The Plan for MIA Korean

Going to use the Perfectionist Path 1.0 that Matt (Matt Vs Japan) and Lucas (Yoga MIA) have now-retired – like Apple has retired the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, which will not be receiving the upcoming iOS 13 upgrade.

Korean Start Date: August 31, 2019

Stage 1 – Getting Started

• Read all Stage 1 articles, and the Theory sections of Stages 2, 3 and 4
  • The articles aren’t all up yet, so I’ll not do this step for now.
• Re-read Stage 1 articles at the pace of one article a day, and after finishing, read Stage 2 articles at the same pace (ongoing)
  • The articles aren’t all up yet, so I’ll not do this step for now.
• Create an immersion environment and begin immersing with audio (ongoing)
  • Got lots of dramas with native subtitles queued up from Netflix and other places on the Internet, to complete this step. I’ll watch without subtitles – the subs are only there to make subs2srs decks with, like BritVsJapan does.
• Obtain an SRS and learn how to use its basic features
  • I use the desktop version of Anki, together with the MIA Low Key Anki setup.
• Gain an in-depth understanding of the phonetic system, and do training to become able to accurately perceive all the language’s sounds.
  • Gain an in-depth understanding of the phonetic system
    • I’m using the “Perfect Your Korean Pronunciation” course by MotivateKorean.
    • A free option would be the Korean pronunciation series by Fluent Forever, under the section “Essential Videos To Start Learning”.
  • Do training to become able to accurately perceive all the language’s sounds
    • I’m using the Korean Pronunciation Trainer by Fluent Forever, available here (select “English -> Korean” under “Choose your trainer”).
    • A free option would be to go through the Consonants and Vowels sections of the Korean phonology page on Wikipedia, look for audio of the example words for each of the sounds on Forvo, and then train your ears to distinguish each sound. (Got this idea after watching Idahosa Ness from Mimic Method’s YouTube video titled “How to Learn a Sound that Doesn’t Exist in Your First Language [Quick Tutorial]”.)
• Learn the writing system (Japanese: Hiragana and Katakana. Chinese: Pinyin and/or Zhuyin – also known as Bopomofo. Korean: Hangul)
  • The Korean Pronunciation Trainer by Fluent Forever also teaches you Hangul, the Korean writing system.
  • A free option would be the “Learn How to Read Hangul” series by How to Study Korean.
• Learn and SRS (audio-based bilingual sentence cards) basic grammar and vocab (1K cards)
  • I got PDF’s of thousands of example sentences with native speaker audio in the form of Audio Packages from How to Study Korean. I put them together into an Anki deck that amounted to 3,692 sentences in total, covering Lessons 1 to 75. I’ll count them all as 1,000 sentences, so the remaining 9,500+ sentences can be sourced from native material.
  • A free option would be to use the “Korean Grammar Sentences by Evita” deck on Ankiweb.
• Through sentence mining, make ~2.5K audio-based bilingual sentence cards
  • I’ll complete this step by running Morphman for Anki 2.1 (using the “Languages with Spaces” option for Korean) on subs2srs decks that I’ll make after watching dramas in full. I’m using the recommended MIA settings provided here.
• (Optional) Continue to learn grammar and vocab from a pre-made deck alongside sentence mining. This can count towards the ~2.5K bilingual sentence cards.
  • I’ll do this step just like the one above.

Stage 2 – Incubation

• Re-read Stage 2 articles at the pace of one article a day, and after finishing, read Stage 3 articles at the same pace (ongoing)
  • The articles aren’t all up yet, so I’ll not do this step for now.
• Continue to immerse with audio (ongoing)
  • Going to keep getting lots of dramas with native subtitles from Netflix and other places on the Internet, to complete this step. I’ll continue to watch without subtitles – the subs are only there to make subs2srs decks with, like BritVsJapan does.
• (Japanese only) Learn pitch accent theory
• Through sentence mining, make an additional ~2K audio-based bilingual sentence cards.
  • I’ll complete this step by running Morphman for Anki 2.1 (using the “Languages with Spaces” option for Korean) on subs2srs decks that I’ll make after watching dramas in full. I’m using the recommended MIA settings provided here.

Stage 3 – Survival Level

• Re-read Stage 3 articles at the pace of one article a day, and after finishing, read Stage 4 articles at the same pace (ongoing)
  • The articles aren’t all up yet, so I’ll not do this step for now.
• Begin to immerse with written materials in addition to audio (ongoing)
  • Will start reading and consider looking at books from Kyobobook at this point.
• Through sentence mining, make ~2K bilingual sentence cards, switching from audio-based to text-based cards (ongoing)
  • Will start mining from reading
• Adopt a parent, and start shadowing (ongoing)
  • Will consider emulating the speaking style of one of the native speakers I’ve seen from the media I’ve watched at this point
• (Japanese/Chinese/Korean) Go through Production RTK 1+3 / RTH 1+2
  • Firstly, go through RTH 1+2 rather than RTK 1+3, because Korean uses more Chinese characters (Hanja) from the former rather than the latter and never simplified the characters they used.
  • Afterwards, go through the “Basic Hanja for Educational Use” list of 1,800 characters on Wiktionary.
  • They’ll be listed in the format “[1] 家 ([2] 집 [3] 가)”, where [1] character [2] meaning [3] reading.
  • 家 is the character (hanja) for house, 집 means house in native Korean, and the hanja is read as 가 because that’s the Sino-Korean reading. An analogy with Japanese is ”[1] 家（[2] いえ [3] か）”. Note that the meaning won’t always necessarily be in native Korean – sometimes a Sino-Korean word will be used instead.
  • Add the Sino-Korean readings and Korean meanings to each of your Hanja cards. If you already understand the Korean meanings, you can use them to replace the English keywords.
  • Pay attention to the 5 characters that Korean writes differently compared to Traditional Chinese and Japanese, listed in the footnotes of the same page on Wiktionary.

Stage 4 – Functional

• Re-read Stage 4 articles at the pace of one article a day, and after finishing, read Stage 5 articles at the same pace (ongoing)
  • The articles aren’t all up yet, so I’ll not do this step for now.
• Continue to immerse with both audio and written materials (ongoing)
  • Will consider adjusting immersion media at this point
• Make the Monolingual Transition
  • Will use the online monolingual Korean dictionary by Naver. It gets definitions from multiple sources that are listed at the bottom of each entry.
• Begin to output (ongoing)
  • Will consider looking for people to have a conversation with in places like HelloTalk, iTalki, and Interpals at this point
• Through sentence mining, make ~3K monolingual text-based sentence cards. This should bring you to ~10K sentence cards total
  • Will continue mining from reading

Note: I won’t touch on Stage 5 for now.

Stage 5 – Fluent to Native Level

• Re-read Stage 5 articles at the pace of one article a day (ongoing)
• Continue to immerse (ongoing)
• Continue to make text-based monolingual sentence cards through sentence mining, but at a further reduced rate (ongoing)
• Begin to make clozed/production cards to learn specific cultural knowledge (ongoing)
• Continue to output, and get corrected (ongoing)
• Study the history of the culture your target language is associated with
• Study the grammar of your target language using resources meant for natives
• (Japanese only) Study Keigo
• (Japanese/Chinese only) Study classical Japanese/Chinese