So to kick things off for this month I watched a video of the Refold Q&A where questions from the community get answered by Matt.

One thing in particular stood out to me and this is about getting more comfortable with the language, or to create so called “mental-ease”. Which basically means you shouldn’t always be actively thinking about the language, dissecting every sentence, or translating it to fully understand what is happening. In the beginning this is probably inevitable, or so I think at least as you want to understand as much as you can. Like he said in the Q&A is that you have an option to choose from when your mind goes “I want to fully understand this”. You either choose to give into it and actively look stuff up or you decide to not give in and just continue watching.

Therefore, I have decided to try and change the way I immerse myself this month. I am going to try out and see if I can tolerate full free-flow immersion and if I will notice a difference compared to the month(s) before. Just to outline it you can place it into three kind of categories.

1. Watching a show like Pororo (I finished it already, need to find a new one) where I pause on a 1T sentence (1T meaning, you know everything except 1 word) and try to fully get the meaning, grammar usage, etc. of that sentence.
2. Watching a show where I will basically free-flow my way through it, but do the occasional lookup of words and grammar but not as intensively. So rather every X amount of minutes or when a certain part keeps coming back/peaks my interest
3. Completely free-flowing a show by not looking up anything and just really accepting it as it is. I hopefully still get some part of what I watch with the things I do know. At the start this might be quite difficult as I will probably still unintentionally translate parts.

Isn’t this what Refold tells you to do anyway? Probably, I follow the Refold guidelines where I can. I mainly do what feels right for me without holding myself to a strict staging schedule.

Besides that, I had some other plans to start introducing this month. As I want to improve my speech a bit (yes I am somebody that does early output in an controlled environment with my iTalki tutors) and my listening ability. So I was thinking of starting the following.

• Chorusing
• Listening to a mix of ‘Slow(er) Speech’ (e.g. IYAGI) and ‘Fast & Slurred Speech’ (e.g. Stray Kids blogs) + Listen to 1 IYAGI Podcast a day while reading the transcript at the same time. Maybe also put some audio on 0.75 speed to get my ears to pick it up better for now.
• Rewatch some shows like Pororo without subtitles as the comprehension with subtitles was alright.

To improve my listening, I asked my iTalki tutor as well on how to improve. He had a pretty unique approach in my opinion. Rather then to search for the ‘problems’ (meaning everything you don’t know) try to listen for the ‘solutions’ (meaning everything you do know). For example, when you hear a sentence like 느낌이 삭 오더라고요 try to listen for the parts you do know. Which in my case are 느낌이 and 오다 because I do not know the grammar conjugation used yet, which makes it harder to listen for as well. By doing that I can understand that there is something with a ‘feeling’ and ‘coming’. Now this obviously isn’t the magic solution to suddenly understand full phrases or anything, but it is an interesting approach where I will try to focus on for a bit.

Besides all of this he also said that the more vocabulary you know, the more sounds you start to pick up. As for now a lot is unknown and that’s also why it’s harder to pick up when listening. Which to be fair I probably knew, but never wanted to acknowledge as I feel like I should be better at it.