update
Some interesting comments by Brogan and Alex Case worthy of entries on their own. Be sure to read those comments and leave your own. I’m too damn busy to be more than passive in this case.

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An interesting article about World English’s in The Financial Times. One of the books that I recently bought is featured called “World Englishes” by Andy Kirkpatrick. I’m not currently reading that one as I have two other books language related on the go. Skip the first two paragraphs of this article and the rest is good and fascinating.
hat tip to The TESOL Blog.

Commentators on global English ask three principal questions. First, is English likely to be challenged by other fast-growing languages such as Mandarin, Spanish or Arabic? Second, as English spreads and is influenced by local languages, could it fragment, as Latin did into Italian and French – or might it survive but spawn new languages, as German did with Dutch and Swedish? Third, if English does retain a standard character that allows it to continue being understood everywhere, will the standard be that of the old English-speaking world or something new and different?

The issue is: whose English will it be? Non-native speakers now outnumber native English-speakers by three to one. As hundreds of millions more learn the language, that imbalance will grow. Mr Graddol says the majority of encounters in English today take place between non-native speakers. Indeed, he adds, many business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when there are no native English-speakers present.

Native speakers are often poor at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions. They tend to think they need to avoid longer words, when comprehension problems are more often caused by their use of colloquial and metaphorical English.

The EFL Geek described a new KSL class online and I am in the process of giving it a try. Koreanclass101 is growing and currently has ‘newbie lessons’, beginner lessons and a little more (the audioblog seems geared toward stronger Korean ability). The site offers free podcasts and additional paid material. When you sign up, you get a free week of access to the premium material, including transcripts and review.

I am about to game the system. I don’t recommend this, but I will soon sign up with a second email address (doesn’t everyone have a handful of email accounts these days?) for a further week of free access to the full service. My trivial excuses are: 1) I’m doing this for you -helping give you a better account of the services offered, and 2) I was busy that week - it was a bad time to explore the content.

A more serious reason is that I have not yet found my true level in the material offered. Again, I was busy. Perhaps a level test is needed (is ‘level test’ a Konglish term -it rolls naturally off my tongue but I’m not sure). I would even accept a sort of eye test: “Can you read and understand this line?” “How about this line?” There’s not much point in cheating on a level test, after all.

I don’t mind, and probably need, review. I am not a ‘newbie’ but, well, false beginners are always hard to place.

Anyway, the podcasts are clear and stand alone well. The documentation prints out in good format, but I don’t really like PDF files. I would prefer a simple ‘.txt’ file that I could store in my phone’s ebook folder and read while listening on the bus. That would be handier than paper in my situation.

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One of my students blogged this video on her blog and I thought I’d share with you. It’s amusing.

I am no longer a Do as I say, not as I do teacher. For the longest time, I’ve been recommending that my students speak English with each other outside of class; with friends or by joinging a club. I’m also a strong advocate of learner dictionaries vs bi-lingual dictionaries. Well recently I picked up the first ever Learners dictionary for Korean learners and have started using it.

I have additionally started a conversation time once a week with a foreign friend and colleague. Last Friday was our first session of one hour. It went pretty well and ended up with some English, but not as much as one would expect. Overall I’m looking forward to this time to use Korean.

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There is now a dictionary, 100% Korean, available for learners of Korean: 한국어 학습 사전.

Yesterday in Korean class we had our oral test. I earlier wrote about the paper test. I do similar test with my English students by scheduling them for 15-20 minute paired conversations. When I’ve mentioned this to other teachers many times I’ll hear that it is too difficult for the students to do or impractical. Depending on your time constraints it may be impractical but I don’t think it is too difficult as long as your students are at least at a high beginner level.

The teacher decided that all students would watch the other students have their conversation which was, to me, an interesting approach. I enjoyed being able to watch the other students do their conversations and laugh at the funny bits as well as the mistakes - it was more of a laughing with rather than laughing at. 

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Last week in my Korean language classes we had mid-terms. For the most part I felt that the test was fair, accurate as well as valid and reliable. In the writing class we were given three questions and expected to respond with about a page of writing for each question. I did that and finished a few minutes early. I haven’t yet recieved my grade so I don’t know how I did. The questions were similar to ones covered in class so I felt they were fair.

In the listening/Reading class we listened to several texts and answered multiple choice questions or wrote down one word answers. This was very fair and consistent with what I have read on assessing listening skills. I blew a couple of questions as I could not discern the most important word in the text. The reading section was also fair and consistent, but I think I didn’t do as well as I should have.

Speaking class is a two hours out of the four hour day. Speaking is a misnomer as it is really a speaking/grammar class with the focus on speaking. Grammar is only explained in this class; in reading/listening and writing we are expected to know the grammar being focused on and used communicatively as it has been explained in speaking class. There are additionally grammar explanations in the textbook.

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Merry Christmas everyone. While surfing around earlier I came across this site Merry Christmas in over 350 Languages. It’s too bad that everything is romanized, but still it is interesting to look through.

Here is the Korean in Korean 즐거운 성탄절이 되길 빌어주다 though this expression is a little different than the one on that page. My Korean classes are going well and if you can read Korean you might want to check out my Korean Learning Blog.

Earlier today I recieved an email from a reader of my Korean learning group blog telling me about their blog.

hi, my name is ***** and i recently started a blog about learning cantonese. I was born in seoul and am half korean so there will be lots of stuff on korean also. anyways, i’m fascinated by languages and a lot of my entries are just my whole take on the language learning process. in any case, i hope you take a look. the address is http://houhousihk.blogspot.com/

I took a look and liked it so far. It is always interesting to read about anothers experience learning a foreign language. I in particular enjoyed Things I wish I Knew Before and Language Proficiency Tests and Why They Suck I agree that they suck, but not necessarily for the same reasons as the author. Anyhow go give 好好食 a read and see what you think.

From a thread on Dave’s Cafe a very interesting site with audio samples of the many accents of English-speaking people, both native and non-native, from around the world. You can visit the Speech Accent Archive or go directly to the browse specific language page.

I copied the about page in the extended entry. The accent archive page is an interesting resource with lots of potential. I just need to sit down and consider the possibilities. 

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My wife is about to become a victim of testing English. Her company, in it’s infinite wisdom, has decided that all employees are to take a TOEIC exam. The exam has been scheduled for December 17 and they were just told today. Yes, they have only 2 months to prepare for an exam that in my opinion has absolutely nothing to do with English skill and is overly long and mind numbing to complete. Yes I took a practice test myself ages ago to see exactly what it was like.

My wife has never taken a TOEIC exam before and is a little stressed because of this. She has no problem speaking or writing in English and has been communicating at the corporate level in English for over 10 years. In fact when she interviewed for her current job, two years ago, they hired her on the spot because of her English skill in the interview. If they were satisfied then, what exactly is the purpose of conducting this needless test at this point?

For the next two months my wife will now have to spend what little free time she has getting familiar with the test format. Yes getting familiar with the test format, not actually learning English. No one studying for the TOEIC actually learns English. All they do is learn how to pass the infernal test.

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click for bigger image - found via Dave’s Cafe this thread

Earlier this evening I wrote a 1693 word review of the Korean program at Sogang University which I have been attending for the past ten weeks. If you are interested in learning Korean or what I’ve been doing for the past ten weeks then pop on over - leave a comment if you like over at Lets Learn Korean as they will be disabled here.

Over on Daves Cafe I came across this thread which linked to this news article (in Korean). The article itself isn’t important but the picture is. I’ve uploaded it for posterity. Clearly the marketing department fails their English test this month.

Snopes has a number of Christmas Carols with commonly misheard variations. According to snopes these misheard variations are referred to as mondegreens. The origin of this term is interesting as well

he term ‘mondegreen’ — representing a series of words resulting from the mishearing of a statement or song lyric — is generally attributed to Sylvia Wright, who is credited with coining the neologism in a 1954 Harper’s column. Ms. Wright was chagrined to discover that for many years she had misunderstood the last line of the first stanza in the Scottish folk ballad “The Bonny Earl of Murray,” which reads:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh! Where ha’e ye been:
They ha’e slain the Earl of Murray,
And they laid him on the Green.

Ms. Wright misheard this stanza as:

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,
Oh! Where ha’e ye been:
They ha’e slain the Earl of Murray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

From the disappearance of Sylvia Wright’s tragic heroine, Lady Mondegreen, came the term for describing unconventional interpretations or understandings of oral repetition, usually in the form of song lyrics.

One example of song lyrics that have been misheard that results in a possible improvement is the following verse from the Twelve Days of Christmas, Enjoy:

On the twelfth day of Christmas,
My tulip sent to me:
Twelve drummers drumming,
Eleven pipers piping,
Ten lawyers leaving,
Nine lazy Hansons,
Eight maids a-milking,
Seven warts on women,
Six geezers laying,
Five golden rings,
Four calling birds,
Three French hens,
Two turtle doves,
And a cartridge in a pantry.
(or) And a partrie Jinnapear tree.

Gord has written a very interesting post titled Using What You Know Where he discussses students usage of their native language in the EFL classroom. He talks about circumlocution as a method to get around unknown vocabulary, dictionary usage, body language and the teachers usage or non-usage (even restriction) of the first language in the classroom. This is a very insightful and well written post (as can be expected from Gord) that I highly recommend all teachers go and read.

Bill Poser of Language log writes a long, interesting and informative post about the origin of Korean script and Hangul Day. I knew there was a day for it, but had forgotten which day was celebrated because it is not (no longer?) a national holiday. I highly recommend reading it.

The Lost Nomad, links to an interesting picture which suggests the importance of understanding product labels.

Apparently http://www.legos.com you’ll see the graphic below imploring you to refer to thier products in the manner they choose.

Somehow I suspect that their error page will change what people call thier product. Lego bricks or Legos it doesn’t really matter, everyone knows what they are. Would write more, but am running behind on a couple of things.

Mark Liberman from Language Log wrote about a site of Essentialist Explanations. Basically the site takes a language and says something about it in the form Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z. Below I have highlited all the ones about Korea.

Korean is essentially bad Japanese, also as spoken by Mongols.
Conversely, Japanese is essentially Korean in the mouths of little children.
Japanese is essentially Tagalog spoken by Koreans trying to do an impression of Americans from the point of view of Chinese people.
Korean is essentially being caught in a syllable-diagraming exercise gone horribly, horribly wrong.
Korean is essentially Mongolian with a Chinese vocabulary.

There are many other examples in other languages that are equally amusing and/or seemingly true.