Day 8 of Korean in 80 days

T-72

I'm too lazy. Or, 난 엄청 게을러 / nan eom cheong geu-eur-reo. Not the most positive thing to know in Korean or admit about myself.

Still, through the lack of motivation, I did three things today that constitutes as effort:

1. Played with hangul letters

I opened up Drops for another 5 mins today so I can get my hangul alphabets wired in. I did well enough with only one mistake on the letter 'ch' (which sounds like 'shh' to me).

5 mins is not enough but I'll take it at this point because worse would be to lose momentum. "I am lazy" in Korean is the 51st phrase in my list of phrases to remember. I could turn this (and my mind) around by learning positive and affirming phrases but I've decided that today is not the day. On a more positive note, I can remember how to say "I wish you joy", which is phrase 1 from day 1. It's not fluent and I still have to think about it, but again, I'm claiming that small win.

Speaking of winning, today I also discovered that I could enter into 'competition' with other users of the Drops app. It adds to the urgency and gives me extra time to play around with the language.

My partner for this maiden experience is someone called Irina. She kicked my ass in the first round but perhaps didn't know there was a second one and left the building (happy and satisfied as a cat, hopefully). Because I was playing against an absent opponent, I won the second round.

So, at that point I have 7 mins of exposure and I deemed it enough for today. Maybe next time, I'll hit the "Start Next Match" button, when my adrenaline has been replenished.

Fingers crossed my sense of integrity catches up with me tomorrow and I'll pick up the pace. If you're going through something similar, hang in there buddy. We'll get through this funk. Let's keep showing up, okay?

2. Learn through the doom(scroll?)

I've been doing is signing up for various Korean teaching instagram accounts. Since I'm addicted to scrolling these days, it seemed like a good idea to ride on that wave and learn.

Having that intention actually makes me want to scroll less, although I did catch a few interesting reels. I don't remember what I learned, per se. What catches and captivates my attention are all the travel trips for Seoul, Busan and Jeju - the three places my sister and I have decided to visit at the end of the year.

3. Expose myself to Korean

I left a kdrama playing in the background as I went about my day. Previously, I was super invested in the kdrama, but now that I'm learning, my interest has waned considerably. Still, I wanted to 'finish' the drama so I changed the subtitle to Korean and occasionally looked at the screen long enough to catch one or two words of Korean (usually the beginnings and the ends of sentences). I look forward to the day that seeing hangul would make me automatically read.

Realising that there wasn't much feeling or investment in that, I found this video which presents 200 Korean words. It's almost 20 mins long and I sat through the entire thing to vet through the words. Because I liked more than 90% of the words they suggested, I decided that I'll run through the entire video again twice daily this week. I could walk on the spot, too, and rack in some steps on my pedometer :)

Checking in with the plan

The original idea was to establish a habit of learning (and speaking) in Week 1. That didn't really happen so I'm hoping Week 2 will help me recalibrate.

Two other things I haven't done is shadowing (repeating Korean phrases that I hear) and using Korean in my journaling. I love that I had this 'study plan' set out in the beginning (you can read about it here) so I can adjust either myself or the plan as I see fit.

Do I still want to be able to speak Korean when I'm there in 72 days? Heck yes. I'm lazy but I'm trying.

Are you studying a language, too? Good luck for the both of us.