I've been working on rebuilding my Korean learning practice this month. I've been doing 1 or 2 lessons a week on Italki, and I have been using Anki for flash cards. I decided to make a brand new deck, and am focusing on adding only common and useful words and phrases.

There have been a few times where I've been able to actually speak Korean in a somewhat natural way. But most of the time, I spend a lot of time just trying to remember the word and how the conjugation goes.

When I look back at the time that I've spent learning Korean, I realize that I am not actually putting a lot of time into it. I put in maybe 30 minutes of studying flash cards a day, then 1-2 hours of speaking per week. That's about 5 hours a week give or take of actual studying. If I continue this rate, I won't reach conversational fluency until about... 30 years old give or take if we assume 1200 hours to reach conversational fluency, and I wouldn't reach fluency until I'm about 35. I don't really need to reach conversational or fluency though. My goal is to be able to understand basic terms and to have a basic conversation. Maybe watch a drama and at least be able to somewhat understand what's going on.

Am I willing to put in the time to learn Korean? I am. It will take a long time, but as long as I'm consistent. I will eventually reach my goal. It's literally impossible to not learn Korean if I spend time doing it every day for years straight. I'm only just over 1 year into it, and I haven't even been that consistent this year. Probably 6-8 months in actual time of learning Korean.

It's hard. It's not going to get easier. But I'm going to keep at it.