Sofie to Korea

I have long been a fan of TTMIK’s News in Korean, and since my reading comprehension and vocabulary have expanded dramatically after six months of use, I’ve gradually started to embrace “real” news in Korean as an additional learning source. For the past couple of weeks I have made a habit of reading a Naver news piece in Korean every morning. I started out in the lighter genre of entertainment news, since I was pretty familiar with the vocabulary related to dramas and K-pop. Then I slowly progressed to economic, political, and health-related content. Not only do I expose myself to a lot of new words, I also familiarize myself with issues going on in present-day Korea. I will have to say that without having trained with the TTMIK articles this would not have been so easy, but already knowing essential words related to society, politics, health, and economics has made the transition into real news reading a real breeze.

I read each article in the same way:

1. Quick skimming of content – trying to grasp the idea (Skimming in Korean is 들춰보다)
2. Careful reading, making mental notes of words to look up
3. Looking all new words up and writing the sentences in which they occur in my notebook with the new word in a different ink color (excellent method for context based vocabulary training)

Here’s the headline of the article I read this morning:

한국경제 하반기도 ‘암울‘…3·4분기 성장률도 0%대 행진 지속

Roughly translated this means “Korean economy faces a gloomy second half of the year. Growth rate continues to be around 0% for the 3rd and 4th quarter.”

하반기 Second half of year (상반기 means first half of year. Note that 상 means “above” and 하 means “under”)

암울 Gloom

성장률 Growth rate (anything with 률/율 means rate)

(Full link to article here)

The article tells about new growth prospects for the second half of 2015 having been published and how Korea ranks compared to other leading industrialized countries. It appears that Korean trade has taken a significant blow from the MERS outbreak earlier this summer. Being heavily dependent on China as a trade partner Korea also suffers in the aftermath of China’s recent economic problems.

Useful words for reading the article are:

부진 Slump (or recession)
여파 Aftermath
하향조정 Downward adjustment
선진국 vs. 신흥국 Developed vs. developing nation

타격 Blow (to suffer a blow 타격을 받다)
금리/이자 Interest (rate)
유가 Oil price
국제신용평가기관 International credit rating agency

Do you guys also supplement your Korean learning with internet sources like news sites or blogs? Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.