Day 1 of Korean in 80 days

This is part of "Learning Korean in a Jiffy" where I attempt to become speak-ready for an upcoming trip to South Korea.

It's T-80. Previous attempts at learning Korean (hi, Duolingo survivor here) did not result in me saying a single word of it when I lived in Jeju last year. After the trip, I keep saying that I'll learn but I just bought tickets to Seoul with my sister and we fly in a little over two months. This is me hauling my ass to the study table and being accountable.

To summarise the technique I'm using to learn, in Week 1 I become familiar with the sounds of and speaking the language:

1. I will learn and memorise phrases that I use in daily life (so I can start swapping them out)
2. By listening to the phrases in Korean (on Google translate) and repeating them out loud
3. In sessions of 15 to 20 mins, I will 'enjoy' listening and repeating the words in the morning (to be fair, I take a little longer to write out the words after the easy listening/voicing is done because that serves my second goal which is to (eventually) read in Korean), do a little research on a few of them and try to memorise them in the afternoon and, at night, test myself before bed to see which phrases stick and do a bit of revision.

So these are my first ten phrases:

1. I wish you joy - naneun dangsin-ege gippeum-eul giwonhabnida
2. It's okay - gwaenchanh-ayo
3. I'm excited - naneun heungbundoenda
4. Let's start - sijaghaja
5. I don't know - moleugessseubnida
6. Life is good - insaeng-eun johda
7. I'm working - naneun ilhago iss-eoyo
8. I wonder why - waeinji gung-geumhae
9. I want some water (please) - mul jom juseyo
10. That's beautiful - jeongmal aleumdabneyo

What I found was I could retain only "it's ok" because there was once a social media trend using that word as an audio. I spent longer than 15 mins uttering the phrases in Korean, with the first 10 sounding garbled, and not in the cute baby talk way. It was harrowing and I could smell my brain getting toasted.

The obsession continued in the afternoon when I tried to repeat the phrases again and I couldn't keep to the 15 min mark. Perhaps 10 sentences were too much?

Head frayed and spent, night couldn't come soon enough. I tucked in two hours before my usual bedtime and did manage to repeat one of those phrases. No one is around to check my pronunciation but I hit every syllable.

Which one? If you guessed naneun heungbundoenda, you'd be right. I'm not sure why that stuck. Google gave me two versions and I mistakenly repeated that in the afternoon, completely unaware that it was not the same phrase as I learned in the morning. I caught on only after I checked the writing eyeroll

Ok, Google translate is not the best resource but I'm travelling and didn't want to use that as an excuse, so this was the best I could do (the alternative was buy a book, but my bag is over it's 7kg weight limit already). I'll start with a teacher in Week 3.

How's your Korean study coming along?