Learning and Anki tips

[Rettend]

Hi @karpathy, I cannot tell you how awesome it is that you started learning Korean. Like many others I also went from enjoying korean dramas to learning the language, so let me share some ideas:

Ditch romanization

• Korean characters are quite easy to learn, and the good thing is that once you learn the sounds in Hangul, you can basically read anything (unlike Chinese and others), even if you don't know the word. So understanding and memorization of the words is not required to be able to read them.
• The characters' pronunciation can change drastically whether they are start or end consonants, or depending on the the syllables that folllow them, and romanization does not account for that (IPA does).
• Romanization is not even a leaky abstraction, it's simply not how the words are pronounced. Look at ㅈ in the words in the table.

Hangul	IPA	Romanization
서점	[sʰʌ̹d͡ʑʌ̹m]	seojeom
정말	[ˈt͡ɕɘ(ː)ŋma̠ɭ]	jeongmal

• The key is that characters that start a word are usually more pronounced. First, it's like j and then more like ch in the second. The character ㅅ is more tricky as it can be s, sh and even t.
• So I would definitely start with mastering Hangul first until you can read Korean Wikipedia articles or sing along to kpop lyrics :). It took me months (surely it could've been faster) to get the logic behind, but after that when I looked at a character, it sort of felt familiar, which is a very powerful feeling.

Cloze cards in Anki

• Simple a/b flashcards never felt right to me, because they are boring and they lack context. So even when learning a single word, I think it's better to include it in a sentence, and cloze cards are basically this. You can select the Cloze type when adding a new card.

Syntax:

<div>저는 새 책을 사러 {{c1::서점::bookstore}}에 갔습니다.</div>	서점은 책을 파는 곳입니다.	

(I went to a bookstore to buy a new book.)/(Bookstore is a place where they sell books.)

First you are shown this:

After guessing it:

GPT-4 is really good at this, given one word (서점) we can use it to create example sentences with it, generate a definition and add the English translation. Now a bookstore is a pretty concrete thing, but usually you cannot translate words 1-to-1 like this, so the definition is added as well (you also learn by reading that).

Note: later, ask for compound sentences for it to use more complex grammar, and I like to add the level I'm at too (A1, A2, B1...)

Currently, I create cards manually with Bing Creative but the moment summer begins, I'm going to try to create a Chrome extension (named Yoinki), now that I'm confident in my typescript. Ideally you just select a word, click on the extension (or tooltip), it generates example sentences, you select some, and it imports them as cards to Anki with Anki-Connect. Anki collections are also easy to share. 👍

Studying this way is so much fun and you get to choose 100% what you want to learn, adding new words as they come up. I prefer GPT to teach me words instead of frantically searching hinative sites (inevitable) and leaving more confused...

Resources

• Aside from TTMIK, I suggest this site: howtostudykorean.com, to read about grammar. It's very detailed and later goes into more advanced territory than TTMIK. Grammar is fun
• Wiktionary is extremely helpful as it has easy example sentences and explanations, and a full expandable table under Conjugation for a ton of words: 공부하다, 모르다

I tried to keep it short and hope this is helpful. I loved your blogs!

[karpathy]

Thank you @Rettend for thoughts/links! howtostudykorean looks great.

RE Romanization I know everyone hates on it but at a very early stage I still find it helpful to have on the side, even when I try to ignore it and read the hangul directly.

Last thought I still don't fully trust GPT-4 to create full examples given just a word. I don't know how much to trust it just yet :). So far it seems quite competent in Korean though!