useful stationery!

I found this English vocabulary note book in Daiso at the weekend. I
am going to use it for korean vocabulary (of course)

You  write the word on the left side and the translation, meaning or example sentence on the right. you can the memorize the word and test your knowledge by covering either the word or description. ... Stationery is so cheap in korea, this cost 1,000원 (58p or $1).

An interesting language learning site called LingRing.

Just before my holiday I joined an interesting language learning site called LingRing.

http://www.lingring.net

Before you go, let me explain... It is a community site that allows you to post text in any language that you are learning and receive corrections from native speakers of that language. Initially I thought that the concept was great but that it would never work...  I made my first post (in Korean, obviously) and filled out my profile.

I was really stuck when deciding what to write for my first post and there was a delay waiting for my confirmation email, so I wrote that...

이메일

안녕하세요! 내 확인 이메일을받지 않았어요. 어떻게해야할까요?

To my surprise I instantly received a correction (from the site creator, I believe) I got 3 corrections on my first 3 sentence post.  

How the site works

• Create a profile and set your native language and the language you are learning.
• Post any text you want (in any language).
• The site feeds your post to connected users matching the language you wrote in.
• The corrections show in a separate tab for each contributor/native speaker.
• You can form a ring by asking someone who shares your languages (learning and native) and ask them  to be your tutor, which they can do in return and form the ring - you can add any number of tutors or students.
• You can see a notification for new posts and flick between pages showing your study and your help languages.
• You can take a quiz, based on your corrections once per day (I spoke to the site creator and he is developing this near future).
• You get a feedback score based on your reply rate (I spoke to the site creator and he is developing a reward system (rings) in the near future).  

How to join LingRing

• go to http://www.lingring.net/accounts/login/ and sign in with your Facebook account, you can change your email address (i did) but, that is basically the way to log in.

Now that I am back from my holiday, I intend to use this site more to support my language learning.

Topik 1 - First Five words and studying with EBS Book and Google translate.

I finally had some time to look at my TOPIK books and start to do some studying with them.
As I posted earlier I chose the vocabulary book, as I think this is the easiest to self study with.  The book is great and contains a list of vocabulary with the English Chinese and Japanese translation. The vocabulary is broken up into small lists (14 words) on the left page and example sentences (2 for each word) on the following 2 pages and then a test / worksheet on the next few pages.

1. 가방 - Bag

가방 안에 책이 있어요.
가방이 크지만 가벼워요.

2. 가운데 - Centre (middle/between)

연필은 책하고 안경 가운데에 있어요.
아이는 아버지하고 어머니 가운데에 있어요.

3.거울 - mirror

거울을 보고 있어요.
거울을 닦아요.

4. 걱정 - worry

내일 시험을 보는데 준비를 못 해서 걱정이에요.
너무 걱정하지 마세요.

5. 건너편 - The opposite side

하교 건너편에 은행이 있어요.
우체국 건너편에 병원이 있어요.

I started with the first 5 words and sentences, I could understand most of the sentences but then I hit a problem with self study... if I was going to commit these to memory, I needed to make sure that I was pronouncing them correctly, I had an idea!

Using the Google translate APP on my android phone I discovered a way that I was able to self correct my pronunciation.  This is how I did it;

Google Translate

...rather than typing the sentence into google translate and then listening to and trying to mimic the pronunciation of the google translate voice, I though why not read (say) the sentence in Korean and self correct my pronunciation until the software recognises the sentence correctly (usually a couple of times).  the added benefit of this is that you have to say it quite quickly, if you pause, translate thinks that you have finished speaking and processes the audio to return the matching sentence and translation.  So I am learning the sentence, correct pronunciation and natural speed and memorising it through repetition all in one hit.  This will, of course, work for any language self study and I am going to make this method part of my study plan.