Intermediate

Duration: 6 months

Goal of this stage

Boost up vocabulary
Familiarise with intermediate level grammar structures
Start picking up advanced level grammar structures
Train up a good sense of the language usage

This is where most self study learners or even classroom learners hit a bottleneck and don’t know how to advance. This is because first there are a lot of similar sentence structures each with their nuances in usage that can easily be confused with each other, for example -고 싶다, -가 싶다, -나 싶다, -다 싶다, -까 싶다, -까 보다. You would have realized by now there are numerous similar verb / adjective conjunctions to indicate anything from the time tense to the speaker’s intention, from the probability of the event to expressing the speaker’s emotion. Secondly, we all know that there is no better way to learn a language then being exposed to it a lot. By being exposed to abundant example usages of these very similar grammar structures you will grow to be able to distinguish them like how kids growing up in Korea do. Also by continuous exposure, you get to build up your vocabulary. The challenge is to find resources at the appropriate difficulty level so that you don’t frustrate yourself in learning obscure vocabulary or grammar that is rarely used. Even with all the online resources are available these days, this is still hard.