강미 | learning koreanWherein I begin a language exchange
My sister has a cleaning service come to her home once every two weeks. Sometimes during a telephone conversation she’ll say, “I have to clean the house. The cleaning people are coming.” (If you are a woman, you may understand this behavior. I’m told that it is otherwise incomprehensible.)
That’s exactly how I felt on Sunday when I met with my language exchange partner for the first time. A death in the family last week meant that I spent much of the week planning to leave, traveling, or recovering from the trip. By the time Sunday rolled around I felt like cancelling. It had been an entire week since I’d paid any attention to Korean, and I was feeling less than capable.
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.
Posted by kangmi on December 13, 2006 at 12:47 PM0 comments