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| Park Si-soo's book "Winning English" is on display at Kyobo Books near Gwanghawmun Square. Korea Times |
'Winning English' asks what kind of English you'd like to learn
By Kang Hyun-kyung
Park Si-soo's "Winning English" is a witty, informative guidebook for Koreans who are eager to improve their English skills to a level at which they can freely use it for work.
With his practical, realistic advice drawn from his 13 years of experience as an English newspaper reporter, "Winning English" will be useful particularly for those who have invested a lot of time, money and energy only to find little progress made in usable skills.
The author revisits how Koreans learn English and analyzes why the time and money investments they've made haven't paid off.
He uses a real-world case study to help readers understand what's wrong with the traditional way of learning English and how learners can hone their language skills to reach the level they desire.
The author tells the story of a mid-career employee, Mr. Kim, who has been working with an unnamed established construction and manufacturing company.
Mr. Kim has a good educational background and scored highly in English proficiency tests. His coworkers believe Mr. Kim's English is pretty good. He himself also had a certain level of confidence in his English skill, although he lacked opportunities to put it to use.
Eager to improve his English, Mr. Kim invested his spare time in watching U.S. TV dramas. With the help of Korean and English subtitles, he tried to catch up with more sophisticated, trendy expressions. After about six months, his boss called upon him to serve as an interpreter in a business meeting with a foreign client.
The hour-long meeting turned out to be a nightmare. Despite his half-year personal endeavor to improve his English, Kim found himself struggling throughout the hour-long meeting to translate highly technical terms used by both sides. After the meeting, his boss said he was embarrassed, blaming himself for his overconfidence in Kim's untested English skills.
"The reason his English failed him was because of the mismatch between what he learned and where he had to use it," Park said.
Learning English through U.S. TV dramas is a good way to improve one's English fluency, he said.
"But the problem was that the English that Mr. Kim needed was not daily conversational English but the kind he could use in his workplace. So what he should have done was prioritize vocabulary specifically related to his work, such as construction, business management and finance terms ― rather than watching TV dramas to learn English for daily conversation," the author said.
If learners clarify what kind of English they want to learn before putting their energy into studying the foreign language, Park said, they will learn more effectively.
"Winning English" is not a one-size-fits-all type of guidebook. It's about the why and how ― why learning English the way we Koreans did doesn't work and how we can fix it.
The author points his readers toward several websites and resources where they can find tailor-made information about learning English.
"Winning English" is a unique piece amid a flood of English learning guidebooks that are almost identical in terms of format and advice.
Unlike other English book authors who give the same old technical advice repetitively, Park keeps entertaining his readers with self-deprecating humor. In the foreword, the author said the English proficiency test score he earned when he was a college student was as bad as 300 (the maximum score is 990). But he said he learned by himself how to improve English through various experiments and now he wants to share his secrets with readers.
"Winning English" published by Seoul-based publishing house UI Books hit the shelves of local bookstores earlier this week.
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