I have been working with KoreanClass101 for about 9 months and I have gotten through Newbie season 1-3 and Absolute Beginner series 1. I have been gathering my observations, so this may be a rather long post, but here goes...
I started by getting the introductory package (Getting Started with Korean) that they say you can only get when you first sign up for $9. That seemed to be a reasonable deal. They make it seem like you're going to get a pile of disks, but they really just send you 2 disks. One of them contains the first season 1 from the Newbie and Beginner series along with some additional random material. The other disk is an interview which inspires you to learn the language to the point that if you are confronted with a native speaker, you can actaually speak it instead of retreating back to your normal tongue.
While I was expecting to get charged $9, it also appeared that I had been signed up for the monthly $9 basic membership charge. I noticed this as I was looking at my membership status. I was not informed that taking the intro package would automatically sign me up, so I immediately cancelled the subscription. I was not informed that this would happen, so I wasn't pleased that I was signed up. I don't mind being signed up if I am told about it and have the opportunity to opt out, but this just seemed sneaky.
I was mostly intererested in the full season lessons since you can only get 3 free lessons from each season with a free membership. The way I used the lesson is that I listen to them during my 1 hour commutes to work. This is the only time I have to learn korean and the only down time I have to learn korean. I have no time to study the PDF or lesson notes - I just don't have the time. I will listen to upto 4 -5 lessons each day and keep repeating them until I can recognize the dialog. Even at that rate, it took a long, long time to get through the 1st Newbie/Beginner lessons. Now I admit that this is a rather crude way of learning a language, but I think you would find that most people are like me - they don't have time to sit down and dedicate time to learn a language. They have to stuff it into 'down' time like commuting or dishwahsing/excercise time. If a language learning program is to be effective, it has to work with the schedule of the user. You can always blame the failure of a language learning system on the user being too lazy or using the program wrong or being just plain dumb. But if most people fail, then I blame the program.
One thing I wanted to note is just how difficult it is to transfer the lesson .mp3 files to my MP3 car player. You cannot use the CD disk you get directly since it stores the files as .mp3 and my CD player in my car can't play that format. I use a simple MP3 player that plugs into the cigarette lighter socket and transmits to your FM radio. It takes an SD Memory card. I had to be very clever to search for only the lesson .mp3 files on the CD and transfer those to my SD memory card. I'm a computer programmer by profession and even I found this very technically complex. I don't know how other people handle this, but I would think this would be extremely frustrating to most people considering how many files need to be copied.
What would have been more convenient would have been to have the lessons on audio CD which I could then just pop into my car CD player without any fuss or muss. Not everyone has an Ipod, or even a basic MP3 player, or the knowlege to transfer files to MP3 players. But, nearly everyone has access to a CD player. I would recommend that you make the lessons avaliable on CD.
I know that Basic membership includes access to the lessons on iTunes. I finished the intro lessons, so I signed up for the Basic membership that promises I will be able to download lessons 'with the click of a button'. However, even this is not without its problems. The iTunes site presents all of the files in a single monolithic directory of hundreds of files. If you want a particular set of lessons from the Newbie series, you have to sort the list and then click on each of the .mp3 files individually to download them. So, it's more like you can access the lesson with 24 clicks. Then you have to find where iTunes put the files (non-trivial) and then copy it to your MP3 device in hopefully the same order that you downloaded it. I ended up with some files out of order. I would recommend splitting the iTunes site into sections so you can find all the files from one lesson season in one place. I would also recommend zipping up all the audio lessons into a single .zip file so that you only have to download that one file and uncompress them once to download the files into your MP3 device.
Getting to the lesson format, I was initially annoyed with the very long 1:30 minute intro music at the beginning of each lesson on the intro CD. I am glad that that has been edited out of the audio tracks on the web site. At some point I hope to learn what they're saying in Korean at the end of that intro ... something about korean?? Which brings me to my first point which why do you have Korean prompts that are never explained? You first play the dialog, then you give a prompt in korean (chan chan ee hum bo no). In some of the other series you reprompt in English as 'One more time slowly'. But in the initial Newbie series, you just toss this prompt out there as if I was supposed to understand it. Initially, I couldn't separate the prompt from the dialog - as a non-speaker it all sounds like gibberish to me. I thought the Korean prompt was part of the repeating dialog. If there is any Korean being used in the lesson, it needs to be explained. I also don't see much point in having both the Korean and English prompts - that just wastes time during the lesson.
The second point about it sounding like gibberish that you always repeat the Korean slowly the 2nd time. Now, it didn't sound like anything I could recognize the first time, slowing it down doesn't help at all the 2nd time. It all sounds like blah, blah, blah to me. I would think it would be more helpful to repeat the Korean slowly after you have repeated the dialog with the English. That way, I have a chance to match up the Korean with the English and I can try to recognize it the 2nd time. Sometimes, the Korean is read so slowly, that it gets distorted. I think it should just be slow enough to separate and clearly pronounce the words, but not so slow that you start to introduce sounds which are inaudiable at normal speed.
I would also recommend that when you give the English translation, that you don't try to translate the grammar. Don't try to tanslate something like 'car please give me' into 'Please give me the car'. When I am listening and trying to learn the vocabulary, I am looking for a 1 to 1 matchup between the Korean and the English. Retranslating the grammar into natural English messes up the order and I think it really prevents you from learning the Korean grammar order. As an English speaker, I don't need to have my sentences in grammatical order. Speak like Yoda, you can and I understand will.
Overall, I find the lessons usefull since I can use them by just listening to them. The only system like it is the Pimsleur language system which I could also listen to on CD. I think your lessons are more 'fun' with the stories and dialog, but on the other hand, it wastes a lot of learning time. The vocablulary density in a 15 minute lesson is usually very low. Maybe that's OK since it seems to take a long time to hammer even 10 new words into my head, but there does still seem to be rather low language learning density.
I have tried nearly every Korean language learning system I can get my hands onto including taking actual teacher lead Korean classes and the one thing I have found is that there is no 'easy, fast, fun, and effective' way to learn Korean or any other language. It's just a lot of really hard slogging to punch vocabulary into my head. I have to wonder if I will ever be able to reach my goal of being able to just 'understand' about 70% of any average Korean conversation. I don't need to write it, read it or speak it - just listening capability. The one thing I have determined from all of the Korean learning systems I have tried is that all fall woefully short of what it would be required to understand 70% of a Korean conversation. Even if you do every level of Korean Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur, if you were faced with a native Korean speaker, you wouldn't be able to understand even 5% of what the are saying since the you only learn very particular situations and vocabulary which doesn't exceed a few hundered words. I'd say you'd need at least 3000 words to be competent. Just because you can pick up a few Korean words about how to order a beer does not mean you have learned Korean as some of these programs would have you believe - 'You can be learning Korean in minutes' - that's a lot of bull. The problem is, that these programs would require many, many, more levels - like 100 of them to gain 70% listening proficiency - but the lessons just come to an abrupt stop at level 3. Still painfully short of anything useful.
So, I have to ask the question, if I learned everything that koreanclass101.com has to offer, would I be able to understand 70% of any average Korean conversation? I generally suspect that I would not, but I wanted to ask if there have been anyone out there like me - a total non-Korean speaker, starting from scratch - who has gone through all of the lessons through the advanced lessons - are you able to understand most Korean conversations? Does KoreanClass101 provide enough practical vocabulary? If it does, then great, I look forward to slogging my way through the rest of the lessons. If it doesn't, then what's the point? What are your lessons leading up to if they don't lead to a practical level of competency? KoreanClass101 at least offers the many, many lessons which add up to hours and hours of instruction time - far more than could be offered in any other learning system, so I'm hoping that I will get to a level of competency with Korean, but at the rate I'm going, I'm looking at a long, long, long road. I'd just like to know if the road goes where I want, or will it be yet another dead end.
-thanks
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