My First TOPIK Experience

Three weeks ago, I finally fulfilled a long-time dream of mine — I took the TOPIK (the Test of Proficiency in Korean).  And even though this post is a little delayed, I still wanted to share all the details about my TOPIK preparations and test experience.

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Korean Speaking Encounters — My New Part Time Job

For as long as I’ve been learning Korean, I’ve had the goal of improving my Korean speaking skills.  Unfortunately, even though I’ve made a considerable number of Korean friends and hang out with them pretty much every day, I’ve fallen into the dreadful habit of speaking 95% English to them and only rarely throwing a few Korean phrases into the mix.  The main reason for this is that I’m shy by nature and I’m terrified of making mistakes in front of them.  I realize it’s silly to be anxious and embarrassed of making mistakes in front of my friends, especially since they make mistakes in English all the time and it’s no big deal, but what can I say?  It’s just an unfortunate character trait that I have to overcome.

Since I’m embarrassed in front of my friends, you can probably guess that I definitely don’t speak Korean to random strangers — at least, I didn’t use to.  That’s changed a bit in the past few weeks.

Looking Back: A Life-Changing Year

It’s incredible how time works.  Sometimes a year can seem like the blink of an eye, and sometimes a year can seem like an absolute eternity.  Most of the time it seems like a strange combination of both–an absolute eternity that somehow zooms past before you realize it.

Most of the summer I’ve spent apart from my friends, which has caused me to be in a weird nostalgic mood for several months.  I keep thinking back to what my life was like before grad school started last August, and I honestly can’t imagine going back to that life.  I’ve met so many people who have become so precious to me, and I can’t imagine returning to a time where I didn’t know them.

My New Korean Focus – Taking the TOPIK

In typical blogger fashion (or is it just me?), I’ll start off this post by lamenting about the embarrassing 6-month long hiatus I’ve taken from updating my blog.  Despite the fact that few people (if any) have even noticed my absence, I always feel obligated to address it.

While I’m sure you’re all dying to know what fun language-learning adventures I’ve experienced in the first half of 2018, those will have to wait until a later post.  Today I’m going to talk about one of my new short-term goals: taking the 60th TOPIK this October.

Language Learning Pro Tip: Vocabulary Lists are Useless

In the 7 months that I’ve been in my Applied Linguistics Master’s Program, I’ve learned a crazy amount of information about second language acquisition theory and practical learning and teaching applications of that knowledge.  Some of this information was new to me, and some of it confirmed what I had already figured out via trial and error in my own language learning journey.

I finally feel ready to start compiling some of this information and presenting it here in the form of “pro tips”.

Language Goals for 2018

It’s already a week into the new year, but I’m just now getting around to posting my language learning goals for 2018.  Even though I mentioned in my last post that my goals tend to change a lot throughout the year and that’s why I didn’t meet my original goals for 2017, I still enjoy the process of setting goals.  It’s fun to have something to work towards throughout the year, and I enjoy looking back through old posts and seeing what goals were important to me in times past.

That said, here are my goals for the remaining 51 weeks of the year:

Looking Back: 2017 Progress Report

At the beginning of the year (which seems like an eternity ago), I set several language learning goals that I hoped to accomplish this year (read them here).  In hindsight, this was a rather futile quest since my interests and focus have shifted several times throughout the year.  I thought it would still be fun to reflect