At the time of writing the month is already nearing it’s end and the new year has only just started. But a new year means new opportunities!

Since the start of this year I have made some changes in my language learning. The most notable one is going from 1 “Grammar” lesson a week with a specific tutor, to 3 “Free-talk” lessons a week. During these three lessons a week we start off with just some simple dialogues about the day itself, and after that we select a specific topic where we will talk about for the reminder of the lesson. For this specific topic a set of vocab (can be a lot of vocab I haven’t really ‘studied’ yet) is introduced by the tutor which I can use during the lesson. Besides he also adds new grammar every now and then to further develop my understanding of the grammar out there.

I have only been doing the increased amount of lessons for a total of ~3 weeks now. However, I do feel that it already has been beneficial to my language learning. The fear, anxiety or however you want to call it of outputting isn’t really there anymore. Of course this does not mean that I suddenly talk easily or make amazing sentences, but that is mainly because of a lack of vocab, grammar and a better understanding of how the language is used.

According to my tutor (and I agree) I do have some bad habits I need to get rid of. To give a couple examples;

• When I hear my tutor ask me a question I often do understand what he means but try to validate what I hear in English by basically translating his answer like “Did you ask me…?”.
• When I don’t know or can’t remember a certain word I want to use I will try to work around it in English. Basically me explaining in English what I want to say instead of just saying the word.

Now this is how we have decided to work on fixing these bad habits;

• Instead of me trying to seek confirmation I just answer the question based on what I think I have heard. In case I have not completely understood the question and my answer is pretty off he will tell me instead.
• For me not knowing the words I am looking for I will ask for the word I want to say in English. He gives me the word and I’ll reformulated my previously said answer when I got stuck.

Then for the last bad habit I have which hasn’t been discussed with my tutor, but I noticed myself. I have a tendency of using Papago to verify my sentences I write instead of just writing and if I make a mistake so be it, I’ll need to be corrected. I know I talked before about having no real fear or anxiety of outputting… but for writing it is a bit different as you can take your time and I want it to be perfect (silly perfectionist in me).

This has been quite a read just about me changing my lesson frequency and what I do in them. But, I am not done writing yet.

During this month I have noticed a slight change in the way I feel, and it’s not a burnout of the language as I still enjoy learning Korean. If I describe it myself I would say it’s that I forgot to have fun and try to (over) optimize the way I learn. Let me explain a bit in depth on what I mean by (over) optimizing the process.