Too much English intertwined with Korean lessons.

[kimchimanus9479]

Too much English to get through to learn Korean. Teasers, advertising, suggestions. Especially in Advanced area.
I'm trying to learn Korean, don't need all the English. It's distracting, especially when not related to the lesson
content.

[timandyou]

This is Tim from KoreanClass101.com.
Thanks for your comment and share your frustration with us.
Are you new here? What's your Korean level?
We have been building new lessons with considering what you just mentioned about.
Thanks for your comment. I really do!
cheers,

Tim

[trutherous]

Podcast 같은 걸 잘 모르지만 웹사이트에 고급 레슨에는 영어가 그리 많지 않은 것 같은데요?? 사용하기 나름이지요.

[aussiekevin]

> We have been building new lessons with considering what you just mentioned about.

What do you mean? Even the newest Advanced Lessons have English in them. (Ironically, the English message even says that the lesson is entirely in Korean!) Because serious learners will want to put these sorts of lessons on repeat on their ipod to simulate an immersive environment, one of the first things I have to do when downloading these lessons is edit out the English. I really wonder what the creators were thinking when they put these annoying English teasers in the advanced lessons.

It is worth noting that the rivals to this website are a little more thoughtful and intelligent in this regard.

[jaehwi]

Hi

I'm Jaehwi Lee, the project manager of KoreanClass101.com

First of all, I would like to thank you for the comment. I think you meant the Advanced Audio Blogs, since it has the intro saying 'the lesson is entirely in Korean.'

As you have listened, the audio is delivered in Korean only, without any English translation in audio format. However, we wanted to provide English translation for review track, and also on the PDFs, so that listeners can get the right meaning of each word introduced and also the sample sentences.

However, we believe that you can get into the immersive environment if you listen to the main audio file repeately, since it's been recorded by Korean native, without any additional explaination in English.

If you mention the intro in English, that's necessary part of the lesson, since we had to deliver our purpose of the seires clearly to our listeners.

If you have any suggestions or questions, please let us know. We hope you understand how we developed the current format considering of helping listeners get into natural Korean, and also get clear meaning with some English translations on review track and PDFs.

Thanks.

Jae / KoreanClass101.com

[aussiekevin]

> If you mention the intro in English, that's necessary part of the lesson, since we had to deliver our purpose of the seires clearly to our listeners.

How is this necessary? After all, it's already explained online, and it is impossible to download the file without going online. Why not explain it in Korean? All the people I know who listen to the audio blogs have made exactly this complaint - I don't know a single person who isn't annoyed by this. In the meantime, your main competitor website has blogs that are -really- completely in Korean, and they are thriving. Although there are perhaps many reasons for this, the fact that their advanced materials are actually all in Korean is one of the reasons that makes them a better website for serious Korean study.

[jaehwi]

Hi,

It's Jaehwi again.

Thanks for your time and the comment.

Although many of our listeners are listening to our lesson on our sites, we also have a group fo listeners downloaing the lesosn directly from our iTunes feed. To meet their needs, we had to make the introduction in English. That's why I mentioend it's necessary.

As you see, we're listneing to our listeners' suggestions and ideas for the lesson improvement. As a project manager of KoreanClass101.com, I'll consider your idea when we develop lessons in advanced level. But please understand that we have different needs of our listeners who're also sending us emails or comments saying we had to offer more English explainations even in the Advanced level lessons.

Thanks again for your opinion. And also if you have any questions about Korean language, feel free to let us know.

감사합니다. - 이재휘.

[aussiekevin]

> To meet their needs, we had to make the introduction in English

I'm pretty sure everyone knows how to get the transcript at this point. As it is, about 30 seconds of each blog is wasted on unnecessary English commentary. None of that commentary is 'necessary' in any sense of the word. Do I really need to be told in English to leave comments? Why not say that in Korean? I am just trying to help explain why many people are going to rival websites. (It's not just the price - it's that your rival websites seem to understand the language learning process a little better.)

Also, you recently changed the home page so that it immediately plays a video with sound every time you go there. That's really annoying and tacky.

As your rival websites become more and more sophisticated and attuned to the needs of the language learner, this website is becoming less and less relevant. That's a shame. You might want to think about changes you can make to make yourselves popular and relevant again. I am happy to give more detailed comments, though I suspect that it all might fall on deaf ears. That's too bad.

[trutherous]

G'day Kevin!

I know how you feel.

Realistically, only a brief introduction in English should be required at the advanced level.

Anyone still crying out for English at the advanced level is either kidding themselves, or needs to leave the English "crutch" behind.

IN the meantime here is what you do:

Using an audio editing program (I use Audacity ) strip away the intro, save the file again as an mp3, and be on your way. Yeah I know it's an unnecessary pain the keester to have to edit each and every one of these files, but at least you won't have to listen to the same introduction OVER and OVER and OVER when listening to your collection while driving, or hiking with the mp3 player blaring in your ears. I don't think these people understand how long and annoying that English introduction is when listening to 100 lessons back-to-back on a long drive.

By the way, if you change your bookmark to http://www.koreanclass101.com/forum/ or http://www.koreanclass101.com/index.php that should get you past the annoying video.

-나영훈 -aka- George see ya round mate

[aussiekevin]

> Realistically, only a brief introduction in English should be required at the advanced level.

Agreed - but in fact, I don't see why any introduction in English at all is necessary.

Actually, I've already been doing exactly what you said with Audacity for a while now.

> I don't think these people understand how long and annoying that English introduction is when listening to 100 lessons back-to-back on a long drive.

Exactly, it's incredibly annoying and serves absolutely no purpose. The fact the project manager of KoreanClass101 describes these introductions as 'a necessary part of the lesson' is completely bizarre - I wonder if she has ever tried to learn a foreign language before.

All the best with your Korean learning.

[jaehwi]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for all your feedback on the issue. We thank you for your time and comments for letting us find the better solution for our listeners.

So far, we haven't got many chances to listen to the voice of our listeners in the advanced level. And I'm glad that we could listen to some suggestions here including the introduction audio for Advanced level lessons.

Since all the published series including one for Audio Blog Season 7 are edited and finalized, it won't be possible to replace their intro audio. But when we work on the new audio lessons in the advanced audio lesson, we'll reduce the length of the audio lessons (posibally, only the title in English), so that you can enjoy all audio lessons in Korean to improve your Korean.

Also, I'd like to ask you give us any suggestions for the advanced level lessons. We could make the current audio blog Season 7, which is on the Gyeongsangdo dialect, thanks to our listener's suggestion. It would be great help for us to see how we can develop our lessons in advanced level.

Thank you again, and I hope you have a great weekend. 감사합니다.

- Jaehwi / KoreanClass101.com

[trutherous]

Hello Jaehwi,

That is good news indeed. There is advertising of the KC101 site in both the English introduction and the English conclusion of each advanced audio blog lesson; and while I fully understand the need to advertise the site, if someone is listening to these lessons it can generally be assumed that they have already found the site.

A wide variety of subject material and character voices at each respective skill level will improve your listener's learning experience, and sell more subscriptions to the site.

It would be nice to have some complicated two-person dialogs at the advanced level.

The very first advanced season was awesome during lessons 1-6, where two people explained a news item sentence by sentence in normal conversation style. I'm not saying every lesson has to follow this pattern; nevertheless, it is refreshing to hear different voices engaged in actual dialog. I know that preparing more complicated lessons is expensive and time consuming, but ultimately if you want to continue selling the product you have got to continue making the investment.

Do not oversimplify the advanced audio blogs.

An audio lesson about Gyungsando dialect is fine, but at the advanced level we are capable of understanding more than "how to say you and me in Gyungsando dialect." That lesson was quite a disappointment.

Voice quality:

Avoid low volume soft-voiced monotonous monologues.

Interest is quickly diminished and it becomes very difficult to focus on a lesson when the speaker has a low soft voice and where style of speech shows very little enthusiasm about the subject.


Be sure your instructors (bloggers) have crisp and clear enunciation.

While I acknowledge the need for students of a foreign language to be able to understand the "average native speaker," when a person is trying to learn a language it is imperative that they be given examples of clear (not slow) enunciation. It is counter-productive to the student to listen to audio material that is under-enunciated, or where the pronunciation may even sound slurred.

Ok -- that's all I've got for now.

Keep up the good work.

[jaehwi]

Hi,

First of all, I really appreciate your feedback regarding the advanced level series.

From this year, we started developing more video lessons than audio lessons, as you can see on the Hana Hana Hangul series or Learn Korean in three minutes sereis. Although it starts from the beginner level, our goal is to deliver the lessons covering all levels including ones for the advanced level listeners. Unlike audio lessons, we can deliver more information in native Korean, since our listeners can get visual information which can help their understanding of the lessons. Also we're looking forward to developing in different formats not like we saw the audio blogs for all advanced level listeners. In that way, I hope that we can develop more effective and helpful lessons for you and our listeners in the advanced level. And your feedback will be a great help to find the way to see what would be the best format for the video lessons.

And also thank you for the suggestion on the voice and the enunciation of voice actors. I'll keep it in mind when we're looking for new voice actors for the future lessons.

Besides the topic, we saw you helping other listeners especially at the forum. We appreciate that adding to our appreciation to your feedback on the advanced level series.

Sincerely,

Jae / KoreanClass101.com