When I reflect on the first time I happened to access English, the two English words are echoing to me. The two words are kitchen and chicken. They were pronounced by my older sister repeatedly, which made me feel envious of her status as a middle school student. In those days, English learning was the symbol of becoming middle school students. Finally, I did become a middle school students, which meant that I started learning English. I did my best in learning English, therefore, I could major in English Education in the University. I also could take regular English speaking classes which were taught by the native speaker teacher who was from Boston. Even though I studied English hard and his pronunciation was easy to hear, I could not speak English as I wanted to say. The huge reason why I could not speak well was that I always tried to make a perfect English sentence before I talked. While I arranged the correct English words according to the English grammar, I lost my chance to talk, which made me feel very frustrated.

When I started teaching English in a public middle school in 1994, I had no difficulty in teaching students English because the grammar translation method was prevalent. However, as teaching English in English (TEE) was emphasized in public schools since 2000, I tried to practice English with the native speaker teacher in a private school. Whenever I took the English conversation class, I thought why I could not speak English fluently even though I knew many English words. Making words into sentences was a big burden to me. Sometimes I felt shameful when I saw other people could speak much better than me. As I watched other classmates speak English, I realized that they did not use that difficult English words. They just did not hesitate when they started to say English. From then on, I tried to start saying the first part I wanted to say, and kept saying English with easier words. So the hesitation time got shorter and shorter.

The biggest improvement in speaking English was achieved in 2010, when I took part in 6-month intensive English teachers training course in Incheon. I could take six classes which were taught by native speaker teachers for 6 months with other Korean English teachers. The native speaker teachers were very kind to wait for me to speak English better and their responses were very encouraging for me to say more in English. Moreover, the native speaker teachers enhance the speaking ability by preparing interesting speaking tasks which made the participants have fun. In addition, the other Korean English teachers helped me to improve my speaking ability because they gave me the confidence that I could speak like them some day. Reflecting on my English learning experience, I am thankful to everybody who helped me learn English.

When I first arrived here in Korea, I landed a job with a hagwon in Incheon. During the first month, I asked the school to provide the foreigners free/ cheap Korean classes. I wanted to really learn how to speak Korean at the time. The biggest problem was that I could not muster up any time to self-learn the language. The hagwon classes started at 10am and ended at 7pm, so at the end of the day I was completely wasted. I would rather go out and have drinks and dinner and relax, rather than opening a book and studying.  

Finally, after a few months of begging the school to have lessons, they hired a Korean-English teacher to come in and start. During the first class, my fellow teachers and I found out that not only was the teacher brand new, but he didn't even have the proper materials or objective for the class. He started out by asking us to write certain words in Korean and found out that we were beginners and were not able to read Korean yet. He finally was able to improvise and then taught us how to read Hangul. The second session totally turned me off completely. This was when sh*t hit the fan and I got super frustrated. Having just learned to read the language, the instructor decided that we should start reading full on sentences in just the second class. I would have thought that some words or simple survival phrases might have been better, but I guess I was wrong. Overall, I didn't stay long and neither did the rest of my co-workers. The jump of levels within a short amount of time was too much to handle. 

    My story takes place in a bar, naturally. My girlfriend at the time and I found a place to drink after a movie and we ended up playing darts with a couple of Korean gentlemen in semi-formal wear. To my amazement one spoke Japanese and one spoke Chinese. Being a language nerd with a few beers in me, I took the golden opportunity to practice all the languages. That is, Japanese to one person, Chinese to another, and finally Korean with my friend. Given this situation, Korean was used as the buffer language and translations went about every turn to Chinese or Japanese. 

  After a while I consciously took opportunities to use more pragmatic language, slang, backchannels, music references, etc.When this happened in a given language, more in Japanese, the discourse became rapid and stayed in the language. Emotive use of language also became apparent in use. 

    This night I noticed the social connections, flow of discourse, and expressive freedoms of using pragmatic language and natural discourse flow. I still bery much do not have this power in Korean as much as I want to, especially in speaking to new people who talk different (accents,  humor, interaction styles). Hopefully, my goal will be reached sometime in the not too distant future with experience and hypothesis testing.

My personal story about learning language involves leaning Korean. It was a beginner class and it was extremely nerve-racking because we were all expected to participate openly in front of the entire class. That wasnt the real problem though. The real problem was that the teacher had so many activities crammed into a two-hour lesson that we had very little time to work in pairs prior to undertaking the role-play in front of everyone. I certainly felt that I was a weaker speaker in the class, but certainly not the lowest level. I was fortunate to have someone who was more proficient than me and who could help scaffold or correct some of my mistakes. Nonetheless, there was not adequate time to practice the role-plays to the point where I felt confident to complete them in front of an audience. The one thing I did to try to buy more time was to always be the last pair to perform the dialog because I was able to listen to the mistakes being made and corrected either by the teacher or students self-correcting. The amount of activities was overwhelming, so my point is to have more quality than quantity and certainly allow more time for students to practice in the classroom.

This is my sister's story.

10 years ago, I was in Montreal in Canada, and my little sister visited me there for a few months.

She was not good at speaking English, but she was very eager to speak English at that time.

We went to a store to buy something for camera. My little sister asked a staff, "Can I see some camara?"

But, the staff didn't get what she said. My little sister kept saying "Camera, camera, camera" over and over.

Unfortunately, the staff didn't understand what my sister said, and she was very frustrated and I helped her, " Can I see some camera?" to the staff.

The staff got what I said right away.The problem was that my little sister pronounced 'camere' as /kamera/ which means she made it three syllables instead of two syllables as /kmr/.

It made me realize even syllable is very important because even though we also say camera in Korean, it is not good English when we speak it in Korean way.

I just noticed the Korean got deleted out of the post and so did the punctuation. I'm not sure how to fix it.

             I believe that god dropped me off at wrong country that is Korea not in somewhere in Latin America, even though I love Korean language and Korean foods. The reason that I told like this is I want to tell that how much I am fascinated by Latin America. And I also believe there is a language that is tightly matched with someone in terms of intonation, pronunciation, or expression. In my case, it is Spanish. I learned Spanish when I was an university student, however, I could not realize the beauty of that language. Rather, I noticed the destiny between Spanish and me after travelling to Spain. In 2010, I travelled to Spain, but I did not know any Spanish because I forgot what I learned in University but the sound of Spanish speaking was beautiful so I decided to learn Spanish when I came back to Korea. I took lessons in a private institute in Seoul and I went to Latin America in 2013. However, my Spanish was still bad. I could only read following the pronunciational rules without understanding. However, when I read something, Latin Americans admired me and they said "Hablas Español muy bien! Perfectamente!" surprisingly. Most Latin Americans tend to exaggerate everything and I, of course, knew that my Spanish was imperfect, however, I started to enjoy speak in Spanish. So I decided that I tried to speak only in Spanish.

             And Spanish is used in many countries, so some vocabulary have different meanings. For example, 'coger el autobus' means 'take a bus' in Spain, however, the word 'coger' has sexual meaning in Mexico. So when I spoke "Tengo que coger el autobus. (I have to take a bus)" in Mexico, my Mexican friends were shocked and they laughed, because it is way sexual expression. And my Spanish teacher in Korea taught me an expression "Estoy loca por tí." She mentioned that it was "I like you." So I told that sentence to my Colombian friend, and he also laughed at me because it has sexual meaning.

My language learning experience

From the different languages I have learned, or tried to learn, Dutch has been the most meaningful language so far. My ancestry is Dutch, but I never learned to speak Dutch. In University I took Dutch literacy as a module. However, we did not get a lot of linguistic input aside from the professor, novels, poems and some historical texts. After attending a national level Dutch winter camp in my 3^rd year I fell in love with the language. I was determined to go to the Netherlands and learn Dutch. After I graduated and spend some teaching, I applied for a job in Amsterdam. I started 2010 in the snowy heart of the Netherlands. Over the course of 2 months I attended a weekly Dutch lesson. The lessons mainly focused on grammar structures and key vocabulary and pronunciation. It was very basic, but kept me focus on what makes the language intelligible. I felt really dedicated to learn the language and tried not to resort to English in any way. I listened to the radio constantly, singing along to songs, listening to programs and the like to receive more input. Since songs and ads are so repetitive, I quickly learned some important and common grammar structures and forms. Sometimes when I struggled uttering a thought, I would resort to the song lyrics and then say (almost sing) it. I would also go to the library and take out some books to improve my language ability. At first the words were swimming on the page and I had no idea how to pronounce them correctly, but with time, I got the hang of it. I also read the newspaper every day, including comic strips and collected some interesting articles. Most of common expressions I learned from TV. I would watch TV with the subtitles on and make connections between the familiar and unfamiliar words to infer some key expressions I ended up using a lot. To learn vocabularies, I would take a recipe as a shopping list and ask the shop assistants where I could find these items. They would usually take me directly to the item, where I had my aha! moment and memorized the word. I did a few shopping trips, 3-4 times a week, buying food and household things. I did not have a smart phone at the time, and internet was restricted to my home, since data plans were very expensive at time and wifi not that common yet. I tried to interact with the language constantly and every day. I was in fact immerged in the language environment. After 6 months some people mistook me for being Dutch, but usually from a neighboring town, not Amsterdam itself. My accent wasnt puur Amsterdams, but then again apparently only born and raised Amsterdam folks had the typical accent, where as others could be distinguished how they make certain g and vowels sounds. I soon made a lot of Dutch friends and hung out with them on weekends. I made doctors appointments over the phone, called insurance companies and the works, all in Dutch, which Im way too afraid to do in Korean, the most recent language I have tried to learn. I still listen to Dutch radio, watch movies and read some books when the time allows. It makes me feel rather nostalgic and I can honestly say I miss speaking Dutch.  

In 2009, after 4 months of studying Spanish in Buenos Aires, a couple of friends from England arrived to tour South America together. We intended to travel Argentina, Chile and Bolivia - all by long distance bus. As they didn't speak a word of the language, my mediocre Spanish was going to be the key to our survival. I successfully managed to book bus tickets and hotels, order in restaurants, distract border guards from my overstayed Argentinian visa by chatting about Manchester United, crack anti-English jokes with the locals, argue with taxi drivers who tried to overcharge us, and always get directions from A to B. Eventually, we reached La Serena, a coastal town in Chile, where we had a long, grueling bus journey to Antofagasta in the north ahead of us. By this point we were fed up of the huge distances of Latin America bus travel. At the bus ticket counter, I chatted with the girl at the desk in Spanish while simultaneously talking with my friends in English. We decided to get the next available bus, sitting anywhere but the dreaded seats directly next to the toilets. Needless to say, as we walked up the bus aisle past every other occupied seat, I suddenly realized those were exactly the seats I somehow managed to book. My friends were not too pleased with what turned out to be the longest, smelliest 13 hour bus journey of our lives! Ironically, the last thing the girl at the bus ticket desk had said to me was how amazing my Spanish was.

(In Spanish, to make a negative statement you need to add the word "No" before the verb. Now having studied Discourse Analysis, I can analyze my mistake by saying I'm quite sure I didn't give enough prominence and stress to the word "No" in my seat request, instead basically telling the bus ticket seller: "We want to sit next to the toilets!")

I want to wirte about how I achieved speaking skills.

I liked English when I was quite young. I wanted to be good at English in all parts and I wanted to go abroad to study English.

When I went 26, I went to the philiiphine to study English. I studied Enlish and paraticed speaking all day long 9-23 but it wasn't that tiring. I had fun at the institute in the country. I participated special program and got rewards(about 150,000won) as I was chosen as the student who showed the most achivement in the institute.

After that I went to Australia to study and work. I worked in the restuarant in the country(the region was fraiser island in queensland, very beautiful) and had to speak with so many native speakers. I was so afriad and creid before I got started the work but soon I got to enjoyed and adjusted. I explained the order of the course, and also how to enjoy tea time in English.

There were many episodes, one guest came to me and her husband has some probelms as he has peanut allergy. So asked me to connect them to the cook in the restarant.

So I told that to cook and explained there wasn't peanut  in dinner.

They went to hospital but I felt so scared when they complained.

I leanred what is natural Enlgish in specific context there and gained confidence.

Now I'm still leanring and enjoying English.

 Consideration is important in a conversation

 In 2013, after finishing military service, I studied English for Toeic and Toeic speaking tests. But, I realized my lack of speaking skills, so I planned to go to Davao in Philippine. (Mothers friend lived there and she took care of some Korean students like a dormitory) When I got there, I enrolled in an academy and learned English. The academy study was not that hard because I was a false beginner and I could understand teachers saying. I also practiced speaking with some teachers. Many teachers gave me compliments. Junie. You are a good student, You can speak English well. They were very kind and considerate. Thanks to them, I could have a strong self-confidence. I thought I could talk to anyone even though there would be some pauses or misunderstandings. One day, one of my teachers asked me to make an American friend through my Korean friend because I had some Filipino friends. It was a good challenge and I was ready to do the task. I could set up an appointment to meet American friends. One of my friends helped me because she went to international school. Finally, D-day came and I went out with cheerful mind.

 I arrived in a café and there were my friend and 4 international beautiful women including an American. They were taking a rest after school. I thought this gathering would be fun, but my hope literally broke soon. At first, they asked me some questions. What do you do?, What is your hobby? I could answer them because they were best example sentences. And then, they started chatting with random topics. And I couldnt understand their speaking at all. It was very much fast. Was it really English? They ended up chatting except of me because they knew I couldnt follow their speech. They didnt concern about me. Even, I could not intervene in their talking. It was like a highway without traffic lights.

 It was very frustrating. My self-confidence had gone. I felt sad and realized that I couldnt talk to English user without consideration. My teachers and Filipino friends spoke slowly and explained well for my level. They concerned about me. They knew, especially for language learners, they should be considerate for students, or they could be demotivated. Thats why I could have a good conversation with them. And I thought it was common regardless of language competency. Even in Korea, if someone doesnt care for me, it would be very hard to keep talking with that person. Since then, I have tried to be a considerate person.   

When I studied in the USA, I needed more money to register for school because tuition was very expensive. I decided to get the part time job during the vacation so that I can keep going the study. I found Beauty supplies shop in the Korean shopping malls. They sell the perms materials, hair dye supplies, cosmetics, fashion accessories, wigs, ponytails Etc. My position was that arranged the product on table display and helped customer finding product. However, there were more than 1,000 types of beauty supplies in the shop so I cried first day at work. A bigger problem was that I didnt understand customers pronunciation. That means Hispanic, South American, Blacks, Whites, Latinos, and Asians had each different pronunciation. For example, some customer said tin. I asked several time and I got it. It was Number 10. There was Texas in Dallas city so some people used country brogue. Another problem was lack of beauty supply knowledge. For example, I didnt know whats different between jet- black and off-black.

Customer : Do you have jack black?

Me : Pardon me?  What kind of black?

Customer : Jack black.

Me : You mean..real dark black?

Customer : Yes. Color number is #1.

Me : Ok. No.#1

I found that there were two kind of black color and different No# on it. No.1 was jack black and No. 1B was off black. After 3months, I worked without any problems and got an hourly pay raise. It has been more than 10 years since back to my home, but my strongest memory is the Beauty supplies world not the English study.

Misunderstanding at Airport

First time when I went to abroad was when I was in the fourth grade of university. I practiced English in Fresno, California for a short time. I went to language school five days a week and I had home-stay experience with American family. As far as I consider about my English at that moment, I was intermediate student. Upon my arriving at language academy, I took a level test and the result was good so I came to study at the level of the 12th of the 12th. The students of the 12th could enter into American college after they had finished their study for one month. So I was very proud of my English because I had practiced English at hagwon to learn the conversation skills and laboratory to improve listening skills, dictating from the tape in which there were native English sounds in only Korea. In every day class of language school in California, I had learned about "Cross-cultural English" and conversation skills. I had engaged in role play and other activities with my peers who were German, Japanese, Brazilian and South American. The students including me had completed each work well. We had gotten the certificate after completing the language course.

Two-months staying had been finished and I had to come back to Korea. At that moment, I was so disappointed for my short studying English in US but I was proud of my English improvement because I had experienced English with natives and foreigners abroad. I came to Fresno airport to come back to Korea alone. At the gate of the airport, the officer asked me to show my passport. I showed my passport then I tried to enter into the boarding area. But he had prohibited me to enter there. He told me something in English but I could not understand his speaking. Oh, my gosh.......I was alone there and I was very embarrassed. I was abroad alone and I could not understand native American's speaking. At the exact the moment, one Korean-American was standing after me helped me. He told the officer something. Then I could enter in the boarding area safely. Until now I cannot forget that moment because I was so embarrassed and shy. Why could I not understand his talking? As far as I can guess about his speaking, I am sure it was about very traditional speech pattern which can be happened at the airport. At that moment, I finished my language course successfully even though staying duration was short. I had convinced about my English, "I CAN UNDERSTAND NATIVE AMERICAN SPEECH". Maybe I guess I could not understand his native pronunciation. With native teachers of language academy and home-stay parents, I had no trouble in communication with them. On the flight to Korea, I could find the answer. My teachers and home-stay parents had considered my lack of English so they had spoken clearly and slowly so I could understand well their talking. But at the airport, the officer did not know my English. He absolutely used traditional American accent, intonation and reduced speech. That is why I could not understand him. I had improved my English in class as a student but I had needed to be exposed to native American speech in a real life.