KoreanClass101.com Blog

We have a new feature again. Now it’s easier to keep track of the recent updates in the forum and the blog! If you look at the right-hand side of the lessons page, you can see the lists of 5 recent posts in the forum and in the blog!

또 하나의 새로운 기능이 생겼어요! 이제 포럼과 블로그에 올라온 최신 글들을 더 쉽게 파악할 수 있어요! 레슨 페이지의 오른쪽을 보시면, 포럼과 블로그에 가장 최근에 올라온 글 5개의 목록을 볼 수 있습니다.

After weeks of development, we’re happy to announce the launch of the much anticipated My Feed. This fully customizable RSS feed let’s Premium members decide exactly what lesson content they want on their Premium feed. You can master Korean on your terms.

Setting up My Feed is a simple 3 step process.

1. Choose the lesson types you want (e.g. Beginner, Newbie, Audio Blog, etc.)
2. Choose the type of content you want (e.g. Main Audio, Dialog Clip, Review Clip, PDF, Video Vocab, etc.)
3. Add My Feed to iTunes or other iTunes compatible feed readers like Juice, and just watch the content you want come rolling in.

Click here to learn more about My Feed or if you’re a Premium member,
click here to get started now.

Thank you all for your continued support and feedback! Without it we simply could not do what we do. We hope you like this new feature and as always, if you encounter any issues with this new functionality or wish to see it enhanced in some way, please post a comment here or shoot us an email.

To get everyone started on this, we’re offering a 15% discount for all Premium Subscriptions.

Coupon code: MYFEED

The Korean school year starts at the beginning of March. Consequently, there is some shuffling that will take place all over the orphanage. Two boys and one girl will move up from the pre-school room to the elementary house. Two 6th grade boys will move up to the middle school/high school floor. And I’m sure that some older kids who just graduated will be off to college/military service or some may be moving away.

Unfortunately, this is all going to happen when I’m in Taiwan. It will be interesting to see how the dynamics change among the elementary boys. The two new 1st graders are pretty tough, no-nonsense kind of kids. The 2 boys who are just one year older than them are not nearly as rugged. They aren’t bigger. They’ve spent the past year at the bottom rung of the social hierarchy and do it relatively willingly. For lack of a better word… they are much “wussier.”

Now, as you already know, age plays a BIG role in social relationships in Korea. Even one year can make a difference - especially for children. The current 2nd graders just LOVE to throw their little bit of weight around at the less-assertive 1st graders. It is the only authority can claim! I am expecting the new 2nd graders to try that with the two new boys. But these kids will not go so easily. They have really strong personalities. Now, they’ll probably take it from the 4th, 5th, and 6h graders, but I have my doubts about the others!

If you have lessons that you liked particularly and want to share with your friends or on the blogosphere, here is an easy way to do it. Go to the [share] button of the lesson post, and just click on it. There you can register a certain lesson to your bookmarks on the Internet or send the link to your friends by email.

특별히 마음에 드는 레슨이 있어서 친구들과 혹은 블로그를 통해서 나누고 싶으시면, 아주 간단한 방법이 있습니다. 각 레슨 포스트의 [share] 버튼으로 가서 클릭하시면, 인터넷 북마크에 등록하거나 이메일로 링크를 친구에게 보낼 수 있습니다.

Help us spread the word! We will keep working hard to help you improve your Korean and make your learning more fun!

주변 사람들에게 KoreanClass101에 대해서 알려 주세요! 앞으로도 여러분이 한국어 공부를 재미있게 할 수 있도록 노력할게요!

Today is the Korean New Year!! And celebrating 설날 (Seollal) is all about celebrating with your family. So we’re offering something REALLY special for the KoreanClass101.com family. We are offering:

45% off a 1-year Premium Subscription! - $99 (Original Price $180)

COUPON CODE: NEWYEAR45

1 year of Stand Alone Dialogs, Review Tracks, LBL audio clips, Voice recording software, customizable word banks, etc, etc!

And if you don’t need a full year, or a Premium subscription at that, we are also offering

25% off ANY subscription of your choice!

COUPON CODE: NEWYEAR25

This deal lasts for only 3 days, so that’s until February 9th!!! Hurry up and sign up!!!

Check out the offers here:
http://www.koreanclass101.com/newyear

Korean is not the easiest language to learn, and especially when it comes to vocabulary, the speed at which your vocabulary expands is never quite satisfactory. But when there’s a will to learn Korean, there will always be a way to expand your vocabulary. Studying with our regular podcast lessons in various levels and using the review tracks and PDFs to study further details is a very good way of course, and here’s another way of learning more Korean words that we’d like to suggest.

We decided to call it “Korean Word Relay”, and we’ve tried making a few of them, hoping that these videos will help you learn more Korean words and also give our listeners a chance to test their vocabulary!

Please give us your feedback on this series, and we will do our best to improve it and make it a regular part of our program!

Thank you!

한국어는 배우기에 그렇게 쉬운 언어가 아니죠. 특히 어휘가 그렇죠. 어휘력이 확장되는 속도가 좀처럼 만족스럽지 않으니까요. 하지만 한국어를 배우고자 하는 뜻이 있다면 언제나 길이 있습니다! 여러 레벨로 나뉘어져 있는 저희 정규 팟캐스트 레슨들을 들으면서 리뷰 트랙과 PDF를 이용해 보충 학습을 하는 것도 물론 좋은 방법이고, 여기에서 소개해 드리는 새로운 단어 학습 방법을 이용해 보셔도 좋을 거예요.

이 시리즈를 [한국어 단어 릴레이]라고 부르기로 했는데, 몇 개 만들어 보았어요. 여러분들이 새로운 한국어 단어를 배우는 데에, 그리고 자신의 어휘력을 측정해 보는 데에 도움이 되기를 바라는 마음에서요.

비디오를 한 번 보시고 피드백을 주시면, 더 좋게 만들어서 저희 한국어 학습 프로그램의 정규 시리즈로 만들 수 있도록 할게요!

감사합니다!

We’ve made a guide video that explains how to enjoy studying Korean with KoreanClass101.com! And here’s the youtube video! We hope you enjoy watching it, and also learn some now words and phrases from the bilingual lines!

Thank you!

Dear listeners,

We truly appreciate all of your continued support for our podcast and your active participation in the lesson comments, the blog comments, and the forum posts. Thank you so much! 정말 감사해요. 앞으로도 재미있고 유익한, 좋은 podcast를 만들어 갈 수 있도록 열심히 노력하겠습니다. While we continue to do our best on our end to make fun, enjoyable and useful lessons for you, we need your help in spreading the word!

If you think we’re doing a job, (we hope you do!) please let more people know about us by voting for us. You can see two small buttons at the bottom of the right-hand side menu on our site.

http://www.koreanclass101.com/index.php

If you have an iTunes account, please write in a simple review and provide feedback on what other people wrote.

Here’s the link to go to the iTunes review page! (Or click on the image above.)

And if you will, please also click on the little podcast alley button, and you can vote for us by writing in a few lines, which will put us at a higher ranking in the podcast list!

Direct link to Podcast Alley

Doing this can take up a few minutes of your time, but it’ll help us soooo much in making better and better podcasts and a lot more useful material!

Thanks very much, everyone! 감사합니다! We will keep doing our best!

We spent yesterday travelling to San Francisco to pick up a Korean boy who will be staying with us for the next four months. He is 11 years old (양력으로). To me this seems very young to be away from home for that length of time, especially to be staying with relative strangers. However, as I understand it, this practice is fairly common in Korea. While we are not doing a business, the “home stay” market is quite large.

We had two home stay children a couple of years ago with limited success. What I mean by that is that the parents sent their children here to America with the hope that their children’s English speaking ability would improve and thus increase their educational opportunities in the future. Most of these programs, as far as I can tell, deal with groups of kids in a very structured program. Thes kids do not get a signifcant amount of real life free-speaking of English. The two students that we had spoke only in Korean to each other and really took advantage of the Korean spoken in my home as well. So, I don’t think that they had as much success as they could have.

The exprience was good though, and it helped expose my children to the Korean language more. (This kind of learning is a two-way street after all.) The boy staying with us now seems to have some good English skills and a willingness to talk and fit into our family. Both of these qualities should ensure that he has a successful stay here (and that we don’t suffer with an uncooperative child…).

What do you think, is 11 too young to spend tht much time away from home? How would you feel about sending your (hypothetical) child away like that? And, do these programs really work or do they just make the parents feel that way? I think everyone should experience another culture directly, I just don’t know if someone that young can appreciate it.

Earlier this week we announced the launch of the Hanja Vocabulary feature in our PDF’s. Today, we are glad to announce the much anticipated release of a new premium features which is sure to take your speaking skills to new heights.

Pronunciation Practice
To address speaking practice, we have integrated a state-of-the-art software to allow you to record your own voice so you can compare your pronunciation to our teachers and continue to refine your speaking skills. This feature is available to all active Premium subscribers in the Line-By-Line Audio Transcript page for each lesson in the Learning Center (see screen shot below):

We hope you enjoy this new premium features and as always please let us know what you think.

Team KoreanClass101.com