Intro

This is my first post here but I am already a few months into my Korean journey. It started around the middle of July 2023 and was pretty spontaneous. I had always been interested in other languages and was fascinated by the idea of reaching fluency in another language. Having taken 3 years of Spanish in high school and growing up around many Hispanics (Southern California), Spanish was my first attempt at that, but I admittedly never became very good at it - enough skill to read a bit and have daily conversations even with strangers, but that's all. After I left my hometown, I stopped putting any time towards Spanish anyway. That was almost 6 years ago now.

Feeling a bit inspired to pursue this interest again, I had passively thought about learning Japanese or Korean for a few weeks. Japanese was on the table particularly because I have many friends who either speak or are learning Japanese, though I mostly randomly decided to learn Korean after some late past-midnight coding session. After a few weeks of learning Korean, I decided to look into Japanese for real, but I stuck with Korean just because 한글 is obviously easier than learning thousands of Kanji, and that by anecdotal claims, Korean culture is much more "compatible" with American culture than Japanese culture is with American culture. In the end, though, I found that studying the Han characters is not so bad, and in fact have studied a few hundred 漢字 to make learning Sino-Korean words very easy. And on top of that, all my Japanese-speaking friends speak English anyway too, so it's not like there was much real utility I would get out of that.

In the beginning I used Duolingo because I had used it in the past for Spanish to some "success"¹, but with Korean I quickly realized it was actually pretty useless. After fumbling around with books and online videos for a few weeks, a friend of mine introduced me to Antimoon/AJATT, which he used to become fluent² in Japanese in two years.

Anki

My Anki journey started on 2023-08-31, and now I am sitting at a streak of 122 days. I started off with the popular Evita decks: Grammar and Vocabulary. Though Evita's grammar deck is great, I don't want to rely on premade decks forever. Since I started from almost nothing, I'm using it as a stepping stone for "curated" comprehensible cards. Eventually, I got to a point where I can consistently mine sentences from TV shows and other native content, and make my own cards from that. Currently studying 25 new cards per day, the split is 15 Evita grammar cards and 10 of my own cards (I started off with 14 total, 7/7 from Grammar/Vocab, and slowly decided to increase this).

I also decided sometime early December that studying vocabulary in isolation is mad cringe and dropped Evita's vocabulary deck, so I'm just using the grammar deck to get exposure to the many grammar constructs in Korean.

At my current rate I should be done with Evita's grammar deck by mid-March 2024, at which point I will be solely sourcing sentences on my own by finding i+1 input.