강미 | learning koreanHow I Use My Commute to Learn Korean
Up until recently, my commute was a vaste wasteland of uselessness for language study. My car stereo played exactly one thing—radio. A 1992 Honda Accord probably never came with anything loftier than a combo radio and cassette player, and my cassette player didn’t work.
I picked up a Mobiblu 2GB earlier this year (and for those of you who are wondering, no, I didn’t know it was manufactured by a Korean company until I was installing the software on my computer and everything came up in Korean). Since then, I’ve been vacillating—is it really worthwhile to put a new stereo in such an old car? Should I even spend the money on an FM transmitter?
Eventually, I tried out an FM transmitter, and the results were unsatisfactory. However, I was loathe to give up those hours of commute time to anything else, so I hauled my 200,000+-mile car over to Best Buy and got a new stereo installed. I specifically chose a model with a front-panel auxiliary input.
That very day, my MP3 player died. Plugged it in—nothing. Charged it up—nothing. Reset it—still nothing. I sent it in a shortly thereafter, and I’m still waiting for its return.
In the meantime, I realized I had options once I figured out that anything with a headphone jack could be played through my car stereo. I’ve played audio files from my Palm and cassette tapes on a cassette player (for which I got a power adapter so that I don’t have to use batteries). I’ve copied MP3 files onto a CD-RW and played them in my CD player. In short, I’ve learned that if I have audio, I can play it in my car.
These are early days, so to date I am using the following:
- Pimsleur’s Comprehensive Korean Level 1
- Some old Korean language cassettes I’ve had for a while
- MP3s, either from podcasts or other audio I record off the Internet
The first two will eventually pass, so I will continue to actively pursue recording my own audio from the Internet. More podcasts would be nice, and they wouldn’t even have to be about learning Korean. I’d be happy to hear someone talk about their day.
How do you use your commute to learn Korean?
Posted by kangmi on October 10, 2006 at 4:53 AM4 comments
