강미 | learning koreanWherein I don’t talk about cranberry juice
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.
Posted by kangmi on December 19, 2006 at 6:18 AM1 comments
