Best Day/Worst Day

“The present is the present, tomorrow is a mystery.”  –anonymous 4A student

Sorry for taking so long to get my comments up about this class. Actually, I have a few excuses. The first is that I wanted the commercials to be at the top so anyone could see them easily. Someone told me that he/she came to the blog and could not see the commercials easily. I don’t understand because they were right at the top of the page. Anyway, if you have not seen the commercials yet, I highly suggest that you check below.

It was quite a long time ago that we talked about the best/worst days of our lives.

The question that we started out the class with was:
“What was the best/worst thing to happen to you today?” 
This question was easily changed by trading today with this week, this month, this year, this decade. 

I thought the best and worst things that happened to people that day to be quite interesting. Some of the things were very small. In this initial conversation I noticed that quite a few students were having problems with the ‘th’ sound in English. Words like birthday, month, months, and think caused some problems.

Another error that I hear quite a lot is confusing interesting and interested.
I was interesting in your opinion. >>> I was interested in your opinion. 
Your opinion was interesting for me. 

I think most of you already know the differences, it is just a matter of using the words correctly. The sentence that I often use to help students remember this distinction is, “Bowling is boring.”  I hope this helps you to remember.

One phrase that I hear  quite a lot is, “I expect tomorrow.” This means that I think tomorrow is going to come. I hope that everyone expects tomorrow. I think a much more likely sentence would be, “I am looking forward to tomorrow,” or “I am excited about tomorrow.” 

Because the topic was best/worst days, many of the guys talked about their army service. For many people the worst day was joining the army and the best day was leaving. I did not expect that everyone would have such similar experiences. One question that I heard a few times was, “What was your charge in the army?” I cannot say that this is wrong, but I would be much more likely to say, “What did you do in the army?” or “What was your job/duty in the army?” 

A very common error for Korean students is to say, “I talked about my friend.” Actually this is perfectly fine English, it just means that my friend was the topic of conversation when I talked with another person. If I had a conversation with my friend I would need to say, “I talked with/to my friend.” 

We still had some problems with choice, choose, chose, and chosen. Click here if you want to see this explained again.

A final point is about the phrase, “frankly speaking.” I honestly, truly feel that I have never said this while in America. Please trust me. I truthfully don’t remember saying this. I feel that maybe American English speaking is already direct so we don’t need to say this, or maybe we would say truthfully instead.

Friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers…etc.

This class was certainly an interesting one. People seemed a bit shy at first and kind of gave me looks telling me that they were not interested in talking about this topic. Well, once we got into pairs it was another story as the questions were shooting around the room like fireworks. It was very interesting for me to watch.

There were quite a few words that came up during the lesson. Some of them are:

bronchial tubes The bronchial tubes connect the trachea to the lungs.
bronchitis I have had bronchitis before, it really hurts.
bangs Charly had a new hairstyle today–she had bangs.
background Many people said that they did not care about family background.
picky If someone is picky, they are not often satisfied with choices.
convert Many people convert so as to the same religion as their spouse.
success rate A good success rate for a hitter in baseball is .300.
break up They decided that they were not happy so they broke up.
couple They are both so energetic and fun–they make a great couple.
single Some people want to stay single forever.
advice You shouldn’t give advise unless someone asks for it.
advise As your lawyer, I advise you to tell the truth.
confess He felt much better after he confessed his sins.
propose She is getting sick of waiting for him to propose.

Please do notice that the last two words are English words, but are often misused in Korea. Confess is rarely used to tell someone that you love them, and propose is almost never used to simply ask someone out. Mi-young made a good point, it is used to bring up an idea, in a meeting or something like that.

One question that was asked lot in this class was, “Do you have boyfriend/girlfriend.” We need to be careful not to forget the article here, so, “Do you have a boyfriend/girlfriend?” is more correct.

Also be careful of questions like, “How many boyfriends do you have?” because while grammatically correct, this question could make someone angry. I suppose that the question that was intended was, “How many boyfriends have you ever had?”

A few people talked about the importance of letting someone “know your mind.” I think I would usually say that “you need to tell him/her your feelings” or “let him/her know how you feel.”

Because today’s topic was very personal and private, occasionly we needed to escape from a question. Some useful ways of doing that are:

Sorry, that’s private.

That’s personal.

I’d rather not say.

I’d prefer not to say.

As I wrote above, I thought that everyone did a great job in the class. Some examples of conversations questions about dating that you could have asked are here. Conversation questions about friends can be found here.

Good job!

Week 3

Hello everyone!

How are you doing?

Everyone did a very good job this week. I also cannot believe that we laughed so much during English class. I especially enjoyed the role-play on Monday.  The topic for Monday was choosing which people would be useful in order to start a new civilization. Each person had some good points and some faults.

The possible survivors were:

1.  A 32-year old male carpenter that was manic/depressive.
2. A married male artist that was 30 years old. His wife was #3.
3. A 29-year old female singer. She was married to the artist and pregnant.
4. A one-armed female nurse that was 26 years old.
5. A male doctor that was homosexual and 27 years old.
6. A female biologist that was 22 but couldn’t have children.
7. A racist male farmer that was 40 years old.
8. A 25-year old Catholic nun.
9. A policeman that was 37 years old.
10. A 25-year old woman that was also a drug addict and a teacher.
11. An aggressive male soldier that was 30.
12. A 50-year old clever politician.
13. An alcoholic engineer that was 33 and a woman.

The pros/cons of each person stimulated a lot of debate and caused a lot of disagreement. After spending a long time discussing each person’s good/bad points we then did a role play and each student explained why they should survive. This was fantastic!

On Thursday, we continued with a similar idea and imagined that we did such great job choosing the survivors that the humanity survived. It was a few generations later and the island had over 150 people on it. We imagined that everyone was going to be on a committee to decide the rules, laws, and customs of the island. At first, we brainstormed questions that needed to be answered. I was very impressed with the questions.

A great deal of new/interesting words came up while thinking of questions.
Some of these words were:

soil
currency
infrastructure
elect
unanimous
barter
conservative
liberal

In the second hour of class we pretended to be one of 6 characters while discussing the questions that everyone thought up during the first hour. The conversations were great–both funny and serious. Mostly everyone talked a lot.

Again, lots of words came up. They were:

unemployment
prevent
incarcerate
monogamy
polygamy
commit
committee
a pill
the pill

At the end of class I  talked about some  key errors that I heard.  Here are some errors from today’s class:

This island has small people. >>> This island only has a few people.
Small people means that the people are short… not the amount of people.

We should prohibit eating the pill. >>> We should prohibit taking the pill.
In English, we don’t usually eat medicine (it tastes terrible).

He is a grandfather.  or He is an old man.
If he is a grandfather he has grandchildren. When we talk about being a grandfather we are talking about family relationship. Otherwise, we would talk about his age. Just like ajashi does not mean really mean uncle.

Are you agree with me? >>> Do you agree with me?
I am not agree your opinion. >>> I do not agree with your opinion.

I also talked for about a minute about “wanna.” My advice about this word is just to be careful. Try to not overgeneralize and use it in the wrong cases.  The examples from today were:

He wanna be a king.  >>> He wants to be king. 

I wanna freedom.  >>> I wanna have freedom. / I wanna be free. 

At the end of class I also mentioned some good things that I heard in class today.  Actually, I heard many good things, but some were:

For me, ….. (instead of IN MY CASE)
Do you think so?
Well,….
Oh my goodness!
When it comes to ___, ….

It was a really great job by everyone. Have a great weekend and I will talk to you next week. Please feel free to leave a comment or question about anything. Take care!

Travel

Today’s main topic was travel. We talked a lot about travel experiences, were we would like to travel and planned a trip.

The question that we started off with was:

Have you ever been abroad?
Have you ever been to abroad?

The usual answer to this question would be:

Yes, I have./No, I haven’t.

Please remember that we don’t include the “ever” when talking about experiences that we have had.

I have ever been to China.  >>> I have been to China.

Also, if we are talking about a specific time that has already passed, we want to use the present perfect (have + PP)

I have been to China in 2003.  >>> I went to China in 2003.

After talking about experiences traveling abroad we then talked about our most recent trip.

Some questions that I thought were useful were:

What was the highlight of your trip?
What was the best part of your trip? 
What was the most memorable part of your trip? 

I found discussing these trips to be very interesting. I was very surprised about Jin’s walk/hitchhike home from the airport. Hyun’s story about traveling with two other girls made me think of the expression, “Two’s company; three’s a crowd.” I thought it was pretty cool that Roger went to Kenya. I have not met any Koreans (or Americans) that have ever been to Kenya before. It sounds so interesting.

I guess a few people in class like drinking because that was a common activity during different trips.  Remember that the past of drink is drank. Drunk is the condition that comes after drinking too much alcohol. Drunken is much much less common and is used before a noun, as in drunken behavior, drunken stupor, drunken sailor, and drunken driving.  One person mentioned that she ate chicken food, but I am sure that she meant that she ate chicken. Chicken food is food that chickens eat, like dog food is food that dogs eat.

After break we answered the question”Where would you like to go?” We spent some time discussing this. I was surprised at the different places that people wanted to go. One common mistake here is to use the word Swiss. In English, Swiss is an adjective, but Switzerland is the country. Also, Mongolia is the name of the country.

After discussing which country we would like to go to we thought of questions that need to be considered when making a plan to travel. They are:

How much (money) do I need?
How long will I stay?
When will I go?
Who will I go with?
What will I bring/take/pack/carry??
How will I get there?
How will I  travel when I  get there?
What problems might I have?
Where will I stay?
What sights will I see?
What will I do?
What will I eat?
(and a very interesting question)
How can I convince my parents to allow me to go?

Finally, we had to make a plan to travel. The money and “who” question was already answered. Each student would receive 2,000,000 won and would go with their group members.  Perhaps there was not enough time to really make a thorough plan but at least each group made some decisions.

I think it was quite a good class and everyone talked a lot. Good job.

Some words that came up in class were:

laser--  She had laser eye surgery.

razor– He uses a razor to shave his face every day.

dumpling– I sometimes buy dumplings filled with kimchi on the street.

shellfish–Crabs are my favorite kind of shellfish.

selfish–  Ji-hoon is not selfish, he cares about other people very much.

highlight –   The highlight of Ji-yeon’s trip was the laser show on the river.

round trip ticket– It is usually cheaper to buy a round trip ticket.

Thursday’s class

Wow. I think this class was fantastic. I was really impressed with how much and well everyone spoke. I was also impressed with the strong arguments that were made. It seemed that everyone was speaking a lot and enjoying the time.

We started off the class by saying hello to the person next to us. Maybe some people were meeting for the first time, but mostly people just said hello and “nice to see you again.” After about 10 minutes of small talk, each student thought of 5 topics for discussion in class. Next, they shared their topics with a partner and explained why they thought it would be a good topic. The next stage is where the arguing began. Each pair (with one team of three) had to make a list of 10 topics that they thought would be interesting. They also had to put the topics in order from 1-10, with 1 being the most interesting. Lots of good discussion came out of this. The next step was to get into even bigger groups and to do the same thing–make a list of 10 topics. This took much longer than I expected because some teams had a hard time to agree on topics. I thought it was very interesting to hear different opinions about what would be a good topic. After each group made its list of 10 topics we shared the answers with the class and suddenly it was time to go home.

The 10 topics from the first group were:

1. Girlfriends/Boyfriends, are they necessary?
2. How to make friends
3. Plastic surgery
4. What makes you happy?
5. Trips–recommending places to travel
6. Explaining places in Korean to foreigners
7. Movies
8. Travel experiences
9. Blood type
10. The best news you have ever heard

the middle group came up with these topics:

1. The shooting at Virginia Tech.
2. Movies
3. Club activities
4. Cherry blossoms
5. Eating/Food (Mike’s favorite)
6. Hillary Clinton
7. Photography
8. Sports and exercise
9. Green Tea
10. Is it better to live alone or with your family?

The topics that the third group had were:

1. Diets to be healthy
2. Good places for dating
3. Mike (???)
4. Spring
5. The upcoming election
6. How to cook
7. Baseball
8. Superstitions
9. The massacre in America
10. Classmates’ lives

I think that these lists are enough for 40 weeks of class, not just 10 weeks. Great job.

Since the discussion took much longer than expected (this is a good thing) there was no time to talk about mistakes and errors.

I will do that now.

One common problem is people confusing scary and scared. Scared is the feeling, as in I feel scared when I watch a horror movie. If something is scary it makes us scared. So, the horror movie was scary.

I was scared when the scary man shouted at me.

Another common problem is to use the word younger when we should say young.
You look very younger. >>> You look very young. or You look younger than ____.

A question I often hear in class is, “Have you been to abroad?” we do not need to “to” with abroad.

Another common problem is misusing the word die. Die is a verb, “to die”. So we could say, “He died last week.” Students often say something like, “he was dead last week,” this means to me that he was dead, but now he is alive–not very likely. Also, suicide is a noun and the most usual verb used with this noun is commit. Sorry for such sad and morbid grammar points! The next point will be more cheerful.

One word that causes a lot of confusion is graduate. This is because it can be a noun or a verb and has different pronunciation. I think the meaning most people know is the verb graduate (grad-jyou-ate) . This word can also be a noun, a person who has graduated is a graduate (grad-jew-it) Finally, the school that people who have already attended 4 years of university attend is a graduate school (same pronunciation as the noun). I hope you are less confused than before.

That is all for today. Thank you very much for your hard work. Have a fantastic weekend!