Friday, July 30, 2010

the week in retrospect

This week has been tough because I've been so busy, but its full of highlights.

Dance club activity started on Monday. This semester only 15 students got accepted, so half or more of the students who applied can't do it, which sucks because 2 or 3 friends plus many of the people I met in the club last semester are not able to do it this semester. We are learning the dance for "bad girl good girl" by Miss A (a korean girl group of 4 members). I've been sore all week since doing that on Monday though, I think I kinda got out of shape during the school break. Also, today I played basketball for 2 hours with some various friends and random people. I think playing that 3rd game was a bad idea. My whole body hurts. I have a couple hours of free time to relax, and then i'm going out for dinner and drinks with 8 or 9 people from my class. I'm kinda worried that they're all just gonna speak Chinese though, as that is what generally happens when 2/3rds of them have the same native tongue.

As far as school, I feel like I'm doing good because I got a 100% on Monday's test and I know I did really good on my speech yesterday. It's tough to speak for 5 minutes in Korean and memorize everything. Most of the students couldn't even do that, and if they did, they were so worried about remembering the words that they made other mistakes, like having monotone intonation, mixing up the polite and casual speech forms, etc. Despite the fact that I was going on 3 hours of speech, I think I nailed it. Compared to the other 7 students that have done their speeches so far, I'd say mine was at the top for accuracy, fluency, delivery, and pretty much every other way of measuring it. Also, my sentences were much more complex. Some of the people were just like "and then _ _ _ happened. And then I did _ _ ." They describe it very accurately by using precise words, but as the topic was "My most ______ing experience" I think it doesn't really draw you into the story when they just speak like that. My sentences were like "While I playing computer on the first floor of our home, my twin brother kept hitting me, but regardless of how much I yelled, our parents wouldn't come downstairs." So, I'm not sure exactly what criteria the teacher is measuring it by, but I think I was best both for my Korean ability and for my delivery style. I'm really happy about that, as I enjoy giving speeches and whenever I have a test or project I want to do my best. Junya's speech was good (and funny too) and I could understand everything because I'm very familiar with her accent by now, but I think some of the other people had trouble with her pronunciation. Nonetheless, it by far wasn't the worst pronunciation in our class. We had to grade our classmates presentations, which I despise. I just gave everyone 90 or 100%, regardless of how bad it was. There were a couple speeches where we couldn't ask any questions during the question time, because there was so much we couldn't understand and we didn't want to embarrass ourselves by asking something that was mentioned in the speech.

There is a talent show next week and I passed the audition doing my Korean pop dance, but I don't want to do it by myself so i'll probably just withdraw.

Life is good.

1 comment:

  1. Hey, I remember coming downstairs to yelling "Leave me alone, don't hit me" and seeing you sitting on a couch with your brother far away. Or maybe that was Bob...

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