Hello girls! Welcome to the second update of the 90-day journey I am doing to improve my speaking skills in my target language (Korean).
So as you can see in the title, this was a week of ‘discoveries’, even though I already knew some things from when I studied English pedagogy at university. The thing is, as I haven’t been trying to improve my speaking skills in any other language apart from English, and I haven’t been teaching for so long, that I forgot some key aspects that teachers of foreign languages always tell their students.
The first key aspect is that you need to receive some input before you can actually produce. This means…if you don’t get enough input (by listening and reading), then you won’t be producing a nice amount of output (speaking and writing).
So I realized that in fact I wasn’t really receiving input. The only Korean I was listening to in the last months, was from the podcast TTMIK, which are lessons in English mixed with basic/intermediate Korean. Apart from it I have been watching some k-dramas and listened to BTS a lot.
But of course, that’s not enough if I want to produce more output from now on. So I will be including more listening instances for me: maybe watching daily vlogs every day and watching Korean variety shows or movies.
Now, on the other side, my reading input has been really poor. Yes, I try to read songs lyrics and everything I find in TTMIK worksheets, but apart from it I haven’t really included other kind of reading material to my study routine.
So I am thinking of something… I may try three challenges from my Language Challenges Bundle during this 90-day journey:
>> First, I will do the Videos on Youtube for 30 days.
>> Then, I will try the Reading Outloud challenge.
>> When I finish with that, I will do the Get more fluent at speaking challenge.
I will do them in that order because I want to increase my receptive skills through listening and reading before. Of course, during this time I will be also trying to produce, so that when I do the final 30 day challenge, I will already be used to speaking.
And yes, I will also try to increase my personal Korean vocabulary bank. And I’ll try to learn more verbs so that I have more to use from.
If you also want to do the challenges I mentioned and have access to five more of them, you can absolutely have them here! You can do them in the order you want and repeat the ones that you feel are more useful to you. Each worksheet includes an audio to guide you through the tasks you need to do.
I hope you have enjoyed this update, if you want to listen to the audio version of it, where I go deeper in the update, you’ll find it down below this paragraph. You can use it as a podcast episode to inspire you!
Have a beautiful day ahead, and see you next week!
Sofía xx
