I took a 12 week speaking class this past autumn. I was 1 year / 500 hours into immersion at the time I signed up. I knew the writing system, phonetics and around 3000 high frequency words. Everyday grammar was familiar but not to the extent that I could reliably produce much.
I didn’t feel ready to have actual spontaneous conversations in the language yet, but I had been wanting to dip my toes into the water more and more. Plus I wanted to meet some other learners and have a bit of fun with the language.
The class was for complete beginners, one 90 minutes class per week in person. 5 students total and a native korean teacher. The school uses an immersion style whereby they teach the necessary classroom vocab up front (repeat after me, do you understand etc) and then try to use only the TL where possible during the course.
The content is for absolute beginners and started on the first day with phonetics before moving to simple grammar and vocab.
The teacher has us listen to very simple dialogues a couple times, goes over the specific grammar points and vocab used and then we do practise conversations with a dialogue template.There is a big emphasis on chorusing and focused pronunciation work throughout.
This class was the very first time I spoke in Korean out loud. It was so weird at first to hear my own voice after a year of learning. Even though it was super weird and I wasn’t happy with how I made some sounds it was fun and I found myself instinctively repeating after my anki cards out loud a lot in the weeks that followed which I had never done before.
After a whole year of watching korean people speak on a screen it felt very cool to be able to have a 2-way interaction with another person and have them respond to my korean.
Sandbox environment - because I was already familiar with the vocab and grammar covered in the course I felt super relaxed and could focus on trying things out and noticing what I found easy and what needs attention. I would see some of my classmates getting overwhelmed trying to practise the dialogues while having to hold new grammar concepts and vocab in their head that they just learned 5 mins ago as well as grappling with a new writing and sound system.
The class gave me a chance to hear what I sound like speaking korean for the first time in a safe non-embarrassing space. I could practise very simple repetitive dialogues to get the correct tongue and jaw positions down (build that literal muscle memory). There was no pressure to use language I hadn’t acquired yet because the course is only covering things I'd already acquired in immersion.
The guided dialogues we used certainly have their limitations. They are good for training tongue/jaw movement and intonation practice but they don’t encourage you to get into a natural conversation headspace. At the end of lessons the teacher would initiate very playful freeflow conversations based on the topics we’d recently covered which allowed us to test our conversational skills more.
The classroom was in general just useful as a shared space to be awkward baby ducklings in the language together and get over the cringe at hearing ourselves struggle to pin the sounds down to our own satisfaction.
At some point a couple of students gave up on the class so it ended up being 2-3 of us with the teacher which was pretty great. Everyone had a really open mindset about learning and the group really embraced the chorusing which our teacher did constantly throughout the lessons.
Looking through my notebook I had jotted down the few unknown words that popped up:
Post office, directly opposite, fox, stamp, some food names (edit: many food names 😭), day after tomorrow, to fish, bland,
Overall I’m glad I took the class. I am absolutely not ready to speak speak yet, but I have opened the door to it. Doing some traditional grammar practice has been useful in helping me map out what my active abilities are and identify areas where I comprehend easily but when I want to write/speak the structures don’t come to me instinctively yet. I have a lot more vocab and language in general to acquire before I think I'll have what I need to start having conversations but I have definitely set myself a good base in terms of pronunciation and intonation.
コメント