Starting from November I really got my habits down and started to immerse more and more in different content. I will not lie that at the start finding content you are interested is easy. There is a lot of content out there, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everything is enjoyable.

Looking at my Anki stats (don’t compare them to yours, never compare yourself to others) I should slowly start to understand more and more of children shows. When I say understand, I just mean get the gist of the story, or maybe a few sentences.

So now you may wonder… this sounds fun and all, but what did you REALLY do with your immersion. I’ll try to keep it short looks back to what I wrote before, well that didn’t really work out well did it.

My plans for this month is making Pororo the little Penguin (please keep in mind that they speak quite a lot in 반말!) a daily habit of actively watching at least one episode. The episodes are fairly short -/+ 20-25 minutes, but with actively watching they can reach around 40 minutes. Does this mean I can watch Pororo and understand everything? No it does not, it means that I can get quite a few words/grammar in a sentence and pause on a 1T sentence to take a look. When I pause a 1T sentence, I try to get the meaning of the sentence, if I do not understand it completely I will either look up the word or the grammar I do not know. Looking words I either do through Migaku while watching and/or use Naver Dicationary. For the grammar I just google or make use of the physical copy of Korean Grammar In Use (KGIU) I have.

<aside> 💡 1T means that you know (or in my case for now have seen) all words except 1 in that sentence.

</aside>

The hardest part probably is spotting the different types of conjugations of verbs most of the time. Individual words with their respective particles are ‘easier’ to spot than the conjugated verbs. Personally I think this is because there are a lot of conjugations so when you miss a handful of them, this is just inevitable. But, this should fix itself with the more you learn.

Now I did notice that I started to see more words, or at least different words then before that came up in my Anki. This might be a mix of frequency illusion or the episode aligning with the words I am currently learning.

Now here it gets exciting (or I say so myself)! I decided to make use of tutors on iTalki early on, which is not something described in Refold perse. Also because Refold tries to keep output to a minimum at the start, more on that later.

Before going on to talk about what I do during my lessons, lets talk a little bit about how to find the right tutor. At the start I did 3 trial lessons, and followed through with all 3 of them to see what fits best for me. The teaching styles they have are all very different, so lets call them tutor 1, 2 and 3 for now

Tutor 1: Structured approach on how to bring new grammar to the lesson, but pretty free format. It feels more like a friend teaching you then a real teacher as we are just having fun!