환영합니다~

Vocabulary | Listening | Editing | Anki settings | Autohotkey | To-do

OK, so you want to learn Korean and want to use Anki. There's a lot of guides out there for Anki (and there's a lot of ways to use it), but I'll suggest some decks and some settings (and more importantly: my rationale for those settings), but ultimately it's up to you to find what works.

The decks suggested here are primarly for someone already fluent in English and wants to learn Korean.

I haven't really tried learning Korean by using a different language (aside from some loanwords like 아르바이트 and the like), but maybe I can help reinforce Korean if I ever start learning Japanese or Mandarin in the future, lol.

Vocabulary

u/wtimkey2016's deck based on Darakwon's 2000 Essetinal Words is one of my favorites. Nicely formatted with some pretty good audio examples. Some of the sentences get a bit complex, but there's usually good context about around the words to help set the scenes.

Here's an older deck from u/wtimkey2016 based on King Sejong's Institute of 5000 words. It's also pretty decent, but I feel the audio clips aren't as nice even as the other deck, if there are more words. I also like the format of their newer deck better, so I'll probably end up converting all of the cards in this second deck to look like the first with some re-ordering of fields and some Autohotkey scripts. Well, at least the ones I end up using.

Evita's Korean Vocabulary deck also has a lot of words, but is just the word and the meaning without examples sentences, audio, or context like the last two, if that's more your style. I still have this in my deck, but I hardly use the cards and if a word I come across isn't in the first two, I just make a new note based on the first deck's format.

Sidenote: at this point, I'm just wondering if I should just remove the cards from this deck that are still suspended... Oh wait theyre only KR->EN? Hrm.... Still maybe useful for someone wanting to just consume written media (like the next deck in a way), but probably not for me.

Retro created a deck based on TTMIK's 500 First Korean words. These have a picture on the front, but at least have audio to go with it.

My suggestions for learning vocab:

1. Learn EN->KR first then learn KR->EN with "bury new siblings" turned on.
2. For EN->KR, I rely solely on recall (though I have toyed around with showing the English sentence examples to show how the word is used, but in English).
3. For KR->EN, I show the example sentences in Korean before flipping/answering.
4. Possibly my biggest piece of advice: don't learn them in the order that they're presented in the deck.

But why?

1. I've always found it easier to recognize words as opposed to producing them (this is not unique to me), so I found that I get more "practice" with the more difficult EN->KR cards that then help jog my memory (hopefully) when the KR->EN cards comes around. I usually end up seeing the EN->KR cards 3-4x as much as the reverse, and since that's what I want to practice more with these cards...it helps.
2. I don't want much context for the EN->KR because it's going to be hard when I try to come up with the word when trying to write/speak it anyway, soooo... It's going to be hard either way, may as well challenge myself.
3. I'll hardly see the words in Korean without context so I may as well add it to help.
4. Why out of order?

Because I'm the one learning the damn words, Janet.

I want to learn words that I've looked up or found or run into or even just end up wanting to know from other cards and not in whatever arbitary order the deck-maker put them in. I'm sure they have their reasons, but mine are better because they're my reasons. So many of my the new vocab notes that I unsuspend and put in line are just words form other vocab cards, but found in the example sentences, lol.

Accomplish this by:

1. I start by suspending all the cards in the deck.
2. When I find a word I want to learn, I unsuspend that note (both sides of the card) and it gets in line with the others I'm wanting to learn
3. I only learn 2-3 cards a day because it's easy to get overwhelmed for me and my retention goal (93-94%)

But yeah. Wanna learn the colors? Unsuspend all of them and get through the colors. Wanna learn some cooking terms? Unsuspend those and reposition them behind the cards you unsuspended earlier so the order's preserved a bit. Have at it!

If you're just starting out with Anki and don't have a large number of cards to review, feel free to do like 10-15/day for the first few days so you have somethign to work with, but please bear in mind that since Anki works off of spaced repition, you also don't want to add too many too fast as the reviews will start to stack up. This may be fine if you're just spending 2-3 seconds a card, but I tend to spend 15-20 seconds (on average) per card, and at one point was looking at nearly 200+ reviews a day and dreading doing an already kind of boring task...so don't let it get there lol.

Listening practice

With listening practice, I don't try to hear every word all the time, depending on the length or speed of the sentence. These are all KR->EN, sometimes with a picture on the front, but never a sentence. Just like the vocab, the bulk of these start their life in my deck all suspended, and then picked by hand based on something like a word that I want to reinforce. There's usually some grammar in the sentece I learned about somewhere and want to see examples of or maybe there's a vocab that's been a bit tricky and that's why the card gets chosen to be unsuspended, for example.

Evita's Korean Grammar Sentences and Retro's Beginner Grammar Sentences are both pretty decent starting points that I still use almost two years later, because if it ain't broke...

Changing the cards

I probably wouldn't do too much to the cards at first. Just learn them as they are without messing with colors or format or whatever else. But after you spend some time with them, you might them "oh, I want to do x" or "I wish this card had y" and the beauty of it is that these decks are now your decks and you're free to do whatever you want with them.

Add that hint field! Put in an answer box on every front card to practice spelling out the word, even when you're shown the KR word first. Delete a card because it's a duplicate and there's going to be a lot of overlap and you like the other card better.

Suspend a card because you didn't realize one deck had 자랑 and the other had 자랑스럽다 and the 자랑-only card is better so you delete the fields in 자랑스럽다 and then combine them with a plugin so that you keep the history so that your six-in-a-row press of "Again" makes it to the new card because they're basically the same card but you also want to keep the history of you failing it six times in a row.

You don't feel like you need to learn the KR->EN card for 서울 because it's too easy? Suspend that card! And then change the EN->KR card to show you something different than "Seoul" and write "the current capital of South Korea" instead. They're your cards now! Do whatever you want~

Anki settings

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• learning steps and FSRS5
  • lots of learning steps sounds good, but it seems to not affect long-term retention that much
  • you do you
  • link to the post about it that you found last time but can't find this time
• deck structure
  • less decks, more tags
  • working decks, storage decks
  • moving cards that are suspended and you're not using
• tagging tips
  • nested tags
  • examples::like::thisOne

Autohotkey things

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• search for highlighted word in the Browse window in a specific field
• transforming one note type into another (and organizing the fields so that it's easier)

To-do list

• check for typos
• suggestions on specific note layout additions or changes
• possibly attempting to write this in Korean because practice