Last night, I took a first step. Every night, Little Clover likes me to tuck him in. As part of that routine, we lay down for just a minute while I tell him how much I love him and how awesome he is. Then, he will ask me to sit in the rocking chair by his bed until he falls asleep. I usually take this time to listen to an audiobook or podcast while I knit. Last night, I read my copy of Teach Yourself Korean and listened to the native speaker as I read along. It's not much time, but it's ten to fifteen minutes more than before.
I must say, finding any decent materials for learning Korean has been very, very frustrating. The type font for the Teach Yourself books is rather poor. Their romanisation of the characters is also rough at best and their English word examples of vowel sounds is way off. The words they picked to represent vowel sounds are words that are pronounced differently across US regions. The authors could have picked more region nuetral words (picking the word "father" instead of "bat" to as an example of an "ah" sound).
I've also go the Berlitz set of tapes and books. The Berlitz format may work well for languages with letter based alphabets, but for Korean, which has a character based alphabet, wowzers! My head nearly popped and I sent the first 5 years of my life looking at words formed by characters. If anyone out there has any advice or suggestions, please send them my way. I've got my eye on the Rosetta Stone language course and I think if I'm still working through my Korean Lessons by my mom's birthday in March, I may get it.
All is not lost on the knitting front. I am still knitting. I just have to find some new time throughout the day. I've managed to finish the back, two cardigan fronts, and a sleeve for a baby sweater. I've casted on for the second sleeve now and with any luck, I can finish it tonight since the mommy of the baby will be induced tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.
2 comments:
Well that wasn't nice. I lost the long paragraph I was sending to you. I really need to learn how to blog.....This year's goal. Anyways, your "hubby" was at my office yesterday to work on a problem and he saw my knitting bag. Then he showed me your blog. Wow, that's all I can say. We ended up talking about knitting, go figure, and he's pretty informative about what you are working on. Good for you! I'm just learning how to blog, so only have 2 on my page. And I'm really bad about taking pictures of my work, so going to have to hunt them up and take some pictures to add to my blog. I finished a lot this year, but only a few pictures of what I learned last week. Anyways, good for you to learn Korean. (is there a reason?) I spent a year in Korea and was on the teaching English staff to Koreans. It was enjoyable.
Love the sweater and the entrelac socks - good going! I have only knit an entrelac hat (for a child - it looks like a pineapple!) and I found it to be a lot of fun too.
As for the language learning, my son has been using a freebie Rosetta Stone trial of some kind (he wants to learn Arabic for some reason). I bet they have a tryout in Korean as well (if you haven't found it already). Good luck and aren't you dedicated and brave to add learning a language to what is already a full life!
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