Even though the month April has just started at the moment of writing, I doubt a whole lot will change this month. Therefore, I’ll just include it in this part.

Lets start off with where I ended last time about getting the fun back in language learning instead of trying to over optimize it. I think the last few months I took a more ‘lighter’ approach and probably even got more out of it then when I tried to min/max it.

These days I think I still spend quite a lot of hours in a week with the language, but with a way less strict plan or process in place then before. I still like to track my hours, but there is plenty of things I do during the day (e.g. check instagram, a few shorts, read the text in there, etc) that I do not track, but do slowly add up in time over the week. I’ll explain a bit more later on what has changed on this ‘lighter’ approach.

The switch to the three lessons a week with my tutor seemed really beneficial to me, but I still felt that I was lacking. Which of course isn’t that strange as I have only been learning for about 6-7 months now. However, I decided to up my lessons from 3 to 5 a week and have been doing that for about 2 weeks now. Didn’t I say I say I was taking a ‘lighter’ approach? Well this doesn’t really seem like it does it? But I have noticed that outputting has been ‘easier’ but it is by no means easy. It’s just that it slowly starts to come more by itself without needing to fully thing about every part of the sentence itself. Besides that, I also talked about my bad habits before. I think most of my bad habits are gone now and do exactly what I described in my previous update. So far the feedback I receive from my tutor is positive that I start to slowly sound more natural.

I recently also started to try and see if I can hold some conversations on Hello Talk or Tandem. So far I haven’t really went all out on those yet. However, I have somebody I talk to on Tandem now and with whatever I say he seems to understand me and I only received minor corrections so far. Only one sentence I said wasn’t that clear for him and he rephrased for me with even giving multiple ways to say it + a regular expression. So I am interested to connect with more people!

I wouldn’t be surprised if some people might of thought I touched a textbook from the 50’s or got stuck in time when I tried to use (으)시요. I conjugated (으)시요 to (으)셔요 instead of the more common (으)세요 ending now days. Which to my knowledge isn’t wrong but just not widely used anymore. Oh well at least I learned from my mistake and hopefully they got a good laugh out of it

Now I won’t say much about this, but I have not touched any of the previously mentioned games in Korean in a while, or at all. I don’t know if there is a specific reason for it or that I just don’t feel like it for now.

Because I am less strict on myself now I just read, watch or listen to anything that I feel like at the moment. I think this approach has helped me also enjoy it more even if this means I might not hit the same numbers during the week as before. For example, before I tried to push for as much hours as I could get before going to bed, but now I also sometimes play games with my friends or do something else. Which compared to before means I hit less immersion hours on some days, but the hours I do immerse are more impactful I think.

Since I have taken the more relaxed approach, I have noticed that when I free-flow certain Youtube content it feels like I understand quite a bit. Now this is hard for me to explain, as it feels like I am not keeping up with the subtitles at all times. But after watching the video I do feel like I at least got the majority of what happened. So I am either imagining things, or subconsciously something is happening.

I have recently also started to listen to the TTMIK IYAGI podcasts again, and depending on the topic I do seem to get more of the story whereas before I only seemed to catch some words. So I also decided to just watch content now that don’t have subtitles and I find fun. Listening itself is already really difficult so having content where multiple people speak (and scream) at the same time, it takes me all my strength to catch anything at all.