Big Dog is Gonna Learn Korean

Discussion in 'Language Learning Logs & Super Challenges' started by Big_Dog, Oct 1, 2014.

  1. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    The Wikipedia description of A1 is:

    That seems to perfectly describe him for listening & speaking: he was able to cope with a few basic questions with some patience and assistance from his interlocutor. His grammar was virtually non-existent, more jumbled of words and phrases than sentences. But, his vocabulary was great, and some of his individual phrases were good, common usage, so I'd guess B1 for reading. He suggested in his final video that if were to spend a few evenings immersed in conversation a lot of his passive knowledge would be activated, and I bet he's right.

    The comment about sounding Japanese was interesting. The other day I had two foreigners with me at work who don't speak Korean, and after an incidental Korean-language exchange between myself and a co-worker, one of them suggested that my words had sounded Japanese to him. In English we all recognize French accents, German accents, and so forth, and I've tried to investigate how Koreans perceive the same in their own language, whether a German-Korean accent is different from an English-Korean accent, and so forth, but I never get a satisfying answer. Perhaps this Japanese-sounding phenomenon may be a manifestation of that. I know my own English accent resembles Mr. Kaufmann's. I'll look into it more.
  2. Peregrinus

    Peregrinus Active Member

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    I find reading aloud to be very beneficial for me with German. Although I mainly concentrate on input, I want my mouth/brain to be used to saying German, and I believe my current level allows me to fairly accurately correct myself for pronunciation. Given your experience above perhaps reading aloud should be part of any later maintenance program.
  3. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    He's a really good Japanese speaker, so I think that has some influence. I often recognize things in Korean due to my Japanese knowledge, but there is usually a difference in pronunciation. He said some phrases exactly as they sound in Japanese, so that's why I asked.
    Yes - I recommend reading out loud all the time in the beginning. One of the benefits is the positive effect it has on your pronunciation. Provided you did step 1, and you constantly try to pronounce correctly when you read, it will help keep you on track. But with hard to pronounce languages I recommend doing more, because when you take away the visual aid of the text things can degenerate. So consciously making an effort to pronounce correctly when you converse is a good idea from time to time. And a more extreme technique is to record yourself to discover your weaknesses. Recording unrehearsed conversation with a native speaker is probably the best. Having others critique it is also a good idea. Both native speakers and advanced non-native speakers can be helpful (some times native speakers can be a little lenient).
  4. Wise owl chick

    Wise owl chick Active Member

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    Yes, in the german culture, you must write extremely pompously and complicatedly or they will not accept that you are intelligent or educated. German speakers have told me this.

    I don't think that most of the Germans can read the FAZ. but of course it's a great aim.

    Viel Spaß, sowas werde ich nie lesen können, aber das ist mir auch eigentlich echt egal. Aber toll, dass du es tun möchtest
  5. sevitzky

    sevitzky New Member

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    **Heavily Edited**

    Hey Big Dog,

    Thanks for the invite onto the forum. Looking forward to your Korean learning process!

    Warning, this post is a jambalaya from the swampy bayou of my mind. It could use a lot more organizing, but perfect is the enemy of good.

    I've been thinking about this thread a lot; I'm really curious to see what your thoughts are as you get deeper into Korean.

    I am learning my first foreign language, Korean. I live in Korea, with a Korean wife. I study with a tutor twice a week. I have conversation classes 2-3x a week. And I try to have extensive conversations at every possible moment. My son is now "half" Korean. And I have a very important speaking test in a couple months that I would like to pass. I have a doctorate in the humanities, and I currently teach English. I read and absorb theoretical materials quickly, which I have begun applying to language acquisition theory (mostly English language, applied to Korean, now...) So I have long-term and short-term goals, motivations, and

    Learning Korean is insanely difficult for me.

    When I found the HTLAL "I Hate Korean" thread, I felt this gush of relief. It was reading my own subconscious thoughts typed out on a forum. This is my first foreign language, so I didn't know how hard it is. Just chipping away at frustrations and developing tolerance for ambiguity.



    The grammar is beautiful and logical. I'm betting you'll breeze through it.

    The phonology is something very special. I don't have experience to really describe it properly, but I can try to apply my intuition and heuristic tendencies to hazard a description (echoed many other places):

    I don't think isolating and mastering phonemes/lexemes will give you a particular advantage as you move forward. **This is just my guess.** I would highly suggest beginning with phonology of all these things:
    phonemes
    words
    clause-or-sentence (authentic or close to it)
    The reason is, the phonetic morphology of individual syllables is very flexible. (They are alive, man!) They want to grow and change, depending on the surrounding sounds. I think the sooner a learner realizes this, the better. Some consonants are swallowed. Vowels change to the adjacent vowel. Some consonants change from glottal stops to nasal aspirations.

    There is a facial-muscle/phonal logical to all of this, which explains where/why the phonetic morphing occurs. And it is very clear, and second nature to Korean speakers, of course. But there is no manual for the outsider. And as usual for native speakers, it's hard to explain WHY something is done. (Because it's "natural", don't you see? :)) As I develop, I have been able to internalize some of these rules, but it is very hard earned!

    These three sentences, show a reduction in English.
    1. What are you doing?
    2. Whacha doing?
    3. What'r'ya doing?

    Any version of this sentence, spoken reasonably close to the phonetic prescription, would be understandable to the English speaker.

    But an analogous example in Korean would fail horribly, if you spoke the wrong version, especially Version 1, especially slowly. How can this be? As others have noted, Korean has a relatively small pool of phonemes that it works with. Small variations in your phonetic pronunciation leads possible communication of a different phoneme. And then of course, there are many homophonic words - even if you did say the right thing. How do you know for sure? CONTEXT!!!! context.. Will kill u.

    Finally, speed. If you say things too slowly, people are LESS likely to understand you. My wife explained this to me and I can confirm from experience that it is absolutely true (in my experience). You can't just say..... each...... word...... and let the listener assemble them. This is why I keep going back to the importance of sentence-level phonology. This seems like a terribly cruel irony, no? That slowing down actually reduces chances for successful communicating? Korea has no time for the slow.

    Oh, one more thing. When I started slurring my speech a bit, my pronunciation became better. Yup, really. I know that the word "slurring" has a negative connotation, so we have to think of it in a different way. It's more like, the adjacent phonemes have an impact on the syllable on your tongue. This isn't conscious, of course. But it might allow us to understand that slurred speech isn't just information BEING REMOVED or losing integrity, (softened constants, morphing vowels) but rather, information from the neighboring phonemes IS BEING ADDED. To take a macro concept, perhaps we could say the phonology is contextual at the level of adjacency. (Hm, that makes me sound smart, right??)

    These are just some of the reasons you can study Korean for months, walk into a coffee shop, and have a completely debilitating experience. I'm willing to be every L2 Korean learner would back me up on this. :) (I hope) (Nobody?)

    Word stress:
    I'm out of time, but I want to quickly mention, I think Koreans don't use emphasis-stress in the same way we do in English. THIS way or THAT way? They sometimes emphasize the musical, or functional particles (gluttinators or whatever) out of a hurried effort to complete the sentences. My personal belief is that Korean often exhibits non-semantic stress in favor of something else (which I don't understand). This throws red herrings all over the place for the "thing" to listen for.

    Hangul is deceptive. It has an amazing simple orthographic system. But it describes a VERY old, very matured phonetic system which has nuances far beyond the orthography. Don't misunderestimate it! :) This could describe nearly every language, obviously, but I think Korean is special -- speculating, here -- since the writing system was an invention and an imposition onto an existing thing. It didn't evolve alongside the language. Maybe I'm being ethnocentric.

    What Peregrinus mentions is true. The Korean language is inextricably linked to neo-confucian culture. The reason that Koreans don't use pronouns is much more than a linguistic quirk -- it deeply reflect the contextual nature of the society. People are ranked in terms of seniority determined by birthdays. This comes down to the year, month, day, hour, minute, and SECOND (in the case of twins) that you are born. It completely defines the standing of the individual in a family unit. And in Korea, the family unit is everything. I'm not going on a tangent here. All of this is important, because when you say a sentence like
    Open the door.
    You don't have to specify the Agent who is opening the door. It is obviously a low-ranking, able-bodied person who will do this. Probably the daughter. So you don't specify an agent, because it is socially predetermined.
    But this extends to deixis & anaphora in general. And this extends even to TENSE conjugation. You can say something in the present tense because the CONTEXT of what you say allows the listener to understand that it actually means the future, or the past, or whatever have you. Tolerance for Ambiguity, anybody? Check here:☒

    We're not done, yet. There are 6 different Formalities of verb conjugation depending on the social context (who is talking to whom, etc). (This doesn't even count the formalities applied to the CONTENTS of the sentence.) Now, FINE. 6 different ways to say something? GIT R DONE! Learn it! Learn 6x more sentences! But it's not just matter of having more options to choose from.

    Speakers invariably have different grammatical constructions (not just conjugations) of saying different things, so you will have certain phrases that have socially ossified into conversational use. Out of those 6 phrases, you'll only hear/use two forms.

    NOW, NOW NOW NOW NOW. Here's the more interesting thing. Korean education comes from a strong rote-learning tradition. And a strong hierarchical tradition, ala our centuries of grammar translation. Communicative language teaching (CLT) is VERY new here, academically, and in practice. So they tend to teach from very formal perspectives. Learning "your basics" means very different things to Korean teachers. They may feel you need to learn the "most formal" verb conjugations to begin. You will never hear these utterances outside of very special circumstances. But aside from pragmatic usage, the curriculum of these learning environments is SO accuracy based (Korea is the land of tests) that it sacrifices strides towards fluency. This can be very stunting to growth towards production fluency.

    So, back to the Formality/Politeness levels. You will have certain phrases that you use. But there will be this emphasis to "learn properly" before you begin to work closely with common utterances. One book in particular, Ganada, keeps switching back and forth between the usual-polite form and the super-polite form, throughout all the beginning chapters. This dumps a cognitive load onto the brain that is neither rewarding, necessary, efficient, or kind.

    And guess what ------- in nearly 9 months of living here --------- i NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER use the Super-Polite form. NEVER NEVER NEVER. You know why? Because elders so RARELY talk to their underlings (me... younger than them.) So we have a cultural context which champions Grammar Translation Methods. And then we have a cultural context which prevents the usage of said language. Check here to request additional Tolerance for Ambiguity: ☒

    I have a great tutor who is very grammar focused, but this tutor has a curriculum directed towards productive grammar. This person is different than every other Korean educator that I have met.

    Anyway, this Korean-Education methodology will only be stunting, so far as most text books go. I'm sorry to generalize so much, without very specific sources.




    Something about the 90 Day Challenge for Korean video left me feeling very unsettled. Initially, I thought it was the (French Quebec?) accent he brought to Korean, or all the um's and ah's. Thinking further on this, it wasn't just performance artifacts that disturbed me, but rather the thought that this method seemed to have no results for sentence-level phonology. Or in other words, a natural sounding sentence, especially for common utterances. I couldn't find much written about his Korean approach, but if the capstone was meant to show progress, I think it it was missing that crucial component.

    Nobody - I was surprised at your relative tolerance for that conversation! I immediately felt that continuing along that approach would lead to failure in native contexts. There are so many cultural reasons for that, as well, and depending on people's goals, it might not matter so much. But something about it felt very much like painting by numbers, and not really speaking *Korean*. Perhaps I'm too harsh.

    Anyway, sorry everybody, for this messy post!
    Last edited: Dec 1, 2014
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  6. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Nice post sevitzky, and welcome to the forum!

    Lol – you got the wrong guy. I don't fine grammar beautiful. It's my weakness, so I'm unlikely to breeze through it, but I look forward to the challenge.

    I agree. That's why I've spelled this out in Synergy. I gave additional detail about individual sounds here because it's going to need a little more attention than usual.

    Interesting - thanks for the info.

    Smart lady. This is also the case with Mandarin. My partners often complimented me on my speed, and mentioned how hard it was to understand the average learner when they talked slowly.

    I believe it. Some Mandarin speakers really slur, and it’s a regional phenomenon too. I basically match my partner when I talk.

    This is possible in every language. I’m confident that if I stick to my method, with the extra attention given to pronunciation in the beginning that I mentioned, it won’t be any worse than usual.

    I’ve met quite a few Japanese who have learned Korean about as easily as Americans learn Spanish.

    I’ll try not to. I intend on learning 1k+ hanja eventually, and my background in hanzi and kanji should help with that. But for a beginner it sure is nice to have a (somewhat) phonetic writing system to work with.

    I assume it’s much more complicated than that. Japanese is, and I’ve heard Korean has even more levels.

    For reasons like this, I prefer to learn languages on my own. I use partners/tutors for conversation, but that’s about it. That being said, it’s fun to take a vacation in the host country and take a few classes in little private language schools.

    I rarely use it in Japanese. And the only time I hear it in person is when a person serves me.

    Steve Kauffman’s method is almost pure listening and reading. I don’t know if he departed from it to do this special challenge though. If he really wanted to learn the language to a high level, I have no doubt that he would succeed, regardless of his poor start. He’s a tough, seasoned old goat. Hmm, now I’m hungry…Anyway, I found your comments, and really your whole post, very interesting. I’ll keep it in mind when I finish my Russian :)
  7. sevitzky

    sevitzky New Member

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    You know, I just realized something, reading your reply. My post might have come off as some kind of lecture or finger wagging! Thanks for not taking it that way; it was really just thinking out loud. " Don't underestimate it!" this was supposed to be a more whimsical "don't misunderestimate it"....

    I'm looking forward to reading your thoughts as you get deeper into Korean!
  8. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    No worries. You did type "don't misunderestimate it"…I changed it in the quote because I thought it was a typo, but I didn't touch your original post. So much for my sense of humor. :D
    I hope to start Korean some time next year, so I may be asking you some questions at that point.
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  9. sevitzky

    sevitzky New Member

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    Typo??? The epic words of GW Bush? Was there ever a finer specimen of that "Beautiful Grammar" we were talking about?? His malapropisms are some of my favorite. Someone get me a chisel and block of marble!

    One last thing:
    1.
    I think you probably know of Talk to Me in Korean (TTMIK) but I didn't see it listed in the materials thread.
    The website has been covered other places; it's a known quantity and pretty good.

    But I specifically want to recommend their "My Weekly Korean Vocabulary" book, which is especially useful in terms of the audio. Contemporary, "real life" speech with very useful, contextualized vocabulary which offers an inductive introduction to grammar and idiomatic expressions. They have male and female voices reading at different speeds, so you can really hear the phonemic-changes caused by pacing. I use a lot of slowed-down audio to study, which is very useful, but that way doesn't illustrate the "inner logic" of the language as well.

    2.
    Traktor iPhone/iPad app: recommended to everybody for studying sound. I'll probably post something on HTLAL to get more exposure on the post.

    3.
    http://www.howtostudykorean.com/
    I keep finding myself returning to this website when I have grammar questions for materials I've already studied. I'm always dubious of online stuff, but this guy has earned my trust. The conversational tone of his explanations make for easy reading.
  10. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Great resources - thanks!
  11. Nobody

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    This was also my initial experience. Part of it is pronunciation (like you said, the sounds slur together and syllable-boundaries shift, and that must occur), and part of it is also the fact that verb-ending particles often have different meanings based upon whether they are connective or final, meaning that an overly-long pause can be confusing. My most memorable failure, though, was asking a taxi driver to take me to the bus terminal. I had to ask about four times, and Koreans even use English loan words for the place in question (버스 터미널).

    Right, Korean does not use stress-emphasis patterns like we do. A few dialects have a certain limited tonality (pitch accent), and of course rising/falling intonation can signal things like a question or differentiate between usage of certain particles, but no stress, and speaking with stress patterns can make it sound a bit weird I've been told.

    You are not too harsh. But, three months also isn't that much time.
  12. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    And as far as politeness levels go, the actual most polite form (하소서체) is effectively defunct. I have only heard it used in historic dramas and in the Korean tranalation of Final Fantasy 6 for Cyan's speech (which was interesting). The highest you would actually hear today is 합쇼체, which is actually fairly common in business and official contexts, but I still hear (and use) a lot more 해요체, even in the workplace, and even with superiors.
  13. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Is that the level a server would use with you in a store?
  14. Nobody

    Nobody Member

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    Sometimes, but you can hear a lot of 해요체 in restaurants or stores too. The easiest place to hear 합쇼체 reliably is probably the news. It is not merely "polite," but "polite formal."
  15. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    2 years and 8 months after I started this thread, I've finally gotten around to beginning Korean. I've pretty much followed my plan outlined in the OP, so I won't modify that post, but I will briefly summarise what I've done and what I'll be doing in the near future.

    I started 9 days ago. My first 6 days were spent learning hangul and pronunciation of phonemes and syllables. I used Korean From Zero! almost exclusively for this step, although I did poke around youtube a little. I finished the 7 step mini-course in 6 days, and decided now was not the time to tackle all pronunciation issues up to the word level, such as disappearing and morphing sounds. What's important is that I can make all sounds easily and distinguishably. Of course, I'm waiting for some big pronunciation issues to hit me upside the head, but so far so good. I don't understand why people think we don't make the ㅓsound in English, or why they confuse it with ㅏ, but apparently that's a problem. We make the equivalent sounds of all their consonants, and all vowels except for ㅡ, which is equivalent to อื in Thai, so I'm covered.

    Immediately after claiming victory over low level pronunciation, I started Pimsleur I. I'm on lesson 3. Unfortunately, Edition 2 isn't due out until the end on October, so I decided not to wait for it. They claim that the main fix was to make the language less formal, which is a big plus, but they've been pushing the date out for a couple years now, so I have zero confidence in them keeping this new one. Pimsleur is tough, as it always is the way I do it, but I feel I'm finally starting to learn the language.

    Here's my procedure with Pimsleur. I obtained a transcript for the first 30 lessons. I prepare the transcript for anki, breaking out any items I'd like to study separately. Then I listen to Pimsleur the first time. This first time, I'll stop the recording on rare occassion to fix the transcript if it needs it. After that, I feed the transcript into anki, and write it out by hand in list form. I'll memorise the list, and usually after a few hours listen to Pimsleur again, no stopping this time. The next day I listen to Pimsleur the third and final time, no stopping, and do the anki reps. While doing the reps, I write out the hangul as part of my answer. This might sound like a lot, but when I'm finished Pimsleur I want to have a solid start in listening, speaking, reading, writing, sentence level pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. As I said it's really hard right now. It's a hard language and I'm rusty at starting new languages; the last language I started was 6 years ago. But I hope that after the first 10 lessons or so I can drop it to just 2 listens per lesson.

    I started listening on day 1. I mostly watched Korean dramas with English subtitles, for example Pinocchio. This was enjoyable, but having exactly zero knowledge of the language made me feel I was wasting my time. So I tried many different podcasts, and settled on my favorite, Talk to me in Korean (TTMIK). I'll switch back to a combination of TV and podcasts soon. I'm considering focusing more on news in the beginning.

    Here is a blurry picture of today's writing:
    14424851_1696671357322584_4384846104673354245_o.jpg
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2016
  16. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    This is day 16; after this I'll probably only post once a month around the first of each month. I'll start posting videos as soon as I'm actually conversing, so I'm forecasting December 1 for my first one.

    My big news this week was that I started Michel Thomas. There are only about 2 hours of lessons, or 13 lessons, and I just finished lesson 6, so it obviously isn't going to take my grammar to a very high level. I'm hoping this will be a very fast way to get a big chunk of basic grammar under my belt, which has been the case for most Michel Thomas courses I've used.

    Pimsleur is going smoothly, as expected. I had a glitch and had to repeat lesson 6 an extra time though. For some reason, it was just harder. I seem to recall this same problem when I was learning Russian. In fact, I remember thinking "I'm never going to learn this language" when that happened. But I persevered, and turned it around almost immediately. That's what happened with Korean too, but I mostly just doubted the quality of Pimsleur. It sure seems faster and less useful than other Pimsleur programs at times. But now I'm on top of it and I don't expect to have any more problems. My procedure hasn't changed yet, meaning I'm still giving each lesson a total of 3 listens over the coarse of 2 days; I haven't felt strong enough to drop it to two listens yet. I want to keep finishing one lesson per day, which is a faster pace than I used for all previous Pimsleur programs.

    The new version of Pimsleur is supposed to be out by the end of this month. I haven't decided what to do yet, but I'm considering quitting after I finish lesson 30. There are so many other things I want to do with this language, and so many great resources out there that I'm getting tempted. If I feel my pronunciation is really good after 30 lessons, I might take the leap.

    So I'm still in the first step of Synergy at this point, and it's living up to it's name. I'm working on all skills - listening, speaking, writing and reading. I'm also working on pronunciation, vocabulary and Michel Thomas is boosting my grammar. There's nothing left, but these programs I'm using right now won't take me very far. What's next?

    Step 2 of Synergy is basically to do everything. My plan right now is to
    • Talk to a tutor every morning, mainly for conversation practice and vocabulary. This is easily the best way I've found to quickly become a good speaker. I estimate that, as long as I keep my other skills in work, I'll reach B1 after about 100 hours of lessons, but I'd like to finish at least 200 before I hit the 1 year mark. For comparison, I had less than 50 in my first year of Russian.
    • I'll continue to listen to the TTMIK podcasts, and dump them into LingQ to read them. I'm considering doing more reading on LingQ this time in an effort to boost my listening comprehension. I've noticed that Steve Kaufmann reads about twice as much as I do, for example. That's gotta be the reason his listening comprehension gets so good so fast. He's not afraid to tackle articles that have over 50% unknown words either, in the beginning. I'd like to get at least 20,ooo lingQs before the year is up.
    • I want to watch a lot of TV. Mostly dramas, but probably some news too. I'll also give radio a try, since it's so content rich. I want to listen 1000 hours before the year is up.
    • I'll work though my Korean From Zero! textbook. I'll definitely finish the first book, and if I like it, I'll go after the other two. I may just do 2 and 3 online, since they're all free. I'd like to finish the first book before the year is up, but may do more.
    • I'll write 5 lines of text per day minimum. I'll also text and type in Korean sporadically.
    • I'll do my anki reps. I'll be very aggressive in the beginning, but loosen up by the end of the year, probably putting a cap on reps, or even deleting decks.
    • I'll get a lot of input, especially in the beginning, about my pronunciation, probably by posting videos. I don't want to have to worry about it at all later on. I should be well finished with it by the time the year is up.
    Last edited: Oct 1, 2016
  17. Big_Dog

    Big_Dog Administrator Staff Member

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    Ok, I have some time this evening and I feel like writing a little. I think I'll take the goals listen in my last post and stick them in the first post.

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