Tuesday’s Class–What is happening with _____?

I was worried that we were not going to have enough topics to talk about on Monday so I brought something with me in case the conversations broke down. As I said earlier, they did not and I was very impressed. The information that I brought with me for Monday’s class was a list of the ten most searched words on Naver. A link to the article can be found here. I thought this list was quite interesting, even if I was only familiar with two people on the list. (I had heard of the K-1 fighter before.)

There was not a full class on Tuesday, and energy levels were pretty low. I was surprised because I thought this topic was a pretty interesting one. These were the people that were most searched, so I thought that they might be hot topics. Were some of the people new to you? I guessed that talking about the people that were most searched might be most like what people would talk about in Korean. I am thinking that maybe Tuesday was just not a great day…. no problem. (I think I will bring a new list on Monday just in case our new system of “no topic” breaks down.)

There were not many corrections in this class. I talked about using, “happening” as a noun. As you can see from the dictionary, it is not wrong. I think I would usually use “event” in the situations that I hear you guys say happening.

However, “What’s happening with ____?” is a very usual and useful question in this kind of situation.

Also, “What’s happening to ____?” is a good question. This sounds more like something is going on with them that they cannot really control. It is happening to them.

There was one story from the list of famous celebrities that caused some errors. Do you know the gagman gagwoman gagartist gagger comedian Kim Mi-Ryo? (I hope you can see that gagman is Konglish–the English word is comedian.) Someone said that, “She wants to singer.” We can’t really “singer” we can “sing” or “be a singer.” So in this case, we should say, “She wants to be a singer.” Or, “I want to be a cowboy” and “Royal wants to be a gangster. “

That is all for Tuesday…

Week 14

Hello! Howzit goin? What’s up? Well, this week we had a few different topics. I think Jason is still waiting for the review about the classes that he missed. I am sorry but you will have to wait until tomorrow. I promise that tomorrow (Friday) afternoon I will update for the whole week. Have a nice evening/morning and I will see you soon.

PS–I have a new idea. Please let me know what you think. I was thinking that from now, because we only have 5 more weeks, that if you guys want, we could extend the class time on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday by 10 minutes so that we have more time to study. If you are not interested, that is fine. Please let me know what you think about my idea.

Drawing

I hope everyone is ready to draw again tomorrow. I expect that tomorrow will be the real test of your drawing skills.

Today, we practiced giving and taking instructions to draw a house. I was very impressed with the checking and confirming. Everyone did a great job to explain and draw the pictures.

 Some words that were needed to draw the pictures of the house were:

kitchen room
bathtub
bath mat
speaker
stove
toilet
antenna
drawer

We also practiced pronunciation of:
wall
door
doll
square
mirror

I know that you are going to be studying articles soon in everyone’s favorite book, Top Notch. I want to be sure to give you a good start. I heard these sentences today:

There is speaker.
There is window.
Is this window? (pointing at a badly drawn picture)

Each of these sentences needs an “a”.

So:

There is a speaker.
There is a window.
Is this a window?

Royal and Rose were comparing the price of something to what they thought it might be. Royal wanted to say:

 It was more expensive than I thought.

Other similar sentences that might be useful are:

It was harder/easier than I thought.
It was faster/longer than I thought.
It was better than/worse than I thought.

Very good job today. As I said, we will continue with mental images tomorrow. Nice work!
 

Weekend and drawing pictures

I hope everyone had a nice weekend. I went to Jason’s hometown to watch my friend’s band play some music. It was lots of fun.

 We started off the class talking with a partner about the weekend. There were some interesting stories. I thought Changbo had an interesting story about getting ripped off on the price of his hotel room because there was a reunion.

There was also lots of talk about movies. I think many people (especially Anni and Rose) are excited for Spiderman 3. I saw the preview (when I was watching The Reaping) and I think it looks like it could be exciting.  I am sure that it will be better than Spiderman 2. Some useful sentences that came up when talking about this were:

When will it be released?
When will they release it?

I haven’t decided yet (who I will watch the movie with).

After chatting about movies and the weekend  little longer we started to work on the job of the day. That was to explain pictures to our partners.

Words that we talked about before starting the task were:

circle, square, rectangle, triangle, (straight) line, wavy line, top, bottom, right, left, corner.

The job was to describe a simple picture to our partner. I was very impressed. I am sure that many people drew better pictures than I would have, even though English is my first language. Actually, the thing that I was most impressed with was the picture that Lina drew from her imagination. It was a rocket, and it only used simple shapes. Fantastic!

We also talked about some common errors in class. The first was:

today morning>>> this morning

The second was:

today night >>> tonight

The third mistake was about giving directions. Many people started their directions with the word “you.” Much more common would be to start directions without this word.

So:

You draw a triangle. >>> Draw a triangle.

You open the window. >>> Open the window.

You put a square above the circle. >>> Put a square above the circle.

(one more command) Have a nice night!

The day after April Fool’s Day

Hey gang,

How are you doing?

A main topic from today was lying.
Some useful sentences about lying are :

Why did you lie? (this one time)
Why are you lying? (continually)
Why do you always lie? (always)

I guess that a usual thing to lie about might be love.
In class today there were rumors that someone is in love.

The sentence that I think I heard was:

_____ is fall in love.

Better sentences would be:

____ fell in love. (past tense, fall-fell)
____ is in love.    (to be in love)
____is falling in love.  (is in the middle of falling in love)

Another sentence that we talked about was the phrase, “to be pissed off.” Please remember that we need to say “to be” + pissed off  because it is a feeling. Like to be hungry/angry/tired . Also, please remember that this is kind of slang and should not be used in formal situations.

Another sentences that I have heard many times is:
When I was high school.
The problem is that I never was high school. I was in high school and i was a high school student.  So, we should say:

When I was in high school I liked gym class.
When I was a high school student I liked PE. 

Have a nice day and good luck avoiding the yellow dust.

Movie Survey

In class today each student gave a survey about movies and interests. This certainly gave many chances to speak. I hope that each student learned about their classmates also. What interesting things did you learn?

The questions that we asked each other today were:

How often do you rent DVD’s?

How many DVD’s do you own?

How often do you go to the movies? Who do you usually go with?

Where do you usually go to the movies? How much is a ticket?

Do you usually watch Korean movies or Hollywood movies?

What percentage (%) of movies that you watch are Korean?

What is your favorite movie ever? How many times have you seen it?

Who is your favorite actress? Why do you like her?

Who is your favorite actor? Why do you like him?

Do you have a favorite director? What movies has he/she directed?

What is the best film you’ve seen recently? Who was starring in it?

What is the worst film you’ve seen recently? Who was starring in it?

Do you enjoy sci-fi movies? What was the last sci-fi movie you saw?

Do you enjoy action films? Is it OK for young kids to watch violence?

Do you like to watch comedies? What is the funniest movie you have ever seen?

Do you enjoy horror movies? What is the scariest movie you have ever seen?

What was the last movie that you saw? What was the first movie you ever saw?

I thought it was quite an interesting time to hear everyone’s answers to these questions.

One (new?) word that came up in class today was:
subtitles-I explained to Royal that I read English subtitles when I watch Korean movies.

I think I heard the sentence, “I am Myeongdong” today as an answer for where someone usually watches movies. This is very strange, because Myeongdong is a place. I cannot be a place. I can only just do some action in a place. So, we could say, “I usually go to the theater in Myeongdong” or “I usually watch movies in Myeongdong.”

Good job and good singing!
See you soon!

“Whadjahdoo” this weekend?

In today’s class we mostly just focused on talking about what we did on the weekend. My weekend was pretty good. On Friday I just watched a movie. The I saw was the Pursuit of Happyness. I thought it was pretty good. I have it on a pirated DVD if anyone wants to borrow it. On Saturday, I met some friends in Sinchon, for my friend’s birthday. It was a good time.

I was interested to hear that many of the students in 1B hung out together this weekend. Sounds nice.

It was nice to hear what people did in their free time. I was surprised to hear that Rooney hit the (English) books.

If someone asks us what we did this weekend we would need to answer with simple past tense. If we use present simple that sounds like a usual plan.

For example:

I’m studied. >>> I studied.
I just hang out at home. >>> I just hung out at home.
I sleep. >>> I slept.
I just stay at home. >>> I just stayed at home.

An error in making questions in the past:
What movie did you watched? >>> What movie did you watch?

I heard that “Kate saw the movie.” I was very suprised because I wanted to know what the movie is. I think a more correct sentence is, “Kate a saw a movie. The movie that she saw was Music and Lyrics.” I also heard that Hugh Grant looks older now and has lots of wrinkles.

Some people had some drinks this weekend. The correct sentence is, “I drank with my friends.” Simple past for drink is drank, not drunk. Drunk is the feeling when we drink too much and feel tipsy.

Some people had Chinese food for dinner on Saturday. Actually I ate Chinese food for lunch today because I was thinking about Chinese food after class. I heard these two sentences:

I so like Chinese food.
I very like Chinese food.

Both of these sentences are incorrect.
We should say, “I really like Chinese food.”

It seemed that many people wanted to talk about movies, so we will talk about movies tomorrow.

By the way, the movies that I bought yesterday are: Perfume, Flags of Our Fathers, Number 23 (whichI heard was boring), Smoking Aces, Hannibal Rising, and Paris, je t’aime (Paris, I love you).

Whatsup? 1B!

The class project of making a CD compilation is going very well. I think most of the songs have been chosen and sent to the burner, Anni. I am worried that the songs I chose will not be popular. Anyway, they are in English and I like them so they should be OK.

Are you possible? 
This sounds quite strange, like I think you are a ghost and I cannot believe that you are really on this earth.  I think we would be much more likely to say, “Is it possible?” or “Is it OK with you?”

We worked on the project over three class hours and it was quite fun, even if many students were tired on Wednesday. Thursday was lots of fun. I really want to hear the song that we sang.

We started out Wednesday’s class with me giving out instructions about the project. I think that maybe I was not clear enough because some students thought I wanted them to make a CD, like as in making music. Royal thought it would be possible to make 2-3 songs in an hour. Amazing! That sounds like a project for another day.

At first, students made up questions that they would need to answer about the project.

Some of the questions were:

What is the purpose of this CD?
How should we make it?
When will we make it?
What should the title be?
How many songs should we have?
What kind of music should we have?
Which singers will we use?
How will we choose the songs?
How will we design the cover?
Who will design the cover?
Who will burn the CD?
Who will _____?

Some important words from this day’s lesson were: deadline and acknowledgment.

A common error that I heard was:

We haven’t many times. >>> We don’t have much time. 
This seems to be two errors at once. We would usually say We don’t have instead of we haven’t. Also, time is uncountable so we would say much time. Please don’t confuse time with times, as in, “I have been to Pusan three times.” This sentence is not about time on the clock, but the amount of occasions that something has happened.

Thursday’s class was like a big meeting that lasted for 50+ minutes. It was the first time that we never split into smaller groups to discuss something. We talked about all the important points about the project (and many other things) in a circle. I thought the conversation went very well. The captain did a great job to run the meeting.

There were some errors from this session that I think it is useful to think about.

Are you decide? 
Much, much more common would be:  Have you decided? 
or
Did you decide? 
Also, please be careful with  sentences like, “I don’t decide” because this means that you never ever make a decision. It would be very possible to live life like this!

I heard many problems with the idea of taking a picture. If you take a picture, you are the person holding the camera. If you have your picture taken, someone else is holding the camera and pointing it at you. I think some of the girls in the class do not like to have their picture taken. If they told me that they don’t like to take pictures I would think that they meant it is boring to use a camera to take photographs.

In the middle of class we suddenly started talking about bedtimes and what time we usually go to bed.  A useful question for this is, “What time do you usually go to bed?”

Remember: The early bird catches the worm.

Some (possibly) new words from this class were: receipt, compress, and upload.

I am very eager to see how the pictures came out. Everyone please take good care and have a fantastic weekend! Great job this week!

My song

Hello everyone…. I have been thinking long and hard about what song to choose. I finally chose.

My song is The Downeaster Alexa by Billy Joel. I hope you can find an MP3 of it.

If you cannot find it, my second selection is American Pie by Don Mclean. (it is very long).

Updates coming soon!

take care,

Mike