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?

Language and
Life
aren’t
separate.

SRS. Besides learning how to read and listen to Korean, another great use for this tool, is to inspire and guide. I give great credit to AJATT for this. I gather quotes, I like, from AJATT’s twitter feed,  good pieces of advice, cool quotes,  or stuff I’ve discovered about Korean, and stick them in the PD (Personal Development) deck of my SRS. Whenever I feel even a  little dread about anything to do with learning Korean I open up the PD deck and I’m reminded that I may need to change something with my study habits or even life in general. The quote cards that I feel I haven’t followed through with or have forgotten about, I fail those. The ones that are clear in my mind or the ones that I follow more or less, I give a better grade. It has worked out pretty well for me. After reading through about 30 cards I open up a Korean sentence deck and start crazy-deleting bad sentences (’cause it feels good),  or I open up a Korean book I forgot about and begin reading, or I just do whatever…in Korean.

It’s a new year and that means there are many school teachers and staff changing schools in Korea. That’s how I had a chance to re-meet a colleague from a school that I used to work at over a year ago. I remember at the time,  I was impressed with her English skills. She was above average for any of the teachers that spoke English. I was talking with her today and the topic of movies came up, and at one point she asked me if I had ever seen the movie Ratatouille. I said yes and just happened to love the stew too! ( kimchi jjigae and ratatouille are a close match for me) Then she admitted that she watched/listened to that movie a hundred times. She realized her modesty and then said the number was probably closer to 150 times. WOW! I don’t know exactly why her English skills are more advanced than the average,  but I would guess that watching a movie 150 times had something to do with it.  I asked her if she had memorized the whole movie. She said no but I think she could have recited it entirely with a little prompt.

I obtained the the video footage from the 2009 End of the Year Festival. Here’s the dance video cut. I’m the one with the dark hair. Enjoy. For closeups of these mind blowing moves, check out the photos in the earlier post.

What happened this month with the Korean Study Method Experiment(s):

1. Changed the way I grade my answers in Anki.
2. Reviewed more than 2000 words and sentences in Anki.
3. Changed my speaking practice dialogue method to a listen, speak, and understand method using Anki and audio clips from Korean Class 101.
4. Felt small progress in reading, writing, speaking, and listening compared to last month. But still having fun, everyday, and not burned out.

The details:

Number 1: I no longer consider speed or accuracy of reading Korean when i grade my answers in Anki, unless i feel its extremely bad. I ended up with way to much to review. 300 cards a day of just reviews was getting to be a bit too much. I could remember the cards just fine. Besides, in these past three months, my reading speed has increased just by reading and really it should not be a factor in the grading of my answers.

Number 2: I’m happy to have reached 2000.  I’m greedy though and I want to learn more, faster. I’m hoping to reach 5000 in three more months. If I used the same sentence structures with the different words i think it may be possible.

Number 3: I’ve had excellent success using Anki to improve my reading skills. I thought perhaps i could get the same rate of progress if I did listening in the same way. Actually, I’ve thought about doing this for a while now, but always feared the work involved to chop up the audio, import the audio, and write/imput the translations, would be too time and effort and not enough fun.  But, I think I found a fairly painless and fast enough way to do it.  Here’s what i did for a Korean Class Advanced Audio blog lesson.

• Import the lesson into Audacity (1 min)
• Reduce the tempo 85%. Note: changing the tempo rather than speed keeps the tone of the audio like the original. (1 min)
• Played back the 10 minute audio and paused at the end of a sentence or a natural break in a long one and then placed a blank label there. I did this until I reached the end of the audio file. That left me with around 120 labels. (45 minutes)
• Exported the audio by label. (1 minute)
• Created a new deck in Anki for audio only. (1 minute)
• Created 120 new cards in sequence putting a number only for the question side of the card. (This part can be skipped but it was just a way for me to be sure I imported everything and didn’t accidentally skip audio files when importing.) (15 min)
• In browse mode, going in sequence, from 1 to 120, imported the audio into the question side. (45 min-60min??)

Number 4: There has been noticeable improvement in my listening skills.  My friend said she has to be careful when she talks to her girlfriends around me.  The truth is I hear maybe 10-20% of words in certain kinds of conversations. I’m able to get the main idea with the help of context. On the other hand, there are many times where I understand nothing.  I’ve been trying for over a year now, to get a made to order haircut. I got the closest this month. It took a lot of repetition and patience. Next time I think I can get it exactly right.