Andrew answers more of your questions from the recent Instagram live broadcast in this short, bonus episode!
Transcript: Hey everybody. This is Andrew from Culips and I wanted to hop behind the mic here for a special episode because yesterday I did our very first Culips English Podcast live event on Instagram. And it was really fun and a cool way to connect with all of you guys.
We’re going to make the transcript for this episode free for everyone and it will be on our website Culips.com. If you’re a Culips member, first of all thank you for supporting Culips and second of all, I’m sorry but there is no study guide for this episode, since it’s a special kind of quick bonus episode, we’re not gonna take the time to make a study guide for it. But don’t worry, we will continue as normal starting with the next episode.
Why I hopped behind the mic today, is I wanted to address some of the questions that we got that I didn’t have time to answer in yesterday’s broadcast. You guys asked so many interesting questions and unfortunately, I just didn’t have time to talk about all of them, but I went through again and looked at your questions and there was some really, really interesting ones there. So, I thought I’d take just a couple of minutes to talk about them today.
So, let’s take a look at some of these questions that you guys asked.
And Surajthulung, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, apologies if it’s a little bit wrong. Surajthulung asked the question, “how can I speak unless I didn’t catch up any good words in my mind, I got my mind blank when it comes to speak English.” OK, so I think what the question is, is how can I speak English when my mind goes blank? OK, great question, I’ve had this situation happen to me before when I speak Korean.
So, I think this all boils down to practice, our mind goes blank when the words that we kind of know are just in that kind of know category. We don’t know them strongly enough and why don’t we know them strongly enough? Well we haven’t been exposed to them enough in our listening and we haven’t practiced using them enough in our speaking. So, it all comes down to making things more automatic, more fluent and the best way to do that is to just up your listening practice, up your reading practice and of course also try to speak more. It’s really more of a matter of exposure, I think and repetition and practice, than it is about anything that’s unique to you. I think a lot of people feel like we’re unique and we have memory problems, but it’s really not the case. It’s just that we haven’t had enough reps, enough repetitions of these words and that’s where our mind goes blank.
One thing that drives me crazy about learning Korean and maybe you have this situation when you learn English too, is that I know there’s a word for this situation and I wanna use that word, because I’ve seen it before, I’ve heard it before, I know what it is, but I can’t remember it. And that just indicates to me that my knowledge of that word is pretty weak, that’s when my mind goes blank. So how do I get the knowledge of that word stronger? I have to hear Korean people use it more, I have to read it more in sentences, and I should also practice using it in my speech too. Once I’ve solidified that memory and then it will be there in the future and it’s so satisfying actually when you have an experience like this, where your mind goes blank and then you do some work with that word, and in the future, it comes out and you can use it, as a part of your vocabulary. It’s a really satisfying experience.
Let’s move on to another question here, from Lucas1394. Lucas, thanks for all your questions. There were several questions that I unfortunately didn’t have time to address about me studying Korean. So, these days the main way that I study Korean is by doing a lot of listening practice. Listening to Korean podcasts, there is a great podcasting application called Podbbang and I listen to many podcasts on there. I watch YouTube videos, there are tons and tons of interesting vloggers and web dramas that are on YouTube. So, there’s no end of the type of content that I can use to study Korean with these days.
So usually what I do, is I listen to podcasts and watch videos and when I find some vocabulary that’s interesting to me, I turn that into a card, a flashcard that I use in a software program called Anki, which is free and I highly recommend. It’s a spaced repetition vocabulary studying piece of software, it’s fantastic and I use that everyday to review the words that I’ve added to that. So I study my Anki cards daily, I read Korean novels, I watch YouTube, listen to podcasts and my girlfriend is Korean, so I’m speaking with her often and that’s about it. I still feel like I have a long way to go in my Korean language journey, despite living in Korea for over five years, I’m still nowhere near fluent. I feel that my language is insufficient everyday, but I just try not to quit, try to keep going and study as much as I can in my spare time.
I will say however, that starting next week I’m going to be taking an intensive Korean class because I want to try and get a permanent residency visa in Korea and in order to do that, I have to take a lot of language classes. So, I had to actually go and do a placement test recently and I had an interview in Korean and I was a little bit nervous about that. It was a stressful situation where I had to speak to three examiners at the same time and luckily, I passed into the highest level of the course, so instead of having to take 500 hours of class study time, which would take forever, I only have to take one shorter class, so I’ll finish that class up and hopefully I can learn many things during that time about Korean culture and language. I haven’t taken a Korean class forever, so I’m pretty excited about doing that. So that’s where I’m at in my Korean study these days.
Our next question comes from Instagram user Cha12, Cha12 asks, “could you recommend how to overcome being hesitant speaking English?” As Nike says “Just do it.” Maybe it doesn’t come across very well here on the podcast but, my personality is naturally shy, I’m not a very outgoing person and I tend to be reserved and kind of avoid conversation in lots of situations. But, I’ve found that the most progress that I’ve actually made in my Korean language journey has come when I’ve forced myself to speak and forced myself to participate in things that require me to speak Korean and I’ve had to go outside of my comfort zone many, many times in order to make progress with the language and it’s just something that you have to do. Again, it also comes down to practice and repetition, right? Something may feel uncomfortable the first time, it may feel uncomfortable the second time, the third time. But, the more you do it, the more comfortable it feels and you realize, oh I can do this and even if you make a ton of mistakes or embarrass yourself, you realize it’s not the end of the world and you learn from making mistakes and you learn from embarrassing yourself and in the future, you can improve and do better. So yeah, let’s just listen to Nike here and just do it for this one.
All right, I don’t wanna blab on too long here, so we’ll take a look at just one more question today and it comes from Instagram user Anderson_P2 and Anderson asks “are all your guests Canadians?” Great question, are all our guests Canadians? No. The answer is simply no. We have had guests on from many different countries in the past. In fact, two of our co-hosts, Jeremy and Suzanne, are both Americans, so in almost, I would say over 50% of our episodes, you’ll hear both American and Canadians speaking. And when we interview guests they can be from really anywhere. We’ve had guests in the past from South America, and from Europe and next week I’m scheduled to interview a really interesting guest who I’m sure you guys will find fascinating, who is from the USA. So yes, I am Canadian, but sometimes I speak to other Canadians on Culips and sometimes it could be from somebody from really anywhere in the world.
All right everyone, well that wraps it up here for me today. As I mentioned I just wanted to quickly follow up on a couple of the questions that I missed from last night’s broadcast. It was super fun to talk to you all and connect with you. You know, sometimes doing the podcast, it can be a little bit lonely. I’m sending all these messages out to you, but, I don’t get to hear back from you in real time too often. So, it’s really encouraging and motivating for me to do that and we’re gonna try and broadcast more live in the future.
So, thanks again for your continued support, we wouldn’t be here without you. If you could do us a favour though and visit the Apple Podcast Store and make sure you’re subscribed to the Culips English Podcast, that would be super, super helpful and we would really appreciate it if you could do that for us. OK guys, we’ll be back soon with another Culips episode in a couple days, so I will talk to you then and take care.
Bye!
Comentarios
I like saying "Repetition, mother of knowledge, I agree.