😢 Story — a mother and daughter at a talk
On a day I gave a talk in Yeouido, an elementary-school girl came with her mother. After the talk we spoke. She said the academy she attends makes her memorize 100 English words a day and does not let her go home if she fails.
The child was eager and worked hard. But there were days the memorizing just would not come, and on those days it was forced anyway — it was too much, and she came home and cried her eyes out. As the mother told it, her face darkened. At the academy meant to make her good at English, the child was coming to hate English.
and that food becomes one they hate for life. English is the same. Feelings formed in the elementary years last a long time — what really must be protected at that age is not the pace but that English does not become something they dislike.
Knowing many words and hearing speech are different abilities. By the Oxford English Corpus, the 100 most common words make up about half of printed text ([[fifty-words-english]]). What the child needs is not 100 new words but the easy words she already knows arriving as sound. Words known by eye but not heard by ear — that is Korea’s real English problem.
Hearing comes first. Once sound starts coming through, the child follows along unbidden — in this order English is closer to play than to homework. Start with memorizing instead, and every day is a test. The detailed order is in [[kids-english-no-memorizing]] and [[listening-first-order]].
A child rebounds new sounds less than an adult, but quits what is boring faster than an adult. Do not do it long at once — break it into short, many.
Source
Reconstructed from the talk-consultation record in Ossam’s blog post “Daechung English #36” (2020-04-09). The academy’s name is absent in the original too. Word frequency follows the confirmed figure in [[fifty-words-english]] (Oxford English Corpus). — Not carried over: the original’s “500 elementary words are 50% of Americans’ English,” whose basis differs from the library’s confirmed figure, replaced here with the confirmed number.
※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.