Chatterbox #229 – Live Q+A follow up!!

Andrew answers more of your questions from the recent Instagram live broadcast in this short, bonus episode!

Transcript:

Hey everybody. This is Andrew from Culips and I wanted to hop behind the mic here for a special episode because yesterday I did our very first Culips English Podcast live event on Instagram. And it was really fun and a cool way to connect with all of you guys.

We’re going to make the transcript for this episode free for everyone and it will be on our website Culips.com. If you’re a Culips member, first of all thank you for supporting Culips and second of all, I’m sorry but there is no study guide for this episode, since it’s a special kind of quick bonus episode, we’re not gonna take the time to make a study guide for it. But don’t worry, we will continue as normal starting with the next episode.

Why I hopped behind the mic today, is I wanted to address some of the questions that we got that I didn’t have time to answer in yesterday’s broadcast. You guys asked so many interesting questions and unfortunately, I just didn’t have time to talk about all of them, but I went through again and looked at your questions and there was some really, really interesting ones there. So, I thought I’d take just a couple of minutes to talk about them today.

So, let’s take a look at some of these questions that you guys asked.

And Surajthulung, I hope I’m pronouncing that right, apologies if it’s a little bit wrong. Surajthulung asked the question, “how can I speak unless I didn’t catch up any good words in my mind, I got my mind blank when it comes to speak English.” OK, so I think what the question is, is how can I speak English when my mind goes blank? OK, great question, I’ve had this situation happen to me before when I speak Korean.

So, I think this all boils down to practice, our mind goes blank when the words that we kind of know are just in that kind of know category. We don’t know them strongly enough and why don’t we know them strongly enough? Well we haven’t been exposed to them enough in our listening and we haven’t practiced using them enough in our speaking. So, it all comes down to making things more automatic, more fluent and the best way to do that is to just up your listening practice, up your reading practice and of course also try to speak more. It’s really more of a matter of exposure, I think and repetition and practice, than it is about anything that’s unique to you. I think a lot of people feel like we’re unique and we have memory problems, but it’s really not the case. It’s just that we haven’t had enough reps, enough repetitions of these words and that’s where our mind goes blank.

One thing that drives me crazy about learning Korean and maybe you have this situation when you learn English too, is that I know there’s a word for this situation and I wanna use that word, because I’ve seen it before, I’ve heard it before, I know what it is, but I can’t remember it. And that just indicates to me that my knowledge of that word is pretty weak, that’s when my mind goes blank. So how do I get the knowledge of that word stronger? I have to hear Korean people use it more, I have to read it more in sentences, and I should also practice using it in my speech too. Once I’ve solidified that memory and then it will be there in the future and it’s so satisfying actually when you have an experience like this, where your mind goes blank and then you do some work with that word, and in the future, it comes out and you can use it, as a part of your vocabulary. It’s a really satisfying experience.