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]”.)
- Gain an in-depth understanding of the phonetic system
- 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
it’s funny you mention the perfectionist path because mattvsjapan doesn’t espouse that anymore! so you should get on the balanced path which is the only path on the site. perfectionist path is not on the site.
LOOKS like the link is still alive but he discontinued it just so you know
That’s fine, I’m not interesting in reading Korean stuff yet, just watching Korean dramas and closely listening for words I understand for now
you should really check out his video on it. it’s undre announcemnts in his discord
so you’re doing korean first? i actually started mandarin recently haha. doing subs2srs and learning about grammar sporadically
I watched it the day it came out. The old perfectionist path is still well thought-out. Plus Matt said in the same video that he might be adding a “theoretical” section to the MIA website for his more experimental ideas – his idea of “listen only to your 1 chosen native speaker for an entire year” is probably going to appear there in the future.
Nice, you’re going full circle (triangle? – Mandarin Chinese + Japanese + Korean) now lol.
well i’m just dabbling in mandarin since I don’t have time to dedicate to mandarin (I just have a lot of tv shows I want to watch in japanese korean). i already know japanese, and it’s easy to get good at korean if you already know Japanese (and vice versa). mandarin is really different from koeran and japanaese… so you are doing korean first???
yes, korean first. mandarin and english have kinda the same grammar, so you have a bridge already just like the one you’ve built with japanese and korean.
Uh mandarin is not that similar to English.. if anything g korean or Japanese is more helpful than English
Knowing Japanese is helpful korean, knowing French is helpful to French…etc
Now that you mention it, that is more helpful.
so what drama are you watching??? i don’t watch korean dramas at all lol. they’re all annoying to me since i don’t want to listen to people argue/complain/whine when i am forced to hear that in real life.
School 2017 and My First First Love, since I like the lead actresses (gugudan Sejeong and DIA Chaeyeon). I really like watching romantic comedies (unironically) 🙂
are you still learning korean? any progress??
question do you even like korean dramas??? do you have favorite dramas? or are you just assuming you’ll like it? as you can imagine, there’s a lot of reading/listening activities for korean that do not involve dramas.
Yes, I liked Answer Me 1997, City Hunter, and Modern Farmer when I watched them 6 years ago. I’ve just had a very short attention span during that entire time so those are the only shows I got to finish.
Here is this link if I never shared it with you http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/printer_friendly_posts.asp?TID=24775
It’s pretty amusing to read. Like I said before, instead of watching stuff without subs for however many hours, you’re probably better off learning about phonetics and mouth/jaw/tongue positioning etc if you’re that concerned about perfect pronunciation. I totally felt that way after watching dogen’s video series on Japanese phonetics which talks about pitch accent as well as common pit falls that English speakers fall into when it comes to not pronouncing Japanese perfectly
hey are you literate in hangeul yet? imade a listening comprehnesion post
are you still learning korean???
are you still going at it??
He deleted the perfectionist path because he thought it was too much theory, and confused newbies into doing perfectionist when they should be doing balanced.
HEY HEY. what’s up?
Hey choronghi. Thanks for checking in. I’m sorry for the very late reply. I’ve currently been doing one lesson from howtostudykorean.com and one hour of a TV show on Netflix with native Korean subtitles per day since May 18, 2020. I’m using the Stage 1 and 2 guides on MIA, and stopped using the perfectionist path after Matt and Yoga discontinued it.
I don’t know much about Mia. Are you making anki cards??? For korean I’ve been trying to catch up on high school rapper, show me the money and other competition shows.
I make Anki cards from sentences from the How to Study Korean lessons. I’m watching the Korean dramas in Netflix’s romance genre section.
I recommend changing the anki settings if you use anki
I use Matt’s recommended Anki settings in this page: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/stage-1/jp-quickstart-guide/#kana. Use Control+F or Command-F and search “here are our recommended option-group settings”
you should change the settings. he’s recommending that for learning kana. https://choronghi.wordpress.com/2020/02/03/anki-stats-and-settings-for-korean/
do you really like the steps 1 10??
do you ever watch netflix with english subs or consult them?? are you rewatching stuff u already saw with eng subs?????????? or do you just watch it while only understanding x percent?????????
I watch Korean shows on Netflix without any subs, English or Korean. It’s just pure active listening. I haven’t started sentence mining TV shows yet.
do you plan on updating your blog? i have plans for updating my blog . just not sure when ‘ill get around to it. i have more pressing things going in my life and my priorities are straight
Maybe I will, after 30 days or so of establishing a solid routine I always follow. I have a full-time job, so my time is limited by that.
do you use discord? there’s a korean mia discord channel with useful files/links being shared.
omg any update?
Hey Choronghi, I decided to discontinue the blog. I am currently focused on learning Korean, while keeping track of my progress using the spreadsheet in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gIu00WcbTI). I appreciate your interest, and thanks for checking in!
Did you join the retold discord
I’m in clowdy’s Refold Korean discord and the main one (Refold Central)
What’s your username ???