What*s Up?

A couple of random things:

FIRST—I’m thinking about going to Ghana in 2014.

While thinking about that and while looking at videos on Africa, I found this gem. I want to learn how to make proper, well gorgeous, videos with my DSLR like this.

RWANDA from MAMMOTH on Vimeo.

SECOND. I passed my Korean test (TOPIK) with the score I wanted, a 4!

How I passed: I watched Korean TV for at least 1.5 hours a week for an entire year. I studied a little bit every 3-4 months (no more than an average of 20 hours a month, including TV time). I crammed during the month of the test.

Despite my waffling in posts here, I am a visual learner. During the last two weeks before the exam, I learned more than 875 words—yeah, it wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had—which probably made all the difference in the world. About 200 of those 875 terms were learned two days before the test. After that, I just reviewed to make sure I was retaining them. I was. My retention rate was 97%.

Most of those words were rather technical (e.g. nuclear energy, division between rich/poor, low birth rate) but I’m always happy when I can expand my vocabulary and they appear often enough in the news. Moving forward, I hope to do a lot of reading. When it comes to language learning, I’m all about input (reading + listening) as it makes for a strong foundation. The rest seems to come fairly naturally.