Tacos on the 탁자
Posted by Maureen on February 13, 2008
For our podcasters, here is your grammar lesson: http://www.5stardreams.com/tacos-on-the/
The other day, Lizzie and I were talking about how to learn language. I posed the question, when you were little, how did you know what this was (pointing to a table)? Her response was, “My daddy told me what it was.” My response to that was, “Well, instead of a daddy, I have a dictionary.” Of course, we then had to look up what a table was in Korean (탁자). I had to sound it out for her, because she can’t read Korean script (I can read script fluently, even though I have little idea of what it means most of the time). For those who are wondering, you say this “Tak-Ja” - both “a”s are the same as the “a” in father. Being eleven, this meant that Lizzie found it hilarious as she was running around the kitchen saying “I’m gunna cook tacos on the Tak-ja!”
We could go into a lot about how children learn a language, but suffice it to say, most toddlers and preschoolers don’t sit down and memorize lots of words. Instead, they slowly absorb knowledge by someone else pointing out an object or action, and telling them what it is. In contrast, the amount of information that we’re forced to learn while studying a language can be overwhelming, and this is why most people are convinced that they can’t do it.
If you’ve been a subscriber to our blog, then you know that we’ve only learned 6 words so far. The reason that we’ve only learned 6 words is because overloading you with vocabulary doesn’t do you much good. Like a toddler, you should absorb information slowly. It’s easier to learn Korean if you only learn one or two words every day.
To reinforce your learning, I’m going to teach you the hash mark flash card system that I’ve devised.
Every day I take a regular index card and write out the phrase that I am trying to memorize. On the opposite side, I write it in English. You can write out the words from our lessons. Don’t worry if you aren’t good at Korean script yet. By reading through all the posts, you will eventually pick it up. (We’ll also do a lesson in the script, and the alphabet, but for right now, we have skipped over this part.)
On the top left hand corner of the English side, I have hash marks. Let me go into those in a bit more detail, but before I do, I need to teach you about Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory.
Short Term Memory
Short Term Memory, or Working Memory, is to keep bits of information for very brief periods of time. Let’s say you call 411 and you don’t have a pencil. You can recite the phone number over and over until it is dialed. This is an example of Short Term Memory.
The brain, as wonderful as it is, can not keep all the information from your short term memory for anything more than, well, a short time. As it stands, you may only keep about seven items in your short term memory. Without going into a bunch of biological scientific mumbo, jumbo, let’s suffice it to say that you would have information overload if you could keep everything from your short term memory!
Long Term Memory
By contrast, Long Term Memory lets us recall information that was stored away by our brains. This helps us in everyday functions, such as eating with chopsticks, or by less common things, such as passing a math test.
Many scientists have studied how exactly information gets passed from the Short Term Memory into the Long Term Memory. I really don’t have a solid answer for you, but I do have two different methods to strengthen your vocabulary.
Mnemonics
Later the same evening after Lizzie and I looked up 탁자, I was telling this story to Don. We went into ways to memorize words and I was telling him the process called Mnemonic, which language teachers use to help students memorize vocabulary. Simply put, it means to relate the new word to another concept or word.
Silly as it was, I don’t think I will ever forget what “table” is in Korean. Why? Because I have an association of Tacos on the Tak-ja! And this is exactly how mnemonics works.
You won’t be able to memorize everything like this; some words, such as “Hello” (안녕하십니까?) you may just have to repeat over and over.
Flash cards
This brings me back to my flash card system. As I’ve told you above, every day I write the Korean word on one side of the index card, and the English on the other. At the top of each English side, I put hash marks in series of 5:
In order for information to pass into Long Term Memory, it needs to be “handled” about 25 times. You actually handle words more often than what you may think: when you are reading my blog post, and when you repeat the MP3 in your MP3 player like iTunes 3 times, you’ve actually “handled” the word 4 times.
That’s great! That means you need to handle this word about 20 more times. Well, let’s write it out on your flash card. If you come up with a Mnemonic association when you right it down, you can add 6 more hash marks. Otherwise, you can only add 1.
Once a day, go through your flash cards. If you can pronounce this word, AND you also know the English meaning, then you can put a hash mark up at the top. If not, go back to my blog post and play the sound file (or if you know how to pronounce the word, flip it over). If you don’t know either the pronounciation or the English equivalent, put the card at the bottom of the deck. Try again with the next word until you are at the end of the deck.
If you reach 25 hash marks for your card, congratulations! You may take that card out of the deck now and put it aside. You don’t want to throw it out because later on, you can still reinforce your long term memory (yes, memories do “disappear”), but you don’t need to review this word anymore.
One more thing: you will want to write your Korean script somewhat near the top. You don’t have to do this, but I always put the dictionary form of verbs and adjectives on the first line, then the conjugation underneath. A fair warning: there are hundreds of ways to conjugate verbs and adjectives in Korean, so I only put the top three (Formal, Polite, and Standard). We haven’t learned anything except the formal yet, but you might want to leave room on your card so when you do learn it, you can add it there.
Don’t cheat! No one is grading you, so cheating only cheats yourself.
Thank You (고맙습니다)
I was originally going to give about 11 new phrases today, but then I discovered a very annoying problem with my Feedburner podcaster! It seems that I’m only allowed 1 MP3 file per post. So without further ado, here is your file:
Homework
Your homework is to create all 8 flash cards (7 from previous posts, and today’s 1) that we’ve gone over so far. Remember my method of learning your vocabulary words:
- Read over the blog post.
- Download the file, and repeat the MP3 3 to 4 times.
- Write down the words using index cards - if you can, try to come up with a mnemonic association.
- Every day, see if you know the word; if you do, give yourself a hash mark, and if not, go back and review it again.
- Once you reach 25 hash marks, put the word aside - you’ve learned it!
Other Materials
If you’re eager-beaver to learn more vocabulary, and make up some more flash cards, go right ahead. Two good ones are:
(Don’t buy these from iTunes, because they don’t come with the books that you’ll need to write down the Korean script.)
If you’re interested in reading more in-depth grammar, I suggest:
The Korean Language (Suny Series in Korean Studies)
and
Roadmap to Korean
All are available from Amazon.com.
Files
To download any of the files here, right-click and “Save As…”
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