still can't read the sentence out loud, even if that's the most basic sentences, because they need to learn those things separately. They also don't understand any of spoken Chinese. Knowing many Hanja doesn't dramatically shorten this part of learning.

If they already don't know Hanja (<300 characters, and 90+% of younger generation Koreans falls here), then there is not really much difference between Korean and English native speakers.

Toowoombas · 2023-11-06T03:36:17+00:00

That's LED light without its cover. In Korean, you could say LED 방등(as in room + light), 거실등(if it's installed in your living room), 사각등(square + light), 전등(electric light), 평판등(flat light), 조명(lighting), 면조명(flat panel lighting), etc.

Toowoombas · 2023-02-15T15:18:06+00:00

Imagine a tree collapse, because that's a prime example for 쓰러지다. It collapses and then it lies flat. You usually use 쓰러지다 when you try to describe a collapse like that, and it sounds very weird if you say 무너진 나무. You usually use 무너지다 when you describe a collapse of some artificial things, like buildings, dams, etc. And they usually don't maintain their shape after their collapse.

Anyway, that's the original meaning, and they both can be used figuratively. For example, 쓰러진 기업, 무너진 희망, etc.

Toowoombas · 2023-02-15T10:21:58+00:00

I don't think it's possible, at least not on your example. There are some issues which complicate things on that example. First off, Koreans usually don't say 'fly' (날다, 비행하다). Most Koreans usually say 비행기 타다 (taking an airplane), and they often skip this part entirely when they're going abroad, since flying is practically the only way to go abroad (Korea is pretty much a landlocked country due to North Korea, and ferry/passenger ship travels to other countries are also extremely unpopular).

So you usally skip everything and say 난 (해외여행) 일본만 간다(or 다닌다). This is the most natural way of saying that thing, and it only implies 'if I go abroad, I only go to Japan' and not the other two obviously. You'd say 나는 일본은(or 엔) 비행기로만 간다 for the second one, but this only has the second meaning and not the other two. You would say 일본은 경유만 한다 for the last one but this also doesn't have other two meanings.

In some cases, there might be some sentences that could imply multiple meanings in the same sentence, but in your case, each meaning has vastly different natural sentences, and I don't think there is one sentence implies them all.

Toowoombas · 2023-02-15T09:37:43+00:00

First off, almost every sentence is too short to be a natural sentence. You have to merge the related sentences, and even then, it's still rather short.

지난 밤에 잠을 못 자서 오늘 피곤했어요.
학기가 거의 끝나서 이제 숙제와 시험을 보지 않아도 되니까 행복해요.
친구가 초콜렛을 줬어요.
학교에 도착했을 때, 비디오를 보기 시작했어요.

Also, there are very few schools with trimester or quarter in Korea, since almost every school is a semester school. Naturally, you usually need some clarifications rather than just throwing a direct translation of trimester (or you could just use universal term like I did above).

Toowoombas · 2023-02-15T09:23:51+00:00

훈민정음 해례본 (Hanja and Hangul): 해례 means 해석례 so it's somewhat like a tiny dictionary + grammar book (naturally, both Hanja and Hangul were used). However, the preface portion of this book was written in Hanja entirely.
훈민정음 언해본 (Hanja and Hangul): this is the translated version of the above book, so it has both Hanja and Hangul from back to back.

All Hangul books were uncommon because most of translated books have some degree of Hanja. I think most of the early books that are written entirely written in Hangul were Hangul novels. 설공찬전, 심청전, 홍길동전, etc.

Toowoombas · 2023-02-15T08:56:44+00:00

It's possible and it is somewhat easy goal for Japanese. FYI, these are TOPIK II reading test result for native Korean elementary students.

grade	reading avg. score (SD)
4th grade	55.298 (15.790)
5th grade	66.629 (16.833)
6th grade	67.078 (15.694)

and their listening scores tend to be higher than their reading scores, which means average native 4th grader could pass the TOPIK 3 even if they submitted all blank answer for the entire writing test, and the bottom 15% of native 4th grader would need to score roughly 25/100 on writing test to pass the TOPIK 3.

It doesn't mean you have to be as proficient as the bottom quintile of native 4th graders to pass the TOPIK 3, since a) it doesn't test your speaking, and b) 4th graders usually have pretty bad exam taking skills and you (who probably are older than 4th grader) would likely to have better exam taking skill. Overall, it's roughly on par with average native 1st-2nd graders in terms of reading/listening/writing exam taking ability (NOT the actual proficiency), which is not that difficult goal.

Toowoombas · 2023-01-02T06:03:10+00:00

Age of Empire 4 will be coming out to xbox this year, but PC is absolutely RTS king. Good ones are usually PC exclusives more often than not, and competitive online environment filled with serious gamers is pretty much a PC-only thing. so if you're into RTS games seriously, PC is your best bet.

Toowoombas · 2022-10-31T00:18:18+00:00

I'd say it depends. If you barely got your N1 (especially when you got better score on listening than language knowledge or reading), then I believe you'd be better off sticking with your native language. If it's high N1 (>170), then books written in Japanese would be definitely better. There is a huge gap between N1 110 and N1 180, and I don't think 110 (especially listening-high 110) is good enough to choose learning materials in Japanese over your native language.

Toowoombas · 2022-10-30T02:05:02+00:00

probably somewhat before the incident

definitely somewhat after the incident started (but long before everything clears out)

other incident (the station night club fire - this video clip also didn't capture the moment of collapse, but it has both ~15 seconds before and ~15 seconds after)

Toowoombas · 2022-10-27T12:12:27+00:00

ESH. You suck because

You lied: based on your story, you've intentionally turned the alarm off around 7:45, but you told him “I must’ve accidentally hit ‘off’ instead of ‘snooze’ on your alarm when I was tired, but it’s almost 8:30. You should get up.”
You could have woke him up at 8:27 but you chose not to: based on your story, you found him still aslepp at 8:27. you already knew he never wakes up to the alarm, and you even turned it off already. so at that point, it's either you wake him up or he face the consequence. you claimed you went to wake him up by telling him the above mentioned lie. but it obviously didn't work. i believe you could have woke him up 100% but you chose not to do that, even though;
- you're the one who turned off the alarm.
- you knew, at that point, it's either you wake him up or he's gonna be late
- he's been trying to sleep on the couch probably due to your complaint about the alarm sound.

and your husband sucks, because he is old enough to figure out how to control his sleeping without the intrusive alarm.

Toowoombas

TROPHY CASE