Young-il Ahn's Audiobook (mp3 + e-book)

I'm really digging Ahn Young Il's audiobook from My Korean Store.  In addition to the hours and hours of free content TTMIK has created, they have some interesting, inexpensive materials for sale as well.

공부법

I love using free and interesting native content to study Korean.  YTN News has the full text to a lot of their video clips, which makes it a great study resource.    

I found a free browser plugin called Freecorder which lets you capture the audio streaming from your browser.   It has a handy convert tool and a couple of different options for recording format.  I like to have the audio files on my MP3 player and listen to them after I've studied the script for a while. 

Unfortunately, if there are any buffering or timeout issues with the audio stream it will break the recording into smaller clips.  When that happens, I mix the clips together I with Audacity.  It's a hassel, but it gets the job done. 

I like to import the articles into Lingq and use that to learn the new vocabulary (requires a basic subscription to do this).  It has an embedded dictionary function which uses Google's translator.
It's far from perfect, but for me it's much easier than looking up everything in Naver.  

If you know of some better tools or resources, I'd love to hear about them.  열심히 공부합시다^^

learning with literature

These days I read a lot of different blogs about language learning and language learning methods (like this one and this one). One thing they all seem to agree on is the importance of reading the language. So I'm trying to read a lot of Korean. I've found that children's books have the perfect balance of simple grammar, new vocabulary and interesting content.

I checked this book out of the Library at my school. It's called"재주 많은 다섯 친구" (The Five Super Talented Friends). I was told it's based on an old Korean folk tale.

They story begins with some old people who are unable to have children so a monk tells them to bury a pot in the ground for a couple months. They do that and then they pull this kid out. They call him "Pot Boy." His talent is being really strong. He decides to leave home after a while and meets a guy who can blow a powerful wind out of his nose. His name is "Nose Breath Boy."

They meet a third super talented person who can pee a waterfall. He's called "Urine Boy."

They meet two other guys, one who carries a boat around on his back, and one who has huge feet and wears iron boots. They are respectively titled "Boat Boy" and "Iron Boy." So they're all traveling together for a while. Unfortunately the house where they stop for the night is full of tigers (!!!)

Instead of eating them, the tigers trick the five friends into a building a tower out of logs and then they light it on fire when the guys are at the top.

I'll bet you can guess which guy saves the day...

Anyways, I'm becoming fairly convinced you have to become a child again to really learn anything, particularly a new language.