Our philosophy...
Wednesday, July 1, 2009 at 6:44PM Welcome to ROK Channel, it is our goal to provide original contents that we hope will be of benefit to you. For example, our 취업면접 도사 series, we were tired of people selling their credentials and not providing substance to the contents. Our goal is to provide you information not everybody provides to differentiate ourselves from the people that give cookie cutter, ineffective, Dear Abby and non-real life scenarios for your job search.
Our 우리 영어 같이 배우자 w/ 은혜 series, English teachers already know how to speak English. How could they understand how hard it is for you to learn English, so we thought it might be more interesting to learn from a student's perspective, where you can learn together and commiserate together.
We are also very excited about our future projects that are in the development stages right now. Coming soon, we will release 운동 도사, as part of our 도사 Series. Around Seoul will be a potpourri of interviews (people not of the everyday ilk), food reviews, bar reviews, and anything around Seoul that we hope you'll find interesting.
Thank you for visiting our site, and please be patient with us as we develop contents.
Reader Comments (2)
Hi:
Your English teacher and learner series is interesting. What I like to prove to English teachers who feel their students are not learning because they're stupid or lazy is because the teacher is stupid in not realizing where the student is coming from. So, I taughth Korean to foreigners for free a few times. I'm not good at Korean but the basic stuff, pronunciation, first level stuff, I can teach it. And you know what? Teachers appreciate after my classes how hard it is for students...
My most basic example is: I go to school because I want to learn.
In Korean that is 배우고 싶기 때문에 학교에 가요.
which literally means
Learn want because school to go. Try talking English like that everyday as an English teacher. If you can't, how can a korean pick it up when they also have to learn the actual words and pronunciation which are also different.
That's why, in my adult classes, I explain the reasoning on why English has been so hard to learn and why it is about taking your time. My way is about technical structural and cultural or TSC: Totally Systematically Complicated.
Technical: this is about words, pronunciation and listening;
Structural: grammar and sentence structure is so different; People learning a new language need to develop new pathways and that takes three things: frequency, intensity, and time.
Cultural: I remembered a businessweek article I gave to a top CEO. He understood everything except six little words:" What's in it for me?" All simple, all structurally easy but still no clue on what it meant. This takes lots of reading and meeting good people who will explain things when things come up that you don't understand.
History majors are dimes a dozen but here, there is a use for them to a certain degree. My VPs and CEO appreciated me. I know, I now work with one.
Hi Dan,
Thank you for your kind comments. Most teachers here, this is their first REAL JOB, and this is their first experience in a METROPOLITAN, so they think it's a Seoul problem, when in actuality, it's a Metropolitan problem. So the combination of the culture shock, exposure to a metropolitan and the shock of being a minority must be overwhelming, personally I feel like a foreigner in my own country based on my background.