Recently I've been digging my way through the scholarship application process for studying in Korea for the 2016 Spring semester (March - June) and the process has ended up being more stressful than I expected. I'm nearly at the end of the process and it will be a relief to put it behind me.
As I was going through the above process I thought about the difficulties I will inevitably be facing next year. Going by my current level of Korean I know just enough to be able to scrape past the minimum enrollment requirements for foreign students but I still wouldn't be able to survive a university course load in Korean just yet and so I have a lot of studying left ahead of me.
One of the advantages of using a Flash card program (e.g. Anki) to study vocabulary is that at any moment I can tell how many Korean words I know. 104 Days ago I reached 3000 words and currently I'm at 3743 words, I'll have to pick up the pace by quite a bit if I want to make any serious progress before next year. But the reason I'm telling you this is because you notice some odd things that come out of these statistics.
For context one of the reasons I started learning Korean was my love for the game Starcraft 2. Due to their strong work ethic and training house infrastructure all the best Starcraft players are Koreans and so it follows that there's a lot of tournaments that are broadcasted in Korean.
And I watch every single one.
While on the off season it's possible for me to go several days without watching Starcraft when the season is in full bloom I can expect to watch about 15 hours over the week and if there's a few weekend tournaments as well I'll be watching upwards of 25 hours in a single week.
While there's a lot of useful words to be learnt from listening to starcraft commentary there's just as many that aren't so useful. For example I only learned the word for 'warrior' (전사) this week but I've known the word for zealot (광전사) for over a year, the simple reason for this is that 'Zealot' is a word used in Starcraft but 'Warrior' isn't.
That's not the end of my problems either, it was only 2 weeks ago (after I had already been learning Korean for 15 months) that I first learned how to say the basic math operations of plus, minus, divide and times (더하기, 빼기, 나누기, 곱하기) I had known all these verbs individually but until 2 weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to transfer them into a mathematical expression.
So now that my Starcraft lingo is well above what it needs to be, while my maths and physics vocabulary is well below what it needs to be I'll have to start sculpting my study to fill in the holes. Recently I've been watching some physics tutorials aimed at Middle School students and some of the new vocabulary seems to be sticking well.
I guess this was a detoured way of saying that you reap what you sow. If you look at a marathon runner's training schedule you'll see a lot of running and not much else. If you just want to be able to watch Starcraft in Korean, then just go ahead and watch some Korean Starcraft. It's almost too obvious to bother saying but sometimes its good to ground yourself and find your bearings before you move too quickly in the wrong direction.
A Korean friend who's learning English recently asked me if she should read children's books for practice, it's not a bad way of practicing but if that's your main resource just be warned that you might end up just like me and learn the word for 'queen' (the name of a special starcraft unit) before you learn the word for 'kitchen'.
So when you're studying a new language, no matter how far down the track you are, make sure you're facing the direction you want to go before you start moving too quickly.
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