I know lots of people like Living language so if it works great. But me personally… I’d rather watch grass grow than read through another of those. It’s essentially lists of words followed by homework exercises. You couldn’t be more boring than that.
I’d be more engaged watching a golf tournament broadcast in another language.
My native is English but I also know German so Norwegian is quite easy. Also, I’m comparing it to something like Russian or Korean with all new sounds, script, grammar. I don’t know if you’ve tried a roman language but there are many, many words that are more or less the same in english so it’s easy to go right into good content.
This question has been asked a couple of times. They need content to add it.
For most languages, I’d agree with you. However, in the specific case of Korean, I think Living Language ends up being a viable solution for beginners for two reasons:
First, it’s one of the very few commercially produced and available self study courses for Korean (published by Random House, professionally recorded, produced, app supported etc. etc) Most other methods are either University produced / published, or in the “self published” rage and are hit and miss as far as writing and recording quality. (TTMIK is a bit of an outlier in that the quality of their recordings is very good.)
Second, the LL method itself works better to Korean than it does to French or German, I think. (I don’t like the “word based” approach either, that’s why usually recommend starting with he dialog and working your way backwards for each unit in LL.) The somewhat heavy use of written exercises allow you to get used to reading and writing Hangul, and the grammar explanations give you a good overall coverage for the most important stuff.
Again, for European languages, something like Assimil is way better (no comparison, really) but for westerners trying to get started with Korean, I think LL is a viable option.
jaliscostate:
Icelandic is heavily inflected and has four cases so it’s very different from Norwegian. I never seriously tried reading it but it would probably be like reading German or Old Norse.
I don’t know a lot of Serbian yet. I’ve gone through Teach Yourself Complete Serbian and memorized the grammar kind of thoroughly but I still lack a lot of vocabulary. Recently I deleted the Russian vocabulary from Anki and now I intend to focus only on Serbian in my Anki sessions. It turns out that focusing is important if you want serious results.
Icelandic looks amazing (even if it’s unbelievably complex!) Realistically speaking, if I ever learned a language from that family, I reckon it’d be Bokmål or Nynorsk.
Oh you’d probably learn both as NRK and other news outlets would shove both down your throat whether you liked it or not. IMO they’re the exact same language, only with slightly different words. And people who know both probably get them so mixed up that they don’t even know it. But that’s just my impression.
Awesome. Glossika also has Serbian if you wanna try it. It did work for my Russian but god is it boring.
Yeah, Glossika in English-to-Target would suck. It’s better for me in German-to-Target - but even then I mix it with a music under-track. (I think it could be effective if I had the staying power to keep it up. It’s lack of motivation which does for me nowadays…)
I would venture on Reddit and perhaps find stuff on there. Some countries even have their own version of reddit (Russia has pikabu).
It also doesn’t help the LingQ library set up doesn’t allow the content to be seen at its full potential.
Free Online Courses in Korean:
*Beginner
Coursera - https://www.coursera.org/learn/learn-speak-korean1
(audio, pdf, and video downloads)
***Beginner and Intermediate
Quick Korean - “the free on-line Korean language learning program of the Cyber University of Korea”, http://korean.cuk.edu/en/
(pdf and mp3 downloads)
4 Levels -
Level 1 instruction is available in five languages: 한국어, English, 中國語, 日本語, Español
Levels 2-4 instruction in Korean
I really like Children’s books. In English and in all of the languages that I study. It certainly is not everyone’s cup of tea.