A few weeks ago I was sitting in the staff  office checking my email when my co-teacher opened a package. She pulled out three books. One was a English classroom activities book, a TOIC (Test Of English for International Communication) study guide, and then this one, Classroom English Expression Dictionary. I looked at all three, but this one stood out. I skimmed through it and knew i had to have it. My co-teacher said I could borrow if  i wanted to. So I did. Then a couple days later she said, “It’s yours Matt”. A gift. Cool!

The content found in this book is great for SRS sentences. On one side of the page are Korean expressions and on the other are English expressions. I can pick and choose the expressions I like or maybe add a whole section of expressions about reviewing tests, passing out homework, or finding the last place we left off.  There are more than 7000 expressions divided up into five sections. Classroom Management, Teaching English Skills, Teaching Activities, Communication and Interaction, and an appendix that has classroom English for students and useful time based expressions. It’s all in there or just about all in there.

Looking at the English, everything that I can remember the teacher or students saying in the classroom is in this book. And, I verified with my Korean co-teacher, the Korean in this book is genuine classroom talk as well.

This book is perfect timing for me. I’ve  gone through two beginner seasons and an intermediate season of Korean Class 101, and the grammar used in those lessons is also found in this book. There are some new bits but for the most part this is a great book to pull sentences from at this time.

If you are a English teacher in Korea and learning Korean, I highly recommend this. I love it. There are MANY examples using the same words in different ways. It’s real classroom Korean, and I will also note, it’s more than classroom Korean. There’s stuff to be used outside the classroom. ie. “It’s too cold in here!” or “I didn’t catch that.”

This will be a nice source for sentences for a while. Skimming through it, I can see myself adding 90% or more of its content to Anki.

I borrowed a children’s book from the library today. I should say two books really. The title on the front cover is  Good! Very good! and on the back cover it’s Don’t do that! As you might imagine the book is about good and bad behavior. It’s written and illustrated by two Koreans.  It’s a cute look into Korean culture.

I made a discovery this last month. Surrounded by a sea of  ballads and teen-pop, I found this tiny tiny island of K-rock. On it, was  Delispice, the band above,  and a few other ones. I’m still searching for some more.

The progress report on my Korean Language Study Experiments:

Listening: There was definite progress with the first audio blog lesson. Now, when I listen, I understand about 60% percent. It’s better than the 10% when I began.
Reading: Faster, and fast enough to read out loud in a melodic fashion. Yes, I sang. It felt pretty cool, for the first time, to be able to keep up with a couple rock songs in the singing room.
Writing: Not much improvement with the free writing. My writing is only in the form of short messages on the cell phone.
Speaking: See Reading.
Typing: Copying one thousand Korean sentences does wonders for typing speed and now I can type without looking at the keyboard. It’s still really difficult to check for accuracy after I’ve copied something. Misspellings don’t scream out as they do in English. It’s more like a whisper or nothing at all.

Last month I decided that I needed to work on the listening skilz. I took an advanced audio blog from Korean Class 101, chopped it up and added the clips to a new deck. I used it for over a week, noticed some progress, then I gave up on it. It was too much too soon. I haven’t opened that deck for about two weeks. I should go through the deck and delete the offensive content. For the moment though I don’t even want to open it up.

The reviews of the main sentence deck suffered a bit because of the above problem. I reviewed everyday but I got behind. It took me about a week to recover. I started deleting the longer sentences, and sentences that i was just sick of seeing. This really helped me come back and in this final week I began adding new fun sentences, and pulled a nice average of 40 new ones a day.

In the last progress report I wrote that I wanted to learn 5000 sentences in 6 months, but it’s looking like it will probably be around 4000. This is really okay because I will still secretly shoot for 5000 anyway.

I no longer question the effectiveness of SRS. It works and works really well for language learning. The question is now, where else can I use this software?

Surprisingly, this post isn’t about Korean. I just really enjoyed Stephen Colbert’s The Word today and had to post it here. hehe…