These videos are teaching English not Korean… But I find them good listening practice since I understand the content easily.

wouldn’t it be more like “Thank you for helping me live diligently”?

mykoreanstudy:

Well it’s up for interpretation, but I personally wouldn’t go with such a translation, for the following reasons:

1. ‘Diligently’ isn’t a word English speakers would use very commonly in everyday speech, whereas ‘열심히’ is an extremely common word used literally every day by Koreans.

2. ‘Live diligently’ sounds (to me) like living a life which is strict or difficult.

3. By treating 살다 and 열심히 as two separate words, you would be ignoring the fact that they are often used together as somewhat of a fixed expression which differs slightly pragmatically than the meaning of 열심히 + the meaning of 살다.

For example, you know when movies end with a protagonist who learns how to make the best of his work life by having fun with it, while making sure to spend meaningful time with his family and exploring his hobbies and laughing with his friends and all that? Those “keep a positive mind and be good to the people around you and everything will turn out perfectly” kind of movies? If you were to ask a Korean speaker what was the moral of such a movie, they would likely say “열심히 살아.” As an english speaker, I would probably say the moral of such a movie was to “live your life to the fullest”

4. If you search “열심히 살자 영어로” you will come up with many Korean people’s suggestions on how to translate it. Koreans likened it to expressions like “

Live today as if there were no tomorrow.” or “Carpe diem,” which I would say is pretty similar to my translation.

5. If you look up “열심히 살다” on naverdic similar translations come up. ex:

[일반]She believes in living life to the max

그녀는 삶을 최대한도로 (열심히) 살아야 한다고 믿는다.

[일반]I’ve always believed in living life to the fullest

나는 늘 인생을 최대한 열심히 살아야 한다고 믿어 왔다.

With all that said, I do think there’s a context in which 열심히 살다 could be translated as “live diligently” or more colloquially “work hard,” but I feel like in the case of this context it makes more sense that you would thank someone for helping you make the best of every situation and achieve your dreams, which I think in short is similar to “living life to the fullest.”

superbkorean:

비누 [binu] “Soap”

근데 오늘은 다른 분들이 사정(situation, circumstances)이

있대요.

물론 우리나라 말에 ‘해가 떴다’(the sun rose)는 말은 ‘화창하다’(bright, sunny)는 뜻도 포함(inclusion)하고 있지만요..

긴장돼네(tense, nervous) 영(0)

이건 중요한 상식(common knowledge)인데요

흥미

나는 스포츠에 흥미가 없다 = I’m not interested in sports.
야구는 아주 흥미 있는 스포츠다 =

Baseball is a very interesting sport.
그는 나에게 아주 흥미로운 제안을 했다 = He made me a very interesting offer.

관심

그 남자가 너에게 관심 있는 것 같아 = I think he’s interested in you.
그녀는 항상 사람들의 관심을 받고 싶어 한다 = She always craves attention from others.

hi! so i trying to self learn korean but im having a hard time. Can you recommend a structure to follow when learning? like i can read hangul, really slowly tho, and pronouncing a lot of blocks together is hard.. so should i keep practicing hangul until it comes natural (altho i dont understand a thing) and then move to voc and grammar or shoud i start right away and practice my hangul on the way? thanks for the answer!

Hi, I personally went straight into vocab and grammar after learning hangul and I think that actually helped me memorise the pronunciation and made things a lot easier. Because I used TalkToMeInKorean there was also romanisation, so for the first few lessons I could check that if forgot the pronunciation of any of the Korean letters (which I did a lot). But only as a back up and don’t rely on romanisation once you’ve memorised hangul!

As for structuring the rest, it’s best to follow lessons from a book or website (resources). Some people ask whether they should learn vocab or grammar first, and the answer is both together! Lessons will usually teach a grammar point, with new vocab in examples or perhaps as a vocab list, and I’d really recommend learning both. Other than that, practising everything you learn through lang-8, the hellotalk app, and reading and listening resources is really important to be able to use Korean.