It’s hard to take my own advice to back off Korean study when the timing is off, but sometimes my will is overcome. Three days after I put up the Kangmi Blog Festival post, my husband had a dramatic incident in which we found him laying on the floor. A couple of weeks later, another dramatic incident sent him to the emergency room.
While his ailment turned out to be nothing more than an inner ear disorder (seemingly temporary, at that; and now we know that his heart and brain are healthy), it did throw a wrench into our lives from which mine has only recently recovered. Somewhere in there I had a viral infection that knocked me out for a few days, and some other stressors (so minor that I can no longer remember them) cropped up. Several things that were on track got knocked off, and my Korean study is the last thing to be put back on. The mechanics are in fact still working on it, and I expect that it will be a couple of weeks before I get into the full swing again.
So while the still-nameless Korean blog carnival is behind schedule, I’m planning to put up the first one on May 1. You may still send me your ideas for a name for this event, and I still have a World Language Repeater for the winner.
kangmi (the site, not me) will shortly undergo a transformation. You’ll see a new look. The Resources page will become a wiki. Lots of crap will go away. Even better, I will not be doing the work. Learning Korean is enough.
Posted by kangmi on March 29, 2007 at 11:56 AM1 comments
EFL Geek tagged me, and I’m in a good mood.
1. I once worked at a roller skating rink, and it wasn’t while I was in high school. Only recently have I appreciated the comic potential of this part of my work history.
2. While in high school, I wanted to grow up and be an actress. My last major role was in college, as Mary in Two from Galilee (the one that’s not a musical).
3. I majored in history and religion in college.
4. Someday I plan to change my name.
5. I am writing a screenplay (to be honest, I have more than one in the pipeline).
Hard to pick just five people to tag, so I tag you.
Posted by kangmi on January 23, 2007 at 12:43 PM3 comments
I’m starting a monthly blog carnival of Korean language learning. Over the years, there have been a handful of bloggers blogging exclusively about Korean language learning. Some are still active, others have gone dormant or left us altogether. Others blog about it in their personal blogs as part of their other blogging. Once a month, I’d like to bring it all together in one place.
What is a blog carnival? Blog Carnival explains:
A Blog Carnival is a particular kind of blog community. There are many kinds of blogs, and they contain articles on many kinds of topics. Blog Carnivals typically collect together links pointing to blog articles on a particular topic. A Blog Carnival is like a magazine. It has a title, a topic, editors, contributors, and an audience. Editions of the carnival typically come out on a regular basis (e.g. every monday, or on the first of the month). Each edition is a special blog article that consists of links to all the contributions that have been submitted, often with the editors opinions or remarks.
There is so much stuff in the blog-o-sphere, just finding interesting stuff is hard. If there is a carnival for a topic you are interested in, following that carnival is a great way to learn what bloggers are saying about that topic. If you are blogging on that topic, the carnival is the place to share your work with like-minded bloggers.
I’m still formulating what kind of content a carnival of this sort should have. Clearly posts about learning Korean would be included. Wyatt’s post on learning a new expression would be a candidate if we’d had a blog carnival back then. I would welcome suggestions on what other kind of content to include.
I plan to host the first one (to be released on March 1), but I am hereby recruiting readers to host subsequent ones. If you’re interested, .
However, let’s consider the name. The Kangmi Blog Festival is unsuitable. Although it’s certainly not about me, that’s what I’ll end up naming it for lack of something better.
Here’s where you can help. your ideas for a name for this thing. I might pick the one I like the best, or I might do a poll. The winner will receive a brand-new World Language Repeater.
The deadline for contest entries is February 1.
Read Less...
Posted by kangmi on January 11, 2007 at 12:23 PM0 comments
Scholars say they have identified the earliest metal type in Hangul, the Korean alphabet. The movable type dates back to the mid-15th century. The National Museum of Korea said Thursday the museum recently rearranged [sic?] the 752 oldest out of hundreds of thousands of letters in its collection.
Read the rest at Chosun Ilbo.
Posted by kangmi on January 4, 2007 at 7:39 PM0 comments
German-speaking learners of Korean may be interested in a new blog (authored by Marcel Grünauer) that combines learning baduk with learning Korean called, appropriately enough, Baduk und Sprache.
Posted by kangmi on December 21, 2006 at 6:34 AM0 comments
Come back to all those people who say, “I want to learn language X; where can I find a textbook?” What would be a better first question for them to ask? Try “I want to learn language X; where can I find some speakers of language X? How rarely people ask that. How odd.
Greg Thomson et al, “A Few Simple Ideas for New Language Learners...and old ones needing some new life.”
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.
Read Less...
Posted by kangmi on December 19, 2006 at 6:18 AM1 comments
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