Quote:
Originally Posted by
tiecollector 
Watching TV can help a bit, but not when you are starting off. It will just sound like noise until you can slow it down in your head. The only way to do this is to speak with real people and use a textbook.
Yes, this is true... watching Korean TV shows is good for someone who already has a basic understanding of the language and a decent vocabulary... I like watching this one show called something like "Talk Show Panel of Beautiful Women" (that's not the exact title) -- it features a panel of foreign women (i.e., non-Koreans) who live in Korea and speak Korean with varying degrees of fluency... there's a girl or two from Canada, one from Germany, Australia, China, America, Japan, Africa, Mongolia, etc. etc. They all sit together in a studio in front of an audience, where they go around the room discussing various topics, like "What it's like for a Foreign Woman to date a Korean Man in Korea" and "How Are Korean Men Different from the Men of My Country", "What I Think of Korean Food", and "Funny things That Have Happened To Me Since I Started Living In Korea", etc. etc. The one constant on the show is that the Asian non-Korean women (the Chinese, Mongolian, Japanese, etc.) ALL speak Korean much better than the White and Black and non-Asian women do. I always find that amusing. But anyway from a linguistic perspective, it's quite interesting to hear the Korean host and hostess pose questions to the panel of non-Koreans in (obviously) fluent Korean, and then to hear the responses by the non-Native speakers as some of them struggle with how to say in Korean what they want to say... they all speak passable Korean... they're all conversant in Korean... it's just that sometimes the Canadian or the German girl, for example, will say something in broken Korean that's just incredibly cute that has me rolling on the floor, and the whole audience cracks up.
