Hello everyone! I hope you are having a beautiful day ahead, and that you are having fun studying your target language(s).
Today is the third update of my 90-Day Journey trying to get better at my speaking skills in Korean, and I wanted to share with you three aha moments I had this past week:
First of all, as you remember, I was going to start the 30 day watching Youtube videos challenge (you can also do it using the Language Challenges Bundle). So I created a playlist on Youtube with 31 videos that I wanted to watch in Korean. They all have subtitles so yes, I have been watching them with subtitles. But what I am doing different from other times, is that I am trying to put more attention into what people say in the videos. Sometimes I try to understand what they say and then I check on the subtitles to know if I got the correct meaning of the sentence.
Some phrases are getting easier for me to understand, while others still are hard and I totally don’t get them, but something is changing little by little. After watching Youtube videos for almost six days (I forgot to watch one day), now I am getting more used to the Korean language in terms of listening. I feel like I can identify words in sentences in an easier way than before, so that gave me a motivation boost!
As you remember from my previous post, in order to be able to speak, you need to listen to a lot of output, so I also realized my speaking skills are getting more polished as my intonation is improving and I am getting more used to speak out loud in my daily life.
The second aha moment I had was in relation to reading songs out loud. I always read the songs in a flat way, but now I understand that we need to read the lyrics using a ‘conversational’ intonation. Instead of a flat boaring tone, we have to play with the language and have fun while we find the tone of voice and intonation that we would like to use when speaking out target language.
Finally, I was reflecting about language learning in general and I remembered about my own experience learning English. I realized that as we advance in our journey learning a specific language, we start learning more things in less time. So at first yes, it is hard to move from A0 to A2 level, but then getting to B1 level gets a little easier, and then we don’t even realize it when we get to B2…
This happens because at some point in our language journey we already have a nice and solid base of knowledge in our target language, so we only need to polish our fluency, vocabulary and construction of sentences.
This does not mean that it’s not hard anymore and that we won’t struggle again, but that we already have the necessary knowledge to move to the next level in a kind of easier way.
Even if you are stuck in B2 level and you want to reach C1, you can move faster than when you were just starting to learn the language, so always remember to use what you already know to push you forward!
If you want more details of my third update you can listen to the audio below! You can use it as a podcast episode to inspire you in your own language learning journey.
Have a beautiful week ahead, and see you in the next update!
Sofía xx
