Wordle is pretty cool. You can put your blog URL in and it spit out pretty stuff like this. What I don’t like is that it’s all in a stupid java applet and you can just link to the image. I can’t get Java and Linux to place nice, or I’d just take a screen cap. But most of you can just click on the little picture to see it. It’s fun to play with.
Last night I tried to make some changes here and ended up breaking the whole thing but good. I swear I shall never tempt fate by trying to make things better.
I must say thanks to eposodic for a response that pushed me in the right direction.
And since my knowledge of PHP is limited to how to spell it… well, I’m not going to muck around much anymore. I wish I had a local geek friend who could do this kind of stuff for a 6 pack and a pizza. Sadly, I’m the person who people come to with geeky problems.
Today is 설날 (Seolnal; Korean New Year). It’s the first day of the lunar calendar. Although Koreans do celebrate January 1st, 설날 is probably one of the most important holidays for Koreans. Traditionally, children wish their elders a happy new year with a deep bow called a sebae. It was interesting to watch the kids do it at school on Tuesday. This site has a nice illustrated guide on how the bow is done for boys and girls.
In our celebration at school, the kids also made a lucky pouch, which is used during the sebae bow. Elders typically give the children money. Upon asking some of my older students how much they typically get, my jaw about hit the floor. I’d say the average is between 150,000 ₩ and 200,000 ₩. I’ll let you do the currency conversion on that one.
On 설날 people traditionally eat 떡국 (Ddeok Gook) a soup made with rice cakes (the chewy kind from Korea, not the crunchy kind westerners think of).
There is a traditional song that children sing on New Years called 까치까치 설날은 which translates to Magpie, Magpie. New Years Day. Traditionally seeing a magpie is an indicator of luck.
Some excellent sources of material:
Teaching guide (pdf)
It’s White Day today. The streets of Samsondong were crazy packed with couples being lovey dovey. Oh wait, let me digress a bit.
What is White Day? Another wonderful Korean Hallmark holiday of course. White Day falls on March 14th, a month after Valentines Day. The tradition on Valentines Day is for the women to give candy and gifts to the men. It’s just the opposite on White Day.
So back to Samsondong. I had to go to Kidari today to pick up a workbook for my D1 class . Kidari is right across the street from Lotte Hotel. There are quite a few little restaurants in that area, including the one I went to lunch at. The cab driver almost hit about 12 cars on the drive down to Samsondong. Ugh. I hate cabs in Korea. This one section of Samsondong has a bunch of very narrow streets that aren’t really fit for automobile traffic. So many people. Not just people. Couples in Love. Disgusting. I was glad to get done what I needed to get done so I could get the heck out of that madness. On the plus side, lunch was good. Spicy chicken and rice. I’ll have to find out what it was called because I just can’t remember.
I got a nice little haul of candy from students yesterday. I’ll probably end up giving most of it away to kids who come in and chat with me. I like to reinforce the whole speaking English thing. Korean Hallmark holidays are good for building up stashes of candy and treats for that.
see more puppies
I came across “Save the Words” a few days ago (warning, obnoxious website). The premise is that words that are less common in every day language will be removed from dictionaries. The people who made this site want to save those words from exclusion. I doubt the site would do much to save some of these words. However, it could serve as an interesting teaching tool for advanced students. Many of the words can be analyzed to find their meaning from the word roots. This is something I’ve worked on a bit with some of my more advanced students.
Personally, I adoped “nidifice” (noun: a nest)
Remember that old Muppet’s skit, “Pigs in Space“? Well, apparently there will soon be kimchi in space. A South Korean astronaut will be staying aboard the International Space Station sometime in the coming months. To help combat homesickness, guest astronauts are allowed to bring foods from their home country. So…
Three top government research institutes spent millions of dollars and several years perfecting a version of kimchi that would not turn dangerous when exposed to cosmic rays or other forms of radiation and would not put off non-Korean astronauts with its pungency.
Read the full articles at the New York Times.
ESL Photos
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