Tell us what frustrates you about Korean at Lingq?

Open Forum
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A lot of Korean nouns have the same terms in Chinese. That makes the retrieval part far easier for me. On the other hand, if the stems are in a reversed order or an unusual combination of stems different from Chinese, they can be tricky to guess. Most of the time, I have a good idea of the common stem or stems in words.

가난했다 is a bit tricky for me. The corresponding Chinese characters should be 艰 (toil) + 难 (hardship, distress). If we search under 艰, 힘들다 is more appropriate than 어렵다.
https://krdict.korean.go.kr/m/chn/searchResult

Another related word is 생활난 (生活難) financial difficulties; economic distress.

难 (simplified) = 難(traditional)

If we search under 가, the closest we can get, but probably unrelated, are -가, A suffix used to mean a family, and -가, A suffix used to indicate a price.

To my great surprise, I just had a sudden enlightenment of searching under 간, which is closer to Chinese pronunciation, and found another related word.

간신히 Adverb
with difficulty

https://krdict.korean.go.kr/m/eng/help?nation=eng

Is 간 a conjugated form of 가 due to grammar rules, regional variance, or the evolution of the language, making them adopted separately for the usages of a verb and an adverb, respectively?

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I’m going to comment and then look at what others have to say. Basically, all the conjugations and the way LingQ counts words. I have to look the same word up over and over and over and often create my own definitions using external resources (dictionaries). It drives me nuts. Of course, the better I get at the language the less I have to look up words or the better at it I get so it becomes less of an issue and over time I’ve seen the LingQ dictionary get better as users contribute to adding to the dictionary.

I can’t relate to people who choose not to learn hangul on day 1. I would say maybe develop a course teaching hangul but otherwise I don’t see the point. You could use IPA but why bother learning IPA when you can just learn hangul directly instead. And using romanization has the same problem - you have to learn how to read the romanization anyway so why not just learn hangul?

Keep in mind if you struggle to read a word you can just click/tap it and LingQ will pronounce it for you. So why would you want to us any script except hangul?

I self judge my Korean at A2 but I’ve at least looked at grammar books with intermediate grammar structures but many of them are still shaky or I don’t know them at all. I’d say I know about 1500 words as counted by a dictionary (rough guess). LingQ has my word count at 18,834.

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I didn’t know you could search Naver for word endings.

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I’m a beginner. I can read fairly fast, but don’t know much vocabulary or grammar constructions. There are multiple courses to choose from, but as a beginner who knows some particles (like 는/은, 를/을, 이/가, 에/에서, 도) and some basic vocabulary, lessons provided by LingQ can be difficult. That’s why I sometimes feel discouraged to use the platform until I know more Korean.

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I agree with everyone on this thread commenting about how we’d like to see improvements in translations/definitions. Whatever time I have available to donate to ‘librarian’ tasks is almost entirely spent on cleaning up translations/definitions. And there are many others who are doing the same even though they’re not librarians. I often find that a definition I chose earlier because it was ‘good enough’ now has among the word’s choices many other, much better definitions/translations to choose from. :orange_heart: to all you Korean learners for that extra effort!

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I really like this lol i wish every mini story came with a breakdown like this. It allows one to visualize see the language etc. Obviously once higher levels are achieved sentences and chunks of language are processed without refering to one’s native language, but in the beginning stages this is gold. Thanks for sharing this!

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Thank you.

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Thank you

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Thank you.

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I’m enjoying learning Korean on LingQ at the intermediate level. I find the user experience and functionality to be very good and don’t see the need for any significant changes. Based on my experience learning Korean, I would say that introducing transliteration to the Korean program on LingQ isn’t really necessary. The Korean script - Hangeul - is quite easy to learn as it is highly phonetic without many exceptions to its basic rules of phonics. So, total beginners would do well to learn to pronounce Hangeul by sight first, before learning any of the language because learning transliterated Korean won’t help you in a real communication situation. Transliteration is rarely used in Korea apart from place names on road signs. So, it’s really only a crutch used by non-Korean speakers. Transliteration of Korean also must follow the official rules of Korean transliteration, which can change from time to time. So, I would say it is much more efficient to learn Korean through Hangeul from the beginning. I hope this is helpful.

31

I apologize for the late response, but I wanted to ask you why you said 10% for a1-a2 for chinese characters? And only 20% for b2-c2. If one grabs the topik list for all the vocab its like 55% hanja words for all the 10,000 words that the want you to know for the test. Whether one learns what the characters is personal opinion, but I wanted to know why you put the percentages so low.

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Language has many shades and becomes more intricate, combining with even more sophisticated aspects in a person’s learning process. Language learning is about connecting meaning, text, and sound. The mastery of Hangul, or rather lack of it, significantly impacted my learning at A1 - A2 level.

Connecting Chinese characters and Korean words can be as easy as learning Impacto in Spanish or as challenging as creating a cross-reference between Seguir in Spanish and English word sequel. One extreme case is the word 쓰레기 for garbage. It took me four months to realize that the word is in the reverse order of Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwan for the same writing in Chinese characters. I have already known the word way early by then.

I assigned 10% to the usefulness of Chinese characters at A1 - A2 for two reasons. The first one is that other elements, primarily the familiarity with the Hangual in both the writing system and pronunciation, play a more significant role during this stage. Secondly, the usage of Chinese characters in the real scenario may be considerably different from what people expected. It’s not one-to-one mapping, and there are more gaps that one has to bridge.

I would have delayed a deliberate attempt at learning Chinese characters at A1 - A2 level if I had no prior knowledge. The learner would progress well even without resorting to an alternative that I considered a better version at this stage of learning.

Sample sentence
People have published many well-known articles within the 학계.

학교,학생, etc., and 세계 could give you some hints if you are familiar with these words. So the better alternative is to associate 학 with Sch in school or scholarly and, my analogy of dom in the kingdom, or landia in ratonlandia vs the true meaning of “world” or “circle.” for 계. Most importantly, lacking prior knowledge of these words or failing to make connections among seemingly unrelated things does not prevent one from learning the word from context.

I would learn Chinese characters more systematically after B1 if I were not a native. The complexity of Chinese characters will be less mysterious once you become more familiar with the usages. Let me invent some writing system or a representation of the English language, which could be a nightmare for even natives to handle.

I list them in a progression of difficulties. All these representations are unique one-to-one mapping from English alphabets to others.

  1. Korean 학 for h, and so forth.
  2. One of a binary sequence of 6 digits for h
  3. One of 256 colors from the computer system for h
  4. A Chinese character of more than 26 strokes and with one stroke in different to represent all 26 letters in English
  5. Use a 3-D geometric structure with variation in the degree of angle combined with the position to represent all 26 letters.
  6. The writing system is embedded with an encrypted key, or a different decryption method must be employed to decipher each letter in the message every time.
    Another thing we can see again is that the writing system significantly impacts the text’s intelligibility and efficiency of a learner to absorb the language.

Learning Chinese characters is not a horror after all.

1 Like
33

I’m a Beginner II, close to Intermediate I, according to LingQ.

When I started in October 2020, I actually did learn Hangul first with the help of Youtube and Anki. Of course it would be nice if one could use LingQ from the start without relying on external resources but that seems hard to realize.

I first thought it would be a good idea if you could add one of the Hangul-teaching-videos from YouTube as regular Beginners’ content, like, a collaboration with Miss Vicky or Kagoshima Jun or whoever is out there creating content for complete beginners. The problem is that the explanation will always be in English or Japanese or whatever mother tongue the creator of the content uses. So, it won’t be universal.

For me, Hangul was not the problem with Korean but the many homonyms. The translations are mostly wrong. For example I just came across the word 밀면. When I click on the “Popular Meanings”, they mostly say “push, shove”. Some add the meaning of “+ 면 = if”, so it becomes: “if you push”. But, from the context, it is clear that in this case the meaning is “wheat noodles”, the 면 being 麺. At least some of the English “Popular Meanings” take this into account but in the Japanese or German “Popular Meanings”, wheat noodles don’t appear at all.

Instead of a romanization, I would love to have the option to have little Hanja displayed above the words, that would so help to distinguish noun meanings from each other and from verbs, adjectives etc. I could imagine that a lot of learners from Japan and China would love that feature, too.

The good thing about Lingq – the user created content – also is its one Achilles’ heel: If, for example, the Hanja were created automatically, how could the system distinguish between “if you push” and “wheat noodles” without someone professional editing it? Maybe that would be a chance to put the lately improving artificial intelligence to a test.

That said, what is going on my nerves is the constant correcting and editing that I’m inclined to do. I’m constantly in the sentence editing mode to erase incorrect word spacing that obscures the correct meaning of a sentence even more. I know I’m not forced to do this and I also see it as a way of improving my own language skills, but it’s almost impossible to edit sentences or translations on the mobile phone. There is a bug where sometimes the cursor jumps to the end of the sentence, so for every single character that I want to type I have to go back to the respective position in the sentence – impossible, really.

Also, I’m flipping between English, German and Japanese translations. (This concerns “Popular Meanings”, dictionaries and translations.) I don’t know how LingQ decides which language they show me first but I noticed it changes all the time. One session I get the German translations first, the next one the English ones. The more I see the more I feel pressured to correct all of them!

I’m also volunteering a lot adding time stamps, since I hate to have the automated text-to-speech when there‘s the original audio available. I just wish the transcript (in my case TTMIK’s Iyagi course) had less full stops in the middle of a sentence, since every full stop creates a new paragraph which causes the natural flow of the audio to be completely chopped up. In those cases I wished I could just delete whole paragraphs and add them to the sentence they belong to. But that might only be possible for the creator of the content?

Doing all this takes so much time that I sometimes wonder if it really helps my Korean or if I’m just procrastinating or if I maybe should get some money for my work? (Only joking…)

There’s a lot more to say about editing and bugs and differences between the desktop and the mobile version of LingQ but since it doesn’t concern Korean specifically, I’ll better stop here.

Despite all the nagging, I really love LingQ. The TTMIK Iyagi course that I’m into right now is perfect for me. I tried to add some own content, like K-drama-transript using a workaround but I’ve only done that once so far.

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@Sasuem
Making corrections in German, English, and Japanese! Wow! Honestly I do think you should be compensated.

I agree with everything you said except for displaying Hanja. Native Korean words without Chinese characters will get confused with Sino-Korean homonyms.
I don’t want to read 부친 in context meaning pan-fried or mailed, and see 父親.

Even without native Korean words, there are Sino-Korean homonyms. So I’m not sure how displaying Hanja above the text would help with that. We would need very advanced AI for it to work.

Another example:

708×964 56.5 KB

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@Sasuem

  • :arrow_right:︎ I just wish the transcript (in my case TTMIK’s Iyagi course) had less full stops in the middle of a sentence, since every full stop creates a new paragraph which causes the natural flow of the audio to be completely chopped up.

If you become a librarian you’ll have editing privilages that allow you to join sentence fragments together into a complete sentence. Since you’re already doing so much work join us as a librarian!

36

@Sasuem

You have elucidated the most valuable points that serve well to us.

However, I also beg to differ on Hanja’s actual application in learning Korean. Displaying Hanja does not solve the problem in most cases. Following are 面/麺 entries from my lingqed terms under Vocabulary. I list them under the same definitions.

Noodle
“준기는 오늘 아침에 파스타 면도 많이 살 것입니다.”
“석진:“ 너구리” 는 면발이 되게 두껍죠.”

Face
“…2 급]15-2 걱정하지 말고 면접(interview as in audition in face to face) 잘 보고 오세요.”
“면도하다” even the face, referring to shaving in the context.
“그런데 이 면접관과 준수는 오늘 처음 만났어요.”

side; aspect; facet
“…기억하는 기회도 되고, 그런 면에서는 좋은 것 같고요.”

The more common word I have yet to encounter
면적 is the area, the mathematical product of a surface.
면하다 to face; to encounter
etc.,

The knowledge of Chinese characters works more like a memory booster than a panacea. It works backward when using it to identify merely the Chinese character associated with Korean words. It’s more important to learn a new word such as 면목 (面目) appearance; characteristic, which is more related to the meaning of face than others. We can significantly reduce the time needed to commit the words to our long-term memory by associating them with our prior knowledge of a particular meaning of 面.

37

Oh, I’m not really correcting Japanese! (Only German and sometimes English, if the translation is too far off – I don’t feel qualified enough to produce a beautiful translation, just one that offers the basic meaning.)

Japanese I’m just using as a reference (the “Popular Meaning”) because most of the time they show the relevant Kanji, and since I have a strong “feeling” towards words of Chinese origin in Japanese (though they sometimes differ in Korean), it really helps me when I see the Hanja or Kanji. The words just make more sense all of a sudden. Seeing the Hanja or Kanji suddenly expands my horizon of this one word, since I have all the context from the past (all the situations that I have “experienced” those words in Japanese).

Yes I know, displaying the Hanja would only help if the appropriate one was displayed above the word. It should be like the audio, only belonging to that specific lesson, not like the collective pool of lingqs that can offer every possible meaning. So, it only made sense if there was a really advanced AI or some proficient person doing this once, at the beginning, when the lesson is created. The latest developments in AI, like Chat GPT made me gain some hope.

The reason I suggested adding Hanja is, that there should be so many people with a background in Chinese or Japanese. I’m thinking of learners of Asian languages, since those people tend to learn not only one of them. (Some start with Mandarin and expand to Japanese, some start with Japanese and add Korean…) But mostly of native speakers of languages that use Chinese characters. I got the impression that the discussion here neglects this massive group of language learners.

I remember Steve told in one video that he started learning Korean with a book that had a Hanja transcript, since he had the same problem with the homonyms that every Korean learner encounters. You just can’t distinguish homophone nouns from each other or nouns from verb endings if their syllables could be part of a noun, like the above mentioned 면.
For all those learners who know Chinese characters, the display of the correct Hanja would be so helpful. Just imagine Japanese being only written in Hiragana. A nightmare! And this nightmare is Korean… At least for Korean learners. Native speakers at least know their language when they start to read. But as a non-Korean speaker it takes so much time until you are shrewd enough to guess everything from context.

And Steve’s example shows that there IS material out there with Hanja transcript. I don’t know what it looked like exactly. Were the Hanja replacing certain syllables of nouns or verb stems, like in Japanese? Did it have little Hanja printed above or next to the respective syllables? Was it “new” material, particularly catering to the market of Japanese or Chinese/Taiwanese students? Or was it “old” material from the 50s or 60s, then used by Korean schools?
Maybe it would be possible to design at least one course that uses this kind of learning material?

So, although it might be next to impossible to implement the Hanja, in my opinion it could enhance LingQ’s attractiveness for a huge group of learners.

38

Yes, I understand completely. I’m also using the Hanja “backwards” as a memory booster, or as a means to “get a feeling” for the meaning of a Sino-Korean word. As you said, it helps if we can associate a new word with prior experiences. Displaying the Hanja (and I mean only that one correct, appropriate Hanja that applies to that one situation in that one lesson – think of a line-edited text, not a pool of meanings) makes sense almost exclusively for learners who know Chinese Characters. (And there are lots of them!)
It could be counterproductive for total beginners without a background in China-related languages. If they feel forced to learn the Hanja, or even see them displayed, it might discourage them. On the other hand the Hanja could still help to visually structure a sentence and distinguish Sino-Korean nouns from other word classes more easily.

39

If being a librarian means that I can do it like I’m doing it now: randomly, while learning my sentences – then I’m willing to join you.

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@Sasuem

  • :arrow_right:︎ And Steve’s example shows that there IS material out there with Hanja transcript.

I don’t know the history of 漢字 that well, but my impression is that it stopped appearing regularly in the 1990’s. These days Hanja only appears parenthetically to clarify homonyms for the average native Korean reader.

Since this was before digitization, reading materials easily found online may not contain much 漢字. But if you were able to visit a used book store in Korea, my guess is that it’ll have many books from 30 to 40 years with Hanja. The language used in those books (with or without 漢字) will be somewhat outdated and old-fashioned, but not completely archaic.

In the USA or Germany perhaps an academic library will have Korean literature published 30-40 years ago? If you’re a student or academic that may work.

Online archives of newspapers published 30-40 years ago may also be a good source, but I have not looked for such things myself.