Bobby - CP 6

Before TEFL today, Sangwook and I met at Atomic for an impromptu CP meeting. I invited him on a whim after his classes, and he obliged. We spent the first few minutes catching up on the goings-on of the past week. We were not able to meet up at all last week because I was too busy. He wasn't feeling well anyway, so that was not a problem. I asked him how school was going. He said it was fine, but that he was having trouble differentiating between the vowel sounds in "sat" and "set." I thought this was a great teaching opportunity, so I got out my notebook and started creating similar words and sentences for him to practice. I guess the Korean language doesn't really differ between these two sounds, but in English, using one instead of the other could completely change the sentence. I wrote down this sentence for Sangwook to say aloud: "We met Pat the cat on Saturday." It took him a while to say it correctly. I explained that the "a" sound is more verticle, and the "e" sound is more horizontal. Coming from a choir background where diction is so important, I can understand the importance of diction and how it can make an impact. I tried to empathize with Sangwook by telling him that we learned about Korean minimal pairs in our TEFL class last week (i.e. jada, jjada, chada). When I tried to pronounce these, Sangwook just laughed and laughed. Clearly, I was pronouncing them wrong, but I liked that he thought it was so funny! When it was time to go to class, I drove Sangwook back to the CIES building, and thus ended my sixth CP meeting.