Very short monologue from School 2013

Transcript:

오늘 중으로 아주 깨끗하게 싹 청소해 놓으시게. 흠~
어, 여,여길 혼자 다 해요?
아, 정말 혼자 하겠냐?
부르셨습니까?
이거 드시게.
예?
어이, 두 제자분들. 내 말 잘 들으시게.
학생님께서는 수업 땡땡이치시고, 선생님께서는 출결 체크도 안 하고 눈감아주셨으니 두 분 다 벌 좀 받으셔야겠습니다.
선생님께서는 학생님한테 다 떠넘기지 마시고 여길 그냥 딱 반으로 나눠서 공평하게 청소 하고 가십시오.
날마다 두 제자분들 수업시간에 내 가서 확인하겠습니다. 오늘과 같은 일이 있을 때마다 둘 다 여기 와서 사이좋게 강당 청소하는 걸로 허구. 자, 그럼, 수고들 하시게.
아, 저 선생님, 그게 아니고, 제가……

Importance of helpful and concrete goals

I was stuck by this quote reading the recent interview with Benny:

A: The most important piece of advice [in language learning] is that set a specific goal. Myth 5: ‘learn a language’ isn’t a helpful goal because it’s far too general. You need to set specific goals or milestones and come up with concrete steps and activities to achieve them. So instead of saying ‘I want to learn x language in the new year, tweak your goal into something like ‘I want to be able to learn x number of phrases so that I can start a basic conversation with someone.’ And then come up with actual steps to achieve your goal. It’s also very important that you check on yourself or get someone to help you to make sure that you’ve followed it through. 

 

Korean facebook feeds I subscribe to

The last several months I’ve been finding all kinds of fun and interesting facebook pages in Korean to subscribe to. A lot of these I found by browsing the pages my Korean friends liked. Most of the pages are updated rather frequently so whenever I’m on facebook my feed is taken up with free, interesting and relevant jokes or messages in Korean. (And of course since it’s Facebook, all the sections are short and can be easily read.) What are some of the pages?

어머 - funny things worth streaming

뻘 – 님이 유물을 발굴하셨습니다 More humor

그러하다 Humor and other interesting short clips

그냥 웃지요 Another humor page.

좋은 글붓 I really like this one — lots of poems and other good writing.

아 좋사 This and  좋은 글붓 are my favorite pages. Lots of delicious Korean goodness. A lot of this is somewhat romantic writing/poetry/insights.

문학동네 Books and culture

I’m curious — are there any Korean twitter feeds, blogs or facebook pages that you subscribe to that you really like? I always love finding new stuff.

Setting up daily goals and keeping them

The last few months there have been several study goals that I haven’t worked on half as much as I wanted. One of them is with regards to Hanja. I planned to study ten minutes a day at least on them. Another is Anki. Anki I have really no excuse because I’ve found even if I do one or two minutes a day it really helps me to be much more fluent and have a lot more vocabulary and grammar a the tip of my tongue.

But life happens and sometimes it’s hard to remember and then a whole week goes by and I’m like, oh dear, I haven’t done any Anki yet!

I used chains before to setup goals and keep track of doing them every day but it gets unwieldy when the chains get too long and there is no way to export the data.

Then yesterday over at EveryDay Language Learner Aaron wrote about a new site I had never heard of before — Ask Me Every.  It’s very easy to use. You put in a few questions (like, how much time did you spend on Korean Anki today?) and give it a time to e-mail you daily. When it e-mails you you email back with the time spent and it inputs it into its charts and graphs so you can login to the site and see all your data nicely and visually represented.

I’m going to try it and see how well it works. Perhaps if I log every day whether I did a bit of anki or not I’ll have more incentive to keep on doing it every day.

Bang Bang Korea — cool new site

A few weeks ago I came across this quite cool website — Korean Bang. It takes popular news stories and comments from netizens and translates them into English. What’s really cool is that by hovering over the translated paragraph you can see the original Korean paragraph. As I’ve been doing a bit of translation it is fun to take a look at how the translators translated a word or phrase.

Today they had a heart-wrenching story about a boy who tried to commit suicide and was saved by a quick-talking and quick-thinking policeman.

In addition to interesting stories they have a Korean glossary of internet slang.

Unfortunately the articles aren’t recorded (so there is no audio). Also when I tried to save articles with the scrapbook plugin in firefox (like I can do for webtoons), it the bubble original text feature doesn’t work. I’m not sure if there is a way around it or i’ll just have to save the translation and the korean version separately. (As you can see, I’m really really big into saving anything I am studying or reading.)

On somewhat of a sidenote, just perusing some of the articles and comments I was rather surprised to see the level (or lack of?) civility among netizens. This is a part of the Korean internet world that I’m definitely not that familiar with yet.

Diary writing

I’ve written 42 entries this month so far on Lang-8. As can be seen though, I didn’t write every day.I don’t really beat myself up if I don’t write on a given day, although I always like it when I do fill up day after day with solid blue. Also, I don’t really consider writing diary entries as study most of the time (unless I’m trying to do some difficult dictation or something like that (and even then I’m doing the dictation because it appeals to me in one way or another)). Rather, writing in Korean has become a fun way to relax, wind-down and reflect on what happened that day or whatever I am thinking about. *I wanted to try experimenting by writing this in Korean.

여태까지 이달에 43개의 일기를 랭팔에서 썼다. 그런데 위그림을 보면 알 수 있듯 매일 매일 쓰지는 못했다. 난 어떤 날에 일기를 못쓴다고 해서 자신을 구박하지는 않지만 며칠 연이어서 쭉 파란 색으로 나오면 당연히 기분이 좋다. 또한, 내가 어려운 받아 쓰기 할때를 제외하고는 대부분의 경우 일기를 쓰는 걸 공부로 여기지는 않는다. (그리고 어려운 받아쓰기할 때도 맘에 드는 동영상만을 받아 쓰기 한다.) 오히려 한국어로 일기를 쓰는 건 나한테 긴장을 푸는 즐거운 방법이고 일기를 쓰는 걸 통해서 숨 좀 돌리거나 그날의 했던 걸 아니면 그때의 어떤 생각에 대해서 되돌아보는 좋은 기회다. **이거 원래 영어로 썼는데 우리말로 어떻게 자연스럽게 비슷한 의미를 전달할 수 있을지 궁금해서 번역해봤다 ㅋ

A code or a rebirth

I was talking to a friend the other day about her Japanese study (she has reached a very high level of Japanese and has worked in Japan). I asked her specifically about the claim that Japanese never accept foreigners as real people or as insiders. Her reply was very interesting. She told me, “If you act exactly the way you’re supposed to act in the situation you are in down to a ‘T’ they will treat you as an insider.”

Although I don’t know Japanese or Japanese culture, I wonder if the same thing is true (in part at least) for Korean.

It seems there are two ways one can approach Korean study. One can approach it either in a cognitive approach — where the language is a code to try and convey your original identity, values, and opinions. In that way you’ll always be an American speaking Korean, or a German or Australian speaking Korean. And then you complain about being treated as an outsider.

The other way is to to think of it as a rebirth into a new world. You will be a new you. You have to create the world completely from scratch again probably eventually something along the lines of the growing participator approach.