How to learn Korean by watching TV shows in Korean?
Korean is the official and national language of both Koreas: North Korea and South Korea, with different standardized official forms used in each country. It is a recognized minority language in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County of Jilin Province, China. It is also spoken in parts of Sakhalin, Russia and Central Asia. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as Koryo-saram and/or Koryo-in, and call the language Koryo-mal. It is an East Asian language spoken by about 77 million people and 5.6 million consider Korean as a Heritage Language. Languages that don’t have their own alphabet and characters have known to have merged in another or vanished over time. Historical and modern linguists classify Korean as a language isolate. Korean vocabulary comprises 35% of native words, 60% of Sino-Korean words and 5% loanwords mostly from the English language. Korean presence or influence is strongly found in the Khitan language. Lesser-known Dravido-Korean languages theory, suggests Korean relationship with Dravidian languages in India. Of the 3000 languages in use currently Korean is known to be the 13th most commonly used language.
Let’s now see how to learn Korean by watching Korean Television actively
TV shows will help you develop an instinctual feel for the pace and flow of actual spoken Korean; and will introduce you to the kind of spoken Korean that rarely show up in regular Korean lessons or textbooks. TV shoes includes some street slang, subcultural expressions, shortened words, and even some beautiful poetic lines. Television Shows include Talk Shows, Documentaries, News, Game Shows, Comedy shows, Variety Shows, Sports, Sitcoms, Dramas, Scifi, Supernatural and Fantasy Shows, Soap Operas, Historical Shows, Adventure or Action Shows, Cooking Shows, Cartoons, Reality TV, DocuDramas, Police procedural or Crime Shows.
Some if not all can certainly be a value add to your learning and offer a similar if not same benefit as the movies can! Watch News in Korean. It would be your friend for a lifetime! Choose a genre in videos that are simplistic to understand in the beginning raising the bar with every lesson learnt efficiently. Remember that the Korean language has evolved from the way it’s spoken in the 1900s to how it’s spoken today, so you may avoid learning from old shows.
Steps you could follow to get the best of your learning:
- Watch the show fully without any subtitles and record it simultaneously(if not available online to see again). Just soak up on the plot and try to grasp the “feel” of the show, what does it wish to convey. Go back to the start and re-watch it scene-by-scene: first, with no subtitles. After you’re done watching it in its entirety, watch it scene by scene to see which words you can grasp even without the help of subtitles. Every time you hear a word you’re not familiar with, write it down.
- Re-watch the scene but this time with subtitles. The Korean subtitles will help you get the spelling and articles used correctly. But if you want to check if your understanding is correct, switch on the English subtitles in your 3rd viewing of that particular scene. Pay attention to the vocabulary and the context on how the words were used. Look out for any idioms and slang, and take note of the grammatical structures used in the sentences. Write down anything interesting you noticed, and be ready to review it later on.
- Listen and repeat new words. If there are some new words that you cannot seem to pronounce, listen to it and repeat the words and sentences over and over until you get the hang of it. Look up the words you don’t understand.
- If there are some things about the show that are bugging you—slang terms, regional jargons, double meanings, wordplays, and subtle humour that you couldn’t quite grasp—do some research or ask a native Korean speaker to help you understand and appreciate it better.
- Re-watch the show until you are confident that you have understood the gist of the conversations and the context of the words.
Watch The Penthouse, The Uncanny Counter Run On, Sweet Home and more.
You could watch more at BestKoreanDramas, Netflix, PrimeVideo, IMDb
Finally,
Modern Korean is thought to have derived from Middle Korean, which in turn descended from Old Korean, which in turn descended from the Proto-Koreanic language, which is thought to have originated in Manchuria. According to Whitman (2012), the Proto-Koreans, who were present in northern Korea at the time, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had an impact on one another, and a later founder effect reduced the internal diversity of both language families.
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