🗣️ Story — how the method was decided
“I came to learn English — why am I listening to Korean?” It is the question I get most in class. But this one did not come only from outside. When the method was being decided, it came **from inside the company first.**
There was a for-and-against debate over how much weight to give Korean speed-listening. The opposition was natural — at a place that teaches English, saying you’ll spend a good share of class time on Korean, the first worry was whether students would accept it. Protests of “why are you playing Korean in an English class” were bound to come.
At first it seems odd. But get in the water and you see why. Methods that are hard to explain in order usually look like this.
Watching the results, the weight did not shrink — it grew, through applying it to students, gathering responses, and adjusting again. Today Korean speed-listening is an inseparable feature when explaining Daechung English. Why Korean comes first is set down in [[hangul-sokcheong-what]].
The claim that Korean shadowing helps English speaking was more so. Even the first is not readily grasped by someone hearing it for the first time; the second, more. But this was faster to have someone try once than to argue in words. Shadow it in Korean, then move to English, and most are convinced on the spot.
Why Korean training carries over to English listening — the mechanism — is not established science. Even the neurologist who has taught alongside us explains it with the word “presumably” ([[frequency-myth]]). What we have is a result seen again and again in the classroom, not a paper — and it is better not to hide that.
Source
Reconstructed from Ossam’s blog post “Daechung English #25” (2020-02-26). The reservation about the mechanism matches the account in [[frequency-myth]]. — Not carried over: the original’s “30 minutes a day for 1–2 weeks and listening more than doubles” and “listening muscle forms rapidly,” which have no measured basis; the syllable-count arithmetic is not used as evidence of a training effect.
※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.