Speaking practice

Yesterday my language partner had to cancel our meeting, so I didn’t get to practice any real Korean conversation. However, I was pretty determined not to let that stop me from practicing my speaking, so when I got home I spent the time I was supposed to have spent on our meeting reading a veeeeery long Iyagi (the one on Taekwondo) as a warm-up and then talking to myself in Korean for 15 minutes. The regular readers of my blog will notice that talking to myself is something I do a lot, but I really find that it helps tremendously. (Bonus info: I don’t just do it with language learning, during my undergraduate studies I frequently led my roommate to believe that I had company when, in fact, I was just reviewing my econ syllabus by talking to myself ^^)

This time, however, I used my phone to record my 15 minute monologue about what I had been doing that day and what I had planned for the weekend, what I was going to cook for dinner, etc. It sounds like a long time, but for someone used to giving hour long lectures it’s not that bad. Obviously, the grammar wasn’t perfect but that also wasn’t the point. I wanted to practice flow. Listening to it afterwards was not as horrible as I would have feared. It wasn’t perfect, and there were a substantial amount of “uh” sounds, but…. it was Korean. Far from fluent, but far better than anything I could have mustered a few months ago. 대박! The cool thing about this is that when you talk to yourself like this you can imagine yourself being interviewed by someone and then repeat the question thereby practising your indirect quotation grammar rules like “오늘 뭣을 했냐고요?”.

I rounded off the day reviewing a few Hanjas. I don’t know about you but I find practising the stroke order of Hanjas almost meditative in some way, so if you feel a bit stressed try practising a few Hanjas. It definitely works for me.^^

Now, it’s time for me to have a Friday beer with my colleagues to celebrate that teaching is over for this semester. Not that I’m too happy about it since I love teaching but the semester had to end sometime. Happy Friday everyone! ^^