Friday 5 July 2013

Time to Read

I have been self-learning Korean on and off for a while now. So far I have only been "reading" the short conversations from the Korean learning resources that I have been using - TTMIK, KoreaClass101 and Integrated Korean - for my reading practice. The couple of Korean fiction books that I bought sometime ago, for THE day that I am finally ready to read Korean, are still lying on my bookshelf waiting to be poured over. Every time I decided to make a start on one of them, I put it down again after flicking through it, the pages and pages of incomprehensible texts just completely intimidated and overwhelmed me each time.

Some people might say it is too early for a beginner to start reading the real material, but then when is the right time?

I have been left wondering when I would ever be ready to read the "real thing". Then I chanced upon a post on Recommended Korean articles/books for each level which advised beginners like me to start on the Korean entertainment news, which quote from the post:

"Entertainment news are the easiest to read. They always use the same few vocabulary and the sentences are pretty short. Unlike more serious news where sentences seem to go on forever and ever.".

So I took the advice, bit the bullet - selected one Naver online entertainment news article about one of the Korean wave idols that I follow Kim Hyun-Joong (Hangul: 김현중; Hanja: 金賢重) and managed to read through it with the help of Naver dictionary and my various Korean learning resources. Gosh, though it was short but I found it fairly tough going as there were so many words that I didn't know, but I am glad that I persevered. So, one down and many many to go.

And this is how my Korean Reading Record is born.

No comments: