우리 둘째 포드캐스다! Michael and Jennifer are joined by Yunji, our Korean co-host. We discuss Lee Myeong-bak’s new English education policy, as well as some other silly things as well. The transcript is available here by clicking on the link below, or directly as an MS Word file, which you can easily print and take with you on the subway. Please leave many comments, ask and answer each other’s questions, and also – register with our site so you can get email updates from us directly.

Also, some suggestions for how to best use our site: 1) listen while reading the transcript, 2) find as many words/phrases you don’t know and understand the conversation fully, and then 3) listen to the show again once or twice more, so you can feel the conversation and don’t have to concentrate on just understanding it.

Now, you’re in a “real English” mode, and not simply just studying it! Alright!

 

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폭탄영어#2 – New English Language (Transcript)

Michael: Welcome to ‘Bomb English.’ (We da bomb!) With hosts Michael and Jennifer podcasting direct from Seoul.
Jennifer: Real people, real topics, real English. Hello and welcome to episode 2 of ‘Bomb English.’
Michael: (We da bomb!) I did it this time.
Jennifer: I don’t think Michael’s (We da bomb!) is as cute as mine.
Michael: Oh, I can’t do that.
Jennifer: I’ve noticed.
Michael: I’ve too high. It’s too high. (We da bomb!)
Yunji: (We da bomb!)
Michael: Oh, that’s pretty good. So this is Michael and Jennifer but we have a new co-host with us today.
Yunji: You finally hear a Korean voice. I’m Korean girl and… I’m Korean girl? Yes…
Michael: And your name would be?
Yunji: Would be Yunji, Yunji Jeong, yes.
Michael: Yunji?
Yunji: Call me Yun. Short, easy to remember, easy to remember.
Michael: Now, we know each other from Yongin, from when you were a student teacher.
Yunji: Right.
Michael: Right
Yunji: German student teacher.
Michael: German, yes.
Jennifer: So you teach German?
Yunji: No.
Jennifer: I am confused.
Yunji: I taught once in Yongin when I was a student teacher. It was good, real good. They got impressed.
Michael: Ah
Jennifer: She, so you were the German TA and you’re not teaching German now. What do you teach?
Yunji: I’m teaching English. Ha ha.
Michael: Oh~ (She da bomb!)
Jennifer: She is the…
Yunji: (I’m da bomb!)
Jennifer: (She da bomb!)
Michael: Ha ha ha ha. So you teach English, what level? Where do you teach?
Yunji: In primary school, middle school, and in company.
Michael: Ah…
Yunji: At school and company.
Michael: Oh, so you do… Ah, you teach on a lot of different levels.
Yunji: Yes, right.
Jennifer: So you’re an English teacher and there’s some new English teaching regulations that are coming into play soon. What are they?
Yunji: What are they? Their English new policy is for people who can speak English, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: People who speak English can be teachers, right?
Jennifer: I hope so.
Yunji: Do you know?
Jennifer: No.
Yunji: Actually, as for me, it’s a good chance, good opportunity, wonderful opportunity for me because I’m a German teacher. But you know, German is not popular lately. Actually the students don’t learn German.
Michael: Oh, it’s less popular than before.
Yunji: Sure. Not less, much less popular.
Michael: Oh.
Yunji: Nowadays, they learn Chinese or Japanese. Asian language is very popular. So, I want to be an English teacher. Like, you know, full-time teacher.
Michael: And your English is fine. I mean, it’s good English.
Yunji: I think so. No, no.
Jennifer: We have two Michaels in the room now! No, your English is excellent…
Yunji: And, and so the English new policy can be helpful to me. But to the other person, but to the other person, I don’t know about that.
Jennifer: So basically the policy is that English classes in Korea from now on should be actually taught in…
Yunji: English.
Michael: English!
Jennifer: What language were they teaching it in before?
Yunji: Korean.
Jennifer: Ahhhh.
Yunji: Korean and English. But nowadays I’m speaking English and Korean in class, actually.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: It’s very good.
Michael: It sounds like you can conduct English classes in English without a problem.
Yunji: Not much problem, I think.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: Uh-huh, because I don’t speak English too much. I speak English, properly. And, yeah even though they can’t understand my speaking in English, but they love to hear that and they don’t feel not comfortable, no, not at all. “What is that? What are you talking about?” they ask me and I can answer, right, the question. It will help them so much, I think to learn English.
Michael: And every word you say, isn’t perfect.
Yunji: Of course not.
Michael: Sometimes you make mistakes. I make mistakes in Korean.
Yunji: Uh-huh.
Jennifer: Boy, I make mistakes all the time! And not just in Korean, in my own language, in English.
Michael: Um, so it’s okay. I know that in Korea, you know the teaching, kind of the teaching culture, the teacher making a mistake is not seen as a good thing.
Yunji: Especially in good school like ○○○○외고 like that.
Michael: Yeah, foreign language high schools.
Yunji: Uh-huh.
Michael: Yeah, so but if you make a mistake, how do your students…Do they know you make a mistake? I mean, you’re just talking and every word doesn’t come out perfectly all the time. What do, how do they react?
Yunji: Just some people who is, who went abroad, they will notice, yeah…I think.
Michael: So some students speak more natural English than you do?
Yunji: Sure, much better than me. Some students, yeah. Uh, but, yeah, I think they understand because I’m not, you know, Englishman, I’m not American.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: So they know, you know, the mistaking, make mistaking of English can be very, is very natural thing to do.
Jennifer: I actually learn the most when I make mistakes in other languages. I never remember when I’ve said something right, but if I make a mistake, which I do by the way all the time, in the future, I remember making that mistake and it’s easy for me to pick up on it and do it better in the future.
Michael: When I studied German, my German teacher never spoke in English and, in fact, I only heard him speak English one day. So, you know, English, should be taught in English right? What’s so, why are some people, why are some people against this idea?
Yunji: I think some people who can’t speak English in the class, probably old teachers like 50s or 40s, or a person who’s not familiar with American culture, they don’t want to speak English in English class, actually. “Why do we have to speak English? We can’t, we can teach them in Korean,” they think that way. So that’s the problem. But, you know, most of 20s or 30s students, students or teachers, they love to learn English in English. So I think some people who is not familiar with English is against, because they feel, they feel fear, they feel scared that they will lose the job.
Michael: Ah…
Jennifer: I have to say there’s a lot of teachers that I know who teach English in schools who can’t actually speak English. It really surprised me. When I first started teaching, there were other teachers in the English department with me, and I couldn’t speak in English with them. We had to speak in Korean, which was really bad because I didn’t speak Korean then, but they couldn’t communicate with me in English, even though they were supposed to be English teachers.
Michael: Yes, we were on the same program and, we were, I was in 제주도, you were in 안동 and 경주.
Jennifer: Woo-hoo 경주! Yoo-hoo!
Michael: And, my, at my school, the head English teacher could not speak any English to me. I could not understand any word he said, and at that time my Korean was not at a high level, so I could not say anything to him in Korean, he could not understand anything in English. So he would avoid me in the school because if we talked, it was usually obvious that he could not communicate with me. And there are lots of good English teachers who can speak but there are also, you know, some teachers who cannot communicate in English.
Jennifer: And it’s really strange because when I’ve studied languages in America, it’s inconceivable that…
Michael: (Inconceivable!)
Yunji: What is ‘inconceivable’?
Jennifer: It means you couldn’t even think of it. It’s beyond your ability to imagine.
Michael: Beyond your ability to ‘conceive.’
Jennifer: Yeah. ‘Conceive’ means to think of something.
Michael: And there was this, also from a movie. (Inconceivable!)
Jennifer: Which movie?
Michael: ‘The Princess Bride.’
Jennifer: Oh, oh!
Michael: We’ll put that in there.
Jennifer: Put the, put the actual clip in.
Michael: Yes.
(A: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!
B: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
A: Inconceivable!)
Jennifer: Usually the prefix ‘in’ in front of any word means ‘not.’ It’s like ‘비’ or ‘무’ or ‘불’ in front of a Korean word. It means ‘not!’ So ‘in’conceivable means “not conceivable,” or not something you can think of. Anyway, it’s inconceivable to me (Inconceivable!) that, that a teacher of any language in America would be teaching a language they couldn’t actually communicate in. If you’re a Spanish teacher, you’re expected to be able to speak fluent Spanish. And if you’re a German teacher, you’re expected to be able to speak fluent German. If you teach Japanese, you should speak fluent Japanese. Whether or not that’s the only language you use as an instructor in the classroom, everybody would still expect that you’re fluent in the language. I’ve never met a Spanish teacher who wouldn’t be able to go to Spain and speak with people in the native language there. Whereas here in Korea, I’ve met English teachers who really, just don’t speak English.
Michael: And this is not to say that America’s school system is perfect, because we have lots of problems. And I think Korea’s problem is pedagogy. It’s pedagological. Pedagological?
Yunji: What is that word?
Jennifer: That sounds like a really nasty operation.
Michael: I’m sorry.
Jennifer: That’s a doctor you do not wanna visit. Where do you have to go today? I have to go to the pedagologist.
Michael: I’m sorry. I made a mistake! I need my pedagology removed. It’s pedagogical, right? Pedagological. So I think Korea’s problem is, it’s pedagogical, which means having to do with how you teach, teaching philosophy, teaching theory. Whereas America’s problem is more “fundy,” it’s money. Public schools in big cities often don’t have enough money but in Korea, Korea has the money, and the Korean teachers receive, how many years of English training?
Yunji: Even though they got to learn English for 10 years, they can’t speak English. They can read.
Michael: So what’s the problem? Why not?
Yunji: Because we don’t speak English in the class. We don’t speak!
Michael: You’re afraid to speak.
Yunji: Yeah, of course.
Jennifer: It’s really strange how convinced my students were, when they started my class, that they couldn’t speak or understand English. Because my classes, of course, always in English, all the time. And I had teachers and students telling me that “students can’t understand everything you say,” and the students would tell me “we don’t understand everything you say.” But even without understanding 100%, my students always completed whatever task or assignment I’d given them, even though they weren’t operating at 100%. They got enough of it to understand. There was actual communication going on.
Michael: They got your message.
Jennifer: They got the message. And despite what they all said about, “Oh teacher, we can’t speak English.”
Michael: They understood what you just told them.
Jennifer: Right! And actually my students were pretty good at communicating.
Michael: Yeah, this is the problem I, and even outside of English, I think, again, it’s a pedagogical problem, ha ha.
Yunji: Good.
Jennifer: Nailed it that time, nicely done!
Michael: Um, you know, I teach U.S. History and the students, they read through the history and, you know, they’ll maybe read 20 pages of the textbook. And they say, “Teacher, I can’t understand. I didn’t understand all of it!” and they get really stressed, and there’s this Korean mindset: If I could not understand 100% the first time, something’s wrong with me. And I said, “You know, American students think U.S. History is difficult, too. They read the textbook and they don’t understand many parts. It’s okay. That’s why I’m a teacher, I explain to you.” But they get a lot of stress if they don’t understand 100% the first time.
Yunji: That’s why I think Korean teachers can help them if they can’t understand the parts, we can explain in English and in Korean again. And some parts have to be done in Korean, actually.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: So that, so, I’m very pro to this policy, but I think some people who has already teaching qualification, will be against to them because, you know, the teachers, the people who can speak English very well, or much better than people who has teaching qualification, even though, you know, the people can speak English, but they don’t have teaching qualification, they can speak English much better, right? Yeah, some people can…
Michael: They lived in the States for 10 years, or something like that.
Yunji: So, so, you know, to get the teaching qualification they have spent much more time and energy and effort to get it, right? But they feel like it’s unfair. We spent many things, we sacrificed many things. You know, but you didn’t get that and you taught them – that’s not fair, they feel that way, I think. That’s the problem right now.
Michael: And even now, though, people judge your intelligence based on how well you speak English.
Jennifer: Or by what your TOEIC score was, not even speaking sometimes.
Michael: Yeah, even now I’m sure some people, Koreans, are judging you based on your ‘What mistakes she made,’ or her pronounce…‘She pronounced this’…
Yunji: Based on my major, too.
Michael: Based on your major, right. But we’re sitting here having a conversation, unplanned, in English!
Jennifer: Right.
Michael: Right? So, but I think that fear prevents students, especially teachers, from speaking English freely in front of students. ‘What if I make a mistake?’
Jennifer: I don’t know, I make mistakes in English all the time.
Yunji: I wonder, don’t you have fear when you spoke, when you speak Korean?
Michael: I do, did, always. But I have a fear of making mistakes, of course, like public speaking. But, but you know the first step for me learning Korean, my first language partner when I came to Korea forced me to speak Korean for a half-an-hour. So, and we were supposed to do a half-an-hour of Korean, half-an-hour of English. We would do a half-an-hour of English and then I would ask her grammar questions in English about Korea. And then one day she said, “You know what? You have to speak Korean only.”
Yunji: For an hour.
Michael: “For your half hour, your 30 minutes, you speak Korean only.” I did not know past tense, I didn’t know many words. So I knew, ‘오늘 식사합니다’, ‘오늘, 어제 집에 갑니다.’ You know, really basic, you know learning the past tense. ‘어제 집에 갔습니다, 갔어요’ You know, and it, probably, it was much, much worse than that.
Yunji: Actually…
Michael: ‘오늘 먹어요’ But I, I just spoke. You know, it was very helpful.
Yunji: Actually, when I was in high school in the classroom, when I made a mistake, the teacher scolded me. The fear comes from the scolding, you know. Probably when I make the mistake, probably he will scold me.
Michael: Or hit you!
Yunji: I was hitted.
Michael: Oh no, the memory!
Yunji: Many times, oh no I don’t wanna recall that. So that’s why, you know, many students will feel fearful about it, the making mistakes of language.
Michael: And they learn that from the teachers!
Yunji: What about in America?
Jennifer: When I learned, I started with Japanese.
Yunji: In America?
Jennifer: In America, I learned Japanese from high school in America, actually. Please don’t ask me to…
Michael: そうですか ~
Jennifer: いや~
Yunji: もしもし？
Michael: もしもし？
Jennifer: もしもし？
Michael: アメリカン…Okay.
Yunji: That’s all.
Jennifer: 私はアメリカ人です。
Michael: お、はい!
Jennifer: はい~
Yunji: はい、そうですか~
Jennifer: そうです。 You know, please don’t quiz me on my Japanese.
Michael: プレーステーション。Sorry.
Jennifer: プレーステーション。
Michael: プレーステーション。
Jennifer: Okay, this is getting edited out. No, I started learning Japanese from about high school, in America. And everybody made mistakes in class and it wasn’t a big deal. The teacher expected us to make mistakes because, you know, duh? None of us had studied Japanese before! And you can’t expect to be perfect or even close to perfect in a language when you’re learning it. Even when you’re wrong, or even when you’re right, you’re still wrong sometimes. You don’t know quite…
Michael: You’re accidentally right!
Jennifer: You’re accidentally right and when I learned Korean, I didn’t generally learn it at first in a formal setting; I lived with a host family. And my host family was enormously supportive of my efforts to learn Korean and when I made a mistake, you know, they would point the mistake out to me! My host father one day sat me down and said, “Listen, Jennifer. You’re driving us crazy! ‘편지’ and ‘판지’ are different things. And you mix them up every time.” But…
Michael: ‘이 바보야!’
Jennifer: But, here’s the thing. After that, I’m like, “Oh!” and I remembered that and I stopped mixing them up. But I learned from my mistake. The mistake was actually a really important part of the learning process for me. And even now, if I get something accidentally right, there is nothing to show that I will not make the same, or make a totally different mistake in the future. I will find a way to mess up the exact same phrase that I got right before.
Michael: I speak Korean all the time and I know it’s wrong as I say it.
Jennifer: But the thing is, if somebody says, you know, “You make this mistake,” I go, “Oh!” and in the future I make that mistake a lot less.
Michael: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer: But, um… no.
Michael: And the problem is in the Korean class, you’re so afraid to make a mistake you don’t speak!
Jennifer: My students were terrified of making mistakes until one day, I misspelled something on the board. And my…
Michael: Ah, you misspelled something.
Jennifer: I misspelled something in English.
Michael: You aren’t a native speaker!
Yunji: I think foreigners do, more than Koreans. Koreans are very good at spelling.
Jennifer: So my students, there’s this gasp – and finally one student in the back was brave enough to be like, “선생님, 아… Your English, ehhh, not right.” And I just went, “Oh, pshaw, I’m so stupid, ha ha ha.” And suddenly everybody in class just relaxed because, ‘Look. Jennifer’s a native English speaker and she screwed up!’
Michael: Yeah, and I’ve corrected Korean people’s mistakes. Doesn’t mean I can speak Korean better than them. Obviously, right? But, you know, I just, I’ve studied certain words and, you know, it’s fresh for me.
Yunji: You’re better than I do.
Michael: No.
Yunji: Well, you know what, in my class, whenever I screwed up or made a mistake, they loved it. “Wow! Teacher made a mistake! Wow!” Wow, they love that.
Michael: So I think, you know, I think Koreans are more afraid to make mistakes in front of Koreans, and even in front of native speakers.
Yunji: Sure. When I was in high school, actually, I learned grammar all the time, grammar. It’s correct or not, correct or not. We didn’t speak English. They didn’t make me speak. We don’t have chance to speak, actually. We have to read a lot, read a lot, and we have to prepare for the test. So we didn’t have time to speak. But nowadays…
Michael: Speaking is emphasized.
Yunji: Very, very important. Right, right. So, my class, my class, I always let them speak.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: In Korean, I said in Korean “어디로 갈까” how do you say it in English? In English, they spoke, they speak very good.
Michael: And the level is, these days is much higher than, you know, when I came to Korea, at first. Yeah.
Jennifer: In a way I think it’s really nice, though, to finally see an emphasis on English as communication, rather than English as answers to a test.
Michael: And…
Jennifer: When school’s over the tests are over too and the real test begins! If you see a foreigner, can you talk with them?
Michael: Well, back to 이명박 and the new policy. I think the system is broken and the way I see it, the people go to school, people have classes. But for the public schools at the bottom, not the foreign language high schools, not the universities, not, not the people who go into 학원s in 대치동, but for the people at the bottom, the system is already broken. And somewhere, there needs to be some radical, sudden change because gradual change, slow change, doesn’t really work. How many reforms have there been in the Korean language system? There’s a 수능시험, there’s no 수능시험, there’s this policy, that policy, the ranking system in high school, no ranking system in high school, I hear. And nothing changes.
Yunji: Right, it doesn’t affect to the speaking of English.
Michael: Yeah, and I think shaking things up and just saying “Okay, it’s gonna cause trouble, but we have to just bite the bullet.”
Jennifer: I’ll be interested to see if this policy actually sticks. (Do it!) There’s gonna be a lot of pressure for it to go away. And even I’m not convinced 100% that it’ll be effective. I don’t think you need to teach kindergartners English, all in English. But, you know, when these kids get to high school, they should be fluent enough to do a class in English. When I take Korean classes, our classes from the very first level, from day one when you know no Korean, it’s all in Korean.
Michael: Yeah, and I also think teaching subjects in English can be good, but I don’t think it should be a requirement, like teaching science or teaching math in English.
Yunji: Even in Korean, we don’t understand the science. Exactly what, you know, teachers are talking about. So, I don’t think it’s so good.
Jennifer: No, that’s…
Michael: I’m of mixed feelings because on one hand, I like shaking things up but on the other hand, I think Korea is getting a little too insane about English, because it’s important, but it’s not that important.
Jennifer: It kind of needs to be a decision whether what Korea really needs is a few people who speak English at a very high level of fluency or whether they want everybody to be able to speak some. Because that’s kind of the choice, it’s really unlikely that in the next, you know, 5, 10, 15, even 20 years, everybody is going to be running around speaking fluent English. The question is: Does Korea need that?
Michael: I think some, one radical change: just requiring English to be taught in English.
Yunji: Like interpreter or some…?
Michael: Well, I mean, even at the middle, high school levels, I don’t think that’s bad, I think that’s a good idea.
Jennifer: I think English level, or English classes, you know, at that level, it should be in English.
Michael: But requiring university classes to be all taught in English? I think…
Jennifer: They don’t have professors to do that.
Michael: And, yeah, I think that’s ridiculous.
Jennifer: And if a professor has already invested countless years getting their Ph.D.. in, you know Nuclear Physics, expecting them to spend another couple years learning English just to teach it, that’s ridiculous.
Yunji: It can be a waste a time.
Michael: It’d be a waste of time.
Jennifer: Such a waste of time.
Michael: And every, no matter what your ability is as an economics professor, your teaching, your ability to teach is limited by your English ability, when you should be teaching economics. Maybe you’re an economics genius but, you know, I if you can’t speak English well enough to, you know, have class in English, I don’t think that should matter. I think it’s limiting Korea’s resources rather than effectively using them.
Jennifer: Any last thoughts?
Yunji: We, Koreans, are worrying about the economic problems, you know, you know some people who are rich, some people who’s very rich, they will go abroad because they will get, they want to get good score of English, right.
Michael: They’re already going abroad.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Michael: Oh yeah.
Yunji: I’m sure. I think they will go abroad more and more to get good score of English because the English exam is changing, like they are increasing speaking, reading, listening, and writing, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: Speaking parts are getting important. More, more, and more important.
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: So the people who is not so rich, who’s poor and who doesn’t have a chance to learn English, I mean, speaking English, they will get, you know, poor grades. And they cannot have a good chance to go to good universities. That’s the real, that’s the big problem, I think.
Michael: I, thing is, I already think it’s already like that and this is the, kind of, one good chance to maybe, you know, fix things for the people at the bottom because, you know, especially I worked in 3 외고s, you know, I’ve done all kinds of elite, like, 과외…
Yunji: Actually, I did, too.
Michael: You know, I’ve worked, you know, I’ve been down in 대치동, 도곡동, 타워팰리스, all those places and this new policy doesn’t affect those people.
Yunji: Because they’re already good?
Michael: No, well yeah because they’re not getting their English in public schools. They’re getting their English from super 학원 in 대치동, they’re getting, you know, English camp in Australia, they’re getting, you know, English summer program, you know, in some other place, so…
Yunji: Yeah, that’s why we don’t worry about them cause they are already good at English and they are already, you know, to, they can afford to do that, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Yunji: To go abroad or to learn English.
Michael: See…
Yunji: The problem is the bottom.
Jennifer: Well that means this policy, if it actually goes into effect and it actually works, means that students at the bottom, for the first time are actually going to have opportunities to actually use the English they’re learning.
Michael: Or get teachers who can change the tone of the classroom.
Jennifer: Right.
Michael: Because I think the broken system benefits the rich already. Because my students, the majority of my students at the top 외고s they go, you know, their addresses speak for themselves. You know, they have buses that take them, most of them go down to 강남 and to very rich neighborhoods, and a very few, a very small small percentage are those students who could, you know, study hard, memorize the dictionary, they never went to 학원, but they still got into 대원외고. That story is very rare. Mostly it’s I went to the best 학원s, I went to the best private schools that were very expensive, I have 5 private tutors, that’s why I went to 대원외고. Of course I work hard but it’s not just 능력 it’s also…
Jennifer: That was Mike making the symbol for money. So while we’re waiting for Mike to get down off his soap box, it’ll take awhile, his soap box is pretty tall. It’s about time to wrap things up here at 폭탄영어. We thank you for joining us, we hope you visit our site on the web www.bombenglish.com (We da bomb!)
Michael: You spelled it right!
Jennifer: I, I’m a native speaker.
Michael: You speak good English!
Jennifer: So thanks again for joining us at 폭탄영어.

Transcription by Eun-Gyuhl Bae