YouTube is a bit like Flickr, because you can upload content to easily share it between websites, between friends, or to simply host it for the world to see. What YouTube does is convert your videos down into a small Shockwave based video with limited controls for stopping and starting the playback. It’s not perfect, as the picture can end up being pixelated and blurry, but it gets the job done. It’s a very nice tool, and is more than functional for my needs.
Let’s Speak Korean is a television program that teaches Korean expressions, phrases, pronunciation and grammar. There are two hosts, and two guests, and they practice a sentence structure or situational dialog in a talk show style format for 10 minutes a show. The show is on randomly throughout the week on television, and I never know what topic they will cover. I don’t have a recording device for my television, so if I miss something or can’t learn it fast enough, I’ve messed up the lesson completely. The show used to provide online content, but it was never easy to find, and seems to have been removed from the official site.
That’s why I was so surprised to see some of the episodes appearing on YouTube. It seems that some people took notice as well, and even started web based scripts on the YouTube’d shows. I was planning on using this as a way to practice my Korean as well. Now that you can easily download YouTube videos, and play them on your own machine locally, you don’t even need to worry if they remove all the files at a later time. This means you could convert them to a more friendly format, burn them, then practice Korean using any DVD player.
This would be awesome for me. I’m sure the shows, as squashed and compressed as the videos would look, would still teach me something. I’d also get to work on my pronunciation with a male voice teaching how to say words. I’m told that since I hear mostly children and women speaking Korean I don’t have a masculine pronunciation. (I need more phlegm sounds and cursing I guess.) Once I get some time to begin this project, I’ll keep you updated as to how simple it all was for the whole process.
