Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Koreans at UNSW - gotta love what they get up to :)


KSA@UNSW LIPDUB "Simple Plan - Jet Lag" from UNSW.KSA on Vimeo.

I thought this was a pretty neat video that the Korean Student Association has made to promote Korean culture at UNSW and abroad (abroad as in: living in Australia as to Korea).
Loving all the fun and effort they put into making this video.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Naver's Korean Dictionary - Pronunciation of Korean words

You know how online dictionaries often have a button to the right side of the word for listening to pronunciation of the word you'd just  looked up? Eg just search up any definition of a word on dictionary.com Well, Naver's Korean dictionary 국어사전 (NOT Naver's Korean-English dictionary 영어사전 that i've previously mentioned on my blog) seems to be introducing that in their Korean online dictionary.

 'Listening to pronunciation' 바름 듣기 seems to be new to Korean online dictionaries? Correct me, if i'm wrong. I can only seem to find pronunciation function on Naver's online dictionary, and even so, it's not available for all the words that you might want to look up. At least, at present.

Anyways, either way this feature might be useful to us language learners who aren't sure of how to pronounce random words.

Click HERE for the link to Naver's Korean online dictionary.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

My latest learning Korean method - Utilising online dictionary

Hello everyone, or no one...? it's been a while.
Either way, i'm going to blog about my latest learning method. I'm going to keep this blog documenting my  learning experience as much as i can (..will myself out of my own laziness). Hopefully, one day i look back and have a recollection of how i learnt, to get to where i am.
One thing about self learning is having the complete freedom to adjust, or adapt our methods of learning to our learning needs. If we're clever, we manage to customise our learning to it's best fit.
No one uses one mode of studying all the way to the end these days. Especially, with language learning. That really would be mindless studying


So moving on from the bookworm language exchange partner also calls for a different mode of studying.
Lately, instead of just translating words so i get a definition of what i don't understand, I've incorporated writing out sample sentences that is provided from online dictionary.
[Physical copy of dictionary from Korea, that are made for Koreans learning English also have heaps of sample sentences!]

Advantages of using online dictionaries:

  • Get an idea on how a Korean word is used in a sentence
    • This deals with untranslatable word problem in language learning - the sample sentences reduces the focus on how it make sense in our own language and forces us to infer how it is used in Korean.
    • Allow us to see how the words are commonly used - i assume the sentences given are one that are somewhat commonly used... who puts uncommon sentences in their native language dictionary for examples? 
    • Make sure that the word is even in use in the way i intend to use it - no matter how we try we will always think of words in our native language when learning and so forming our sentences can be a little messed up~ this is a nice reassurance that i've got it right