::A Geek in Korea::

On the way to my Grandmother-in-law’s birthday breakfast party, I saw a man yelling very loudly at an elderly woman.  The old woman had asked for a discount on some fruit. She was old, hobbled with osteoporosis, and didn’t look she was trying to a pull a fast one on anyone. I was a little confused. Most people don’t start screaming at old people. Also, street vendors don’t tend to shout,"NO! GO AWAY!" to potential customers. I sought answers for this very odd scene.

My wife explained that when people sell things out of trucks, or have their own business, they dislike giving discounts to the first customers of the day. It’s bad luck. It supposedly sets the precident that the rest of the day, or week, will be very slow and bad for business. While people in flea markets love to arrive early to try to get the best deals in the United States, going early to a market early in Korea might not get you the best price if you are someone’s first customer. This has been another cultural lesson in cheapness by Torgodevil.

My students are facing a series of grueling tests in two weeks at their elementary and middle schools. Our school has end of term tests for our report cards  coming up next week.  All this and I have to write individual comments for each student with specific guidelines to improve their studying, develop the kindergarten syllabus, as well as teach the rest of my classes. Several of my students will be going on picnics in the next week as well, forcing me to juggle my schedule around to make sure I am able to test and evaluate everyone before we go on a week vacation as well.

In these sorts of situations, the best way to get students to study vocabulary is to never let them realize they are studying vocabulary at all. Is that some sort of ESL Zen koan?

My method for studying vocabulary today was "call out bingo", where students get to pick from a word list, then write down their choices on a bingo sheet. They then called out one word on their turn, and listened to everyone else’s words, crossing out any word called. This practices speaking, writing, listening and pronunciation in one lesson. The goal is to be the first person to completely fill in the bingo sheet crossing off all the words written. No collaborations between players is allowed.

This sort of activity can take a good ten to fifteen minutes per game, and it’s filled with students speaking. Directors and mothers love that sort of thing. All the teacher has to do is make sure no one cheats, make sure people know what the last person said, and keep the pace of the game moving. Marking off the words said as it goes around keeps you busy, as well as lets you make sure no one crosses something out by accident. Also, you can see which words students need the most help with pronouncing by simply putting a check next to the word when it was called.

I actually took this idea from a teacher at my last school, who also made the students translate all the words as homework before they could start the game. The students came to class with the bingo sheet filled out and completely translated for next class. Getting kids to look up 25 words in a dictionary for a game is difficult, so this should only be attempted after you’ve played the game a few times in class so the kids know why they are doing the work The only problem arrises when multiple people finish filling in the board at the same time. Multiple rewards must be rationed out to keep people playing.

I also let them play past when the game has a winner. That way the students with good listening can gloat. Most frequently, students that chatter during class will miss a word or get distracted and forget to mark off something on their card. When the game ends and people start telling them, "We said that one, you could be finished if you listened better!" They get the point that paying attention has direct benefits, like not looking silly and saying the same word twice.

The best part about it is that you can define the word list, then make sure everyone is practicing new vocabulary if you desire. The bigger the word list, the longer the game. It is rather boring when no one shares the same words though, as people just go around the circle listing off words, meaning it might be twenty four or more times around the class before students complete their cards. A general rule would be for a twenty five slot bingo card, a 60-80 words maximum limit would work.

I did this twice today, and both of my classes liked the activity. We played two games in class, and had people really get excited when it was down to the last few words. Everyone got a prize, but the few bonus stickers I gave out as a reward for good listening skills paid off. Simple activities like this turn a day with little time to plan into a winning set of lessons that students learn from and still enjoy. Once a month vocabulary review that the students actually look forward to? Who would have thought?

One of the most creative activities that our text book have wasn’t given the proper time or effort to be made into a complete lecture. There was a story about a young guitar playing genius. She had written her on songs, and had recorded her own album at the age of 11. The book used lots of the grammar they were learning in the lesson, and even added a small amount of basic punctuation to the exercise. Then they had questions the students should answer about their own musical abilties.

I turned this activity into a full out lesson that took most of the class. I created my own handout based on this exercise. At the top, the student had to draw their own album art and create four song titles for their imaginary group to sing. Then, I had them create their own band and make up it’s history in a series of questions. The students were unsure if they were allowed to lie or not, but I encouraged them to be as creative as they could be. I got some very nice responses, since they could copy the article from the book, subsituting the information from their questions to make the article about themselves.

Some of my students can actually play music very well. Everyone in the school can play piano. It’s nearly a requirement of Korean school. Most have played piano multiple years and have at least one other instrument under their belt as well. In my class I had one clarinet player, one pianist, and one guitar player in a group of six. They probably could have recorded an album between all of them that would have sounded pretty good. They always ask me if I know how to play any music.

They are always a little embarassed when I tell them that I’ve only learned how to play one song in my life, and it was on the recorder.  The classic "Hot Cross Buns" is the only song I’ve mastered, and only the beginning.  My musical education never "took". I had a year of uninteresting trumpet lessons. I disliked practicing, had no timing, and the only bonus to the entire program was getting out of class from time to time to drain spit valves and pretend to know how to play.

Despite my skills, I made my own "Hot Cross Buns" album, featuring the song, the instrumental version, as well as the "Hot! Hot Cross Bunz!-European Dance Remix", and "Hot Cross Bizzuns featuring: Snoop Doggy Dog". If you are going to go for something silly, you might as well go all out. I made my own cover art, then wrote a very serious article while I laughed the entire class. The students surprised me at how well they did at the activitiy, asking me for different musical styles and artists. They got to show off their musical vocabulary as well.

I’m not sure if my students appreciate the creativity I try to put into my lessons to keep them having fun. I do notice my students don’t tend to whine for games very often if I do a good job creating their activities. This is motivation enough to try hard, because it’s rather annoying to hear them complain about being bored.

On Monday, there was a rather insane attempt on my part at trying to explain the idea of the "Easter bunny" to a group of Korean school children that have absolutely no cultural context or language to understand what it was I was trying to explain.

My basic conversation went something like, "We all know rabbit right? What do rabbits like? Carrots, yes, they love carrots, but today is a special day. Does anyone know Easter? The Easter Bunny is a special rabbit. He doesn’t like carrots. He likes chocolate. He also likes children. No, he doesn’t like to eat children. Don’t be afraid, the Easter Bunny won’t eat you. The Easter Bunny also likes eggs. Why? I don’t know either. He just does. No, he doesn’t eat the eggs. He hides the eggs. Why? I don’t know. So, let’s review. Easter Bunny, chocolate, egg. Okay?"

Seeing as I wasn’t exactly convincing myself I understood the holiday, I’m sure I was very believable. Seriously, what kind of a crazy holiday is Easter anyway? I didn’t expect them to get much out of what I was saying at their age, so I decided to take another try at the explanation for more visual learners by just drawing some cute pictures. I started with a rabbit. Two long ears. Two big teeth. Eyes. Legs. Poofy tail.

No sooner had I finished the tail than one of my students gave me a surprised look and started giggling.

The dialog continued in Korean from this point forward:
 "Teacher!" he said in a shocked tone. "Why?!"

I gave him a look that was echoed by all the other students in the class. We all turned to him and asked, "What’s so funny?"

He said, "The teacher drew the rabbit farting! Look! See! It’s farting, and there is a cloud near it’s butt! Hahahahaha!"

Everyone else in the class went, "It’s a tail!" Then they sort of looked at it for a minute, then they started laughing too.

I thought the whole exchange was just brilliant, so I was already laughing.

As I was updating this very website, trying to ponder what cute thing my students said to turn into some long winded post about teaching in Korea, and struggling to come up with some sort of lesson I learned from teaching someone from another culture (It’s what I do here), an event happened outside worth writing about.

I first heard the sirens when I was surfing the web. Instead of the doppler effect decreasing as the sirens started getting near, the sirens kept a nice steady whirl as they parked directly behind my apartment building complex. Somewhat concerned it might be a fire somewhere in my apartment complex, I grabbed my camera and my phone to share the news. Seems I answered my "What would you save in a fire?" discussion question activity without even trying. (Sorry wedding photos and Nintendo DS, it just wasn’t your day.)

I headed outside to see what the hell was going on. It turns out the the white sheds in this picture had caught on fire. I had a great vantage point to see what was going on. The fire fighters drove the water truck over the sidewalk, grabbed hoses for the fire engine, and had the fire out in about ten seconds of spraying. Then someone knocked in the door with some sort of tool, went inside, and then declared the emergency over. A crowd gathered near the subway exit and on the balcony of the apartment.

I dutifully started snapping off pictures from my vantage point, then once the fire was out and the majority of fire fighters had left, I went down to the scene of the fire to snap a few shots of the damage. There were still people seeing what had happened, and some fire fighters around trying to contact people about something, but it seemed like it was pretty much over for the night.

Transcript of the video:
Man at piano: "Pretty girls like pomegranate. What will I do if a pretty girl gets more beautiful? When I look at myself in the mirror, I feel happy. Pretty girls…"
Girl: "Ah, pretty!"
Man at piano: "Pretty girls like pomegranate." (Three times.)

You have no idea the amount of annoyance this man has caused me. The man singing at the piano happens to be the newest androgynous pretty man (ko-mi-nam) star, Lee Jun-gi. Seeing as I don’t follow Korean popular culture much, I had no idea why this man was famous.

It turns out he was one of the stars of the massively popular movie Wang-ui namja (Literally: King’s man) retitled for western cultures as  "A King and the Clown." This movie is the Korean film industry’s Titanic, with sales equilvalent to nearly 25% of the population going to see this movie. It’s a historical drama about a somewhat  king that grows to love two beautiful clowns that help him expose corruption in his government. I haven’t seen it yet, as it’s not on DVD at the moment, but my wife’s told me the basic story.  It’s smashed all sorts of box office records, and has propelled the unknown cast into stardom.

Seeing Lee Jun-gi on my television screen is a result of this phenomenon. The problem is, he’s a terrible singer. Second, the singing, no matter how terrible, gets stuck in my head whenever I see him on television (constantly), hear someone else sing the song (my students, also constantly), or see the new pomegranate juice he is crooning for on sale (every day at work or in any store), or advertised (anywhere you go).  The song is also simple, the downside of this being that it gets stuck in my head even worse.

I’ve been singing this song to myself for the past few weeks and I need it to end. It’s like a curse. Last Friday, when I tried to buy an orange juice at the vending machine, the machine gave me a pomegranate juice instead. I cursed, sang the song a few dozen more times, and sucked down the sweet liquid bitterly.

Damn you Lee Jun-gi!

Speech contest season is upon Korea once again, which means my wife has request after request to translate speeches for students. This is part of her responsibilty at her school. Her boss, due to pressure from the student’s mothers, expects her to help these students cheat on their speech contests. This means I get called in to help with the grammar and translation of the final products. While we supply the English text, in most cases, the students aren’t responsible for most of the writing of the Korean either.

Today’s speech was a book report done by a girl in elementary school. It might have actually been written by the girl as well. It was a book report about what happens to garbage after it has been thrown away. The girl talks about how garbage bins get stressed as people throw garbage into them. She says that garbage cans must be sad when they are full. She says that garbage cans must really love the garbage truck, because it takes the garbage away. She called garbage trucks, "The savior of all garbage cans".

When you translate something, you can easily manipulate the content to sound better or worse. While you want to remain neutral, you can change tone, intent, and meaning significantly as you go. We try to remain as literal and honest about our translation as we can. We know that calling garbage trucks "saviors" is an odd thing to say, but it’s what she wrote. We aren’t going to change what she said to put it into our own more adult voice. Keeping the original "voice" for such speeches can be rather difficult, because when a parent has written the entire speech to begin with, it often muddles the translation. They tend to use words no children would know, and trying to write simple sentences for them to memorize in English would be difficult. When politics or some sort of agenda gets involved, it’s often very frustrating to translate without feeling like a complete tool.

The worst thing about the entire speech contest season is the fact that all the students are forced to memorize everything we write. We try to keep the sentences simple, but when parents write long speeches, the students often have several pages to memorize. We don’t make listening tapes for the kids anymore, as it is too much of a bother and is beyond what is required for her school. Most of the students can’t speak English well at all, so they need to practice for weeks before the contest.

I think it’s a terrible method to force people to speak English, and I honestly think it causes much more stress than should be allowed on very young students. I’ve had six and seven year old students trying to memorize entire pages of English dialog. It’s a waste of time, as 90% of all the speech is memorized phonetically without any meaning at all. Hopefully the speeches we have to do this year will be at least as entertaining as this one was.

As previously mentioned, I have now have A Nintendo DS capable of going online. I’ve now played three of my four online games over WiFi and I’ve gotten different experiences out of each one.

Tetris DS:
This is my main online game experience. I’ve played a more than 70 games online. The games have all been smooth, easy to set up, and fast. I’ve never had any problems with people quitting in the middle of the game, and because the options are so limited, there really isn’t a way for people to spoil my fun. My only issue at the moment is the ranking system. I’m not ranked that high, as I started out losing basically every other game to much better players. Once my ranking fell, I got into some better matches with some people a little closer to my skill level.

 As I slowly rise my ranking back up, beating people ranked much lower than me, I’ll occasionally get matched with someone with several hundred wins who promptly kicks my ass. Depending on the ranking difference, people with lower rankings stand to gain by playing with upper level people, because a win grants more ranking points. I haven’t beaten anyone with a ranking substantially over my own, but I’ve won series of games against lower players that hardly budged my score.

I play the simple "two players, no items" rules. These are the easiest games to find. When I try to play four player games, I usually have to wait a minute or two for players to join, and more often than not, someone will drop, forcing the game search to resume again. This is the only time when you can play with more than one other player, so perhaps this is just something you must be willing to accept. The few games I’ve played in this mode were good, but tend to end quickly if you get a bad item thrown your way.

Metroid Prime: Hunters
Metroid Prime is my FPS game of choice at the moment. I never really got into the whole multiplayer FPS scene when I was in the United States, as I was too busy playing my Gameboy or Playstation. My aiming, sniping, and camping skills are weak. While I’ve been working through the rather tedious single player campaign (BACKTRACKING! REPETITIVE BOSSES! BOO!)

I have gotten online a few times to play this over WiFi as well. It’s basically a twitch based shooter, like any other FPS, with characters that have different bonuses and advantages. I can’ t win a game for the life of me, but of course everyone in the United States that bought a Nintendo DS early had gotten a demo of the game that let them practice their skills. I’m almost a year behind in my aiming skills, so I shouldn’t feel bad.

This game feels much more robust. Tons of options. Tons of levels. Lots of depth between the characters. The alternative forms for the characters, and their special abilities add a lot of the fun for this game. Nearly everyone plays simple deathmatch rules, which are okay. Some of the characters and level combinations can be cheap. People pick things that favor their character to get an edge. I don’t have any friends enabled, so I don’t get to use voice chat. Adding friends is much easier than Tetris and Animal Crossing. Anyone you play can potentially be added as a rival, then moved to friend, which would let you add them as a chat partner.

It certainly isn’t a true Metroid game, more like a Quake total conversion, but it’s surprising that the Nintendo DS can pull off smooth, polished FPS without a problem. While this isn’t my favorite game online, it certainly is the most impressive.

Animal Crossing: Wild World
This is the first WiFi game I bought, but i hadn’t been able to play it online until today. The premise of the online game is that you are inviting people over to your town. There is even a bonus for getting people to connect to your town and buying an item in your store. You get a new upgraded store with the ability to change your characters hair! Sadly, my store had just closed, so I wasn’t able to get anyone in my store for the upgrade.

The online friend system is a little cumbersome for this game. You need to add your friend, and they have to add you. Then you must open your gate to let them into your village. This is to prevent random people into your town and messing things up. Finding people to play with when you live on a different continent with 12+ time difference can be difficult. Since the game is time based, you can’t access some items or activities depending on the time it is when people join. Also, the villagers stay in their houses, and some random visitors disappear if you invite people to your town.

I did invite someone over, and they helped me pull weeds in my long neglected town. As payment, I allowed them to raid my overloaded fruit trees and take whatever they needed back to their town.  I’ll also get viral content from Nintendo as well as other people’s towns if I visit them, or have them come to my village. This is pretty cool, but it takes a lot of work finding people to play with. Adding codes and logging on to find people is a little tough without outside help to organize when people will be online.

I have yet to play Mario Kart DS online. This is mainly because I’ve heard of problems with the online system of keeping people honest. People tend to disconnect when they are about to lose. They don’t get charged for a lose due to the way the game was set up, which was later improved on for Tetris DS. No thanks.

I’ve extremely satisfied with my Wi-Fi dongle, and I’m simply waiting for the announcement of the Nintendo DS lite in the United States for a few of my friends to cave in. Then I’ll be getting even more online experience with people. Should be getting better as time goes on too, as people discover the system and the games. More online games are on the way, and I can’t wait.

The inside text of the card reads:
Have you ever been in a rocket ship? Would you like to visit the moon? Please come to my birthday party on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009. Meet at the launch pad.

My students had to create their own birthday cards centered on an activity they wanted to do. They had to use the structure "has/have ever …" to start the card.

There were several examples in the book that were pretty good ideas that let the student begin to think of what they could do. I let the students write, then decorate their own cards.

Since this activity was only as good or bad as the effort put into their cards, I decided I’d make my own card, pictured on the left as an example. It took around thirty minutes total, as I cut out the designs, helped other students, checked spelling, and corrected their grammar.

Once I finished I was really happy with the result. All the students in the class gave me an awed, "Oooooh! Wow!"

I was feeling in an artistic mood, so I took a few pictures of all the other art my students have made:

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.