moronmode's Korean journey

Learnings from my mistakes, or other general advice.

1. Prioritize immersion and remember Anki is only a tool: Anki is motivating and feels good, but it is almost worthless without a solid amount of immersion. In fact Anki/SRS is just a supplement to immersion. You can speedrun 30, 40 cards per day but without immersion you will not get very far. Do not forget to immerse with native content daily.
2. Immerse actively without TL subtitles: Immersing without any subtitles is important for listening practice, even if it means you can't understand almost anything at all. (shamelessly ripped: No one says, "I'm going to stop using training wheels once I can ride without them". You first take them off.)
3. Don't study vocabulary (alone): Isolated vocab cards are cringe and a waste of time. Only study words in-context with sentence cards. If you feel like you aren't learning words from putting sentences in SRS, you aren't immersing enough.
4. Avoid premade decks: Premade decks are OK for absolute beginners to learn some grammar, but do not rely on them. The best deck is the one you make yourself. Once you can find i+1 sentences reliably, make your own deck.
5. Get a good dictionary: Make sure to get a comprehensive dictionary from the get-go. For Korean, Naver is popular but IMO it kinda blows compared to the dictionaries on korean.go.kr: 한국어기초사전 for more common words and simpler monolingual definitions, 표준국어대사전 for a wider range of words and typically more comprehensive monolingual definitions, and 우리말샘 for slang, regional dialects, nonstandard spellings, etc. 한국어기초사전 in particular contains a more complete list of definitions for words than Naver, has example sentences organized per definition, and is available online and offline in an XML format. If you know what you're doing, you can also use this to convert the XML to a GoldenDict-friendly format (xdxf).