I’m sure everyone has plateaus wherein it feels a lot like treading water. No real progress seems to be made and the same sticking points keep coming up.
One answer is to just keep on trucking and eventually it’ll click into place. However I don’t mind temporarily (for a week or so) doing some focused work on climbing it.
Right now the immediate issue which is frustrating me is some grammar. I am now fairly adept at understanding the simpler Korean sentences, but for some time now am repeatedly stumped by how the language turns a clause (with a verb) into the role of noun or adjective.
An English example might be: I saw the guy you were talking about.
The verb is ‘saw’. The subject is me. The object is guy. And the extra information about the guy is “who you were talking about”.
The Korean renders more like this: I you were talking about guy saw.
I can understand that if I am reading it and I have time to kind of cross-reference parts of the sentence to figure it out. However if any other grammatical principle is thrown in, it moves into ‘word salad’ territory where I am staring at a sequence of white words (being all of them are known to me) but the overall meaning escapes me.
Some of the things I am considering doing to help myself along:
- Compile a list of such sentences and specifically review them each day as part of my reading practice.
- Write sentences with this grammatical structure myself - so I am applying it myself, forcing me to mentally wrestle with this.
I am keen to hear if anyone has other tricks they have tried when trying to push past some impasse such as this.