Heather

Korean Reading Resources: A Personal Masterlist

August 14, 2020December 12, 2020

Reading is probably one of my favourite things to do in the world, and I try to read something in my target languages everyday, whether it’s an article, a chapter of my favourite webtoon, or if I happen to have a lot of free time that day, a book. It used to be a lot harder to find reading materials in Korean, but it’s 2020 and these days you can pretty much find anything you need on the internet.

Unless it’s Korean books – but we’ll get to that later.

How I Prepared for TOPIK II

July 23, 2020March 21, 2022

Two weeks ago, I took the TOPIK II test for the first time. I had a year to prepare for it, so I got to experiment with all sorts of exercises – reading news, listening to radio, writing articles – with varying degrees of success. In this article, I’ll be talking about the ones that I found the most effective.

I also wrote an article on the test-taking strategies that I used during the exam, which you can read here.

Hacking TOPIK II

July 15, 2020December 3, 2022

Two days ago, I sat for the TOPIK II exam. It was my first time taking the test, so I was pretty nervous, but to my surprise, I was actually better prepared than I’d thought. I wish I had more time for the essay writing section, but other than that, I think it turned out pretty okay.

This article is a compilation of the techniques and strategies that I found effective, as well as things that I wish I’d done differently.

Rediscovering My Mother Tongue

July 1, 2020July 3, 2021

I loved my native language growing up.

I was always either reading or writing, mostly stories and occasionally poetry. I had a little notebook that I carried around, and I would write down all these random sentences that popped into my head throughout the day. If I didn’t have it on me, I would write it down on my desk. I spent half of my waking hours thinking about new ways to word things, and my dream was to become a writer one day.

Growing Up in A Language

May 22, 2020March 8, 2022

Or more specifically, growing up in your target language.

The other day, I was watching a video on one of my favourite Korean learning channel. It was an interview with Lindie Botes, a polyglot content creator I really enjoy watching. They talked about various aspects of the language learning process, but what stood out to me the most was the host’s story on how differently he feels about English, a foreign language he speaks fluently, and German, the language he’s actively studying at the moment.

Studying with Netflix

March 22, 2020January 20, 2021

For the past few weeks, I’ve been practicing my French listening skills with a French series on Netflix called Plan Cœur. I do this via an exercise where I listen to the same clip repeatedly – the same method I used with Korean and English. It is still to this day one of my favourite ways to improve listening skills, so I thought I’ll do a quick breakdown of the process and share it with you guys!