kangmi: learning korean

Not so odd, really. Books are available 24 hours a day, no appointment necessary. Books aren’t late. You can carry a book in your backpack. You can read a book on a train or a bus. Books don’t ask questions. Books don’t make you do role plays or correct your pronunciation. If a book is boring, you can quit reading it without any negotiation or repercussions. You can’t have a relationship (not in the classic sense, at least, as I would argue differently in another venue) with a book. Thus, every language learner needs a person.

In Building a Corpus of Comprehensible Text (and other articles at Language Impact), Greg Thomson lays out a method of working with what he calls a Language Resource Person (LRP). An LRP is a native (or perhaps otherwise fluent) speaker of your target language, in my case Korean.

So I’ve got an LRP (Namsuk). I showed up at his house yesterday with 20 photographs I got off Flickr (dropped them into PowerPoint, 4 photos to a slide, then printed). After some orientation, I turned on the voice recorder on my MP3 player and we spent the next 37 minutes talking about them on a fairly basic level. “This is a man.” “The woman is wearing a hat.” (Yes, I stacked the deck with some vocabulary that I already knew.) There was some discussion about yellow versus orange, which word Koreans use these days for cup, Namsuk’s career before he came to the States, and words used to describe snowfall.

When I got home, I did a quick-and-dirty edit of the session with Audacity and ended up with 8 usable minutes. I took out almost all the parts where I was talking, and where Namsuk was writing, and where the conversation wasn’t worth preserving. I listened to it on the way to work this morning. I’ll listen to it again whenever I have a chance. I’ll make another one after our next session. I’ve already added eight new pictures to the set of 20, which will provide us with something new to talk about while giving us time to review the old.

Namsuk wasn’t my first choice. I met him and his wife at Korean church recently. I’d been thinking about getting a language exchange partner, and she seemed like a good choice. Insun acted as a go-between, and Sungmin agreed to the proposal. Later, when we met to discuss the arrangement, Sungmin suggested that I meet with her husband instead. He’s the one in school and needs the language practice; she stays at home with their children (three boys followed by a girl, all of them adorable. I’ll never get tired of the cuteness that is children bowing when they greet me. And the stay-at-home part was one of the reasons I thought she would make a great partner.).

Not only was I feeling insecure about my lagging Korean ability, but I hadn’t had a chance to research best practices for a language exchange. Without some kind of structure, I imagine a language exchange might quickly fall apart, and I want to give it a decent shot at success.

All told, it went well. We spent the first half hour going over some questions he had about “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which he’s studying in one of his English classes. Namsuk spent the next half hour talking to me in Korean, and I spent it not talking at all. It wasn’t that the words fled when I needed them. They weren’t there to begin with.

We’ve got a half-hour session coming up tomorrow night, and I’m going to bring some ideas I picked up at Language Impact. There are a couple I’d like to use in the English part (his English is better than my Korean, so he needs different methods), but there are a lot I’d like to use in the Korean part.

Coming up: More on language exchanges; the full Pimsleur report (thanks to the holidays); and a giveaway I’d like to give away, but should I? Should there be a contest for it? Because I like the idea of a contest, but I haven’t had any wild and crazy ideas about it.

The answer to your question is: Do not use my site to learn a little new Korean every day. I do not even use my site to learn a little new Korean every day. The high-minded part of me hopes that my site will be useful to my readers; the middle-minded parts likes that I have some record of my language-learning journey; the low-minded part knows that a lot of blogging is narcissism for introverts, and thus appreciates “great site!”.

You mentioned that you’ve been in Korea for seven months already and are just now going to learn the language. Kudos to you (and all the rest of you out there like Colin). I like Seth Godin’s recent take on the best time to get started. You’re doing great.

You didn’t mention if you already know how to read hangul. If you don’t, you can find several good resources in the Resources section. Pick one, and have a good weekend.

I’ve already given you more than you’ve asked for, and I’ll stop there. But I’ve recently changed my own focus, and I plan to post more about it in the near future.