Never Study English — The 1999 Book That Changed How I Listened

Jeong Chan-yong’s Never Study English came out in 1999. Its point was to step outside the familiar way of studying English and practise the things you wanted to be able to do with it.

It follows a character named K, who tries Jeong’s method and gradually comes to feel less anxious about using English.

What English Study Looked Like in Korea in 1999

At the time, English was a source of stress for a great many Korean students and workers.

The materials that went with it were different too. A book like Seongmun Comprehensive English could dominate the language shelves, and school lessons put much of their time into formal grammar and reading.

For a student with a copy of Seongmun and a word list, studying English could mean working through explanations and memorising vocabulary.

You did not have a smartphone, and the internet was less widely available. A dictionary meant a heavy book in your bag, or a separate electronic dictionary if you could afford one.

Many learners had far fewer chances to hear and speak English than students do now, whether in their neighbourhood, a classroom or an ordinary encounter in Seoul.

Why the Book Made Noise

Into that setting came a book asking Korean learners to put listening and speaking first. Jeong’s advice ran against the habits built around grammar exercises and reading tests.

A book saying that the usual way of studying was itself the problem was bound to draw a reaction.

Readers argued over whether K was based on a real person. Online communities formed around the method, including people comparing notes on why it hadn’t worked for them.

Some of the advice seems familiar today. The distance between it and the habits of 1999 helps explain the size of the reaction then.

What It Changed for Me

For me, the book marked a change of direction. Without it, I might have kept studying English in the same way I had before, through grammar books.

I read it at the right time. After high school, and during my military service, I kept trying the method until I had a more usable grasp of English.

The third stage was the sticking point. Looking up unfamiliar words in a monolingual dictionary led to still more unfamiliar words, and the process was slow. I worked on grammar with Cambridge’s Grammar in Use, still little known among people around me at the time, and that gave me a way forward.

The Book’s Five Stages

There are plenty of other ways to learn now, including materials and tools Jeong could not have used when he wrote the book. I wouldn’t treat the five stages as rules that everyone has to follow.

In the setting in which I began, listening and speaking had received so little attention that the first two stages alone took a long time. That repetition gave me the experience of one day hearing distinctions that had always passed me by.

Here is how Jeong set out the five stages.

Stage 1

1. Find an English audio tape at a level you can work with.
2. Listen to it attentively from beginning to end twice a day.
3. Listen for six days, then take one day off.
4. Keep going until you can make out all the sounds on the tape.

Stage 2

1. Go back to the tape you have learned to hear.
2. Transcribe it.
3. Work one sentence at a time. Listen to the end, stop the tape and write what you heard. Repeat until the sentence is complete. Guess at the spelling of words you do not know.
4. When the full tape is written out, check unfamiliar spellings in a monolingual English dictionary. A spelling guess may lead nowhere. Jeong considers it more important to be able to reproduce the sounds, with meaning welcome when you can find it.
5. Read the transcript aloud, following the pronunciation and intonation of the recording. Replay any passage you are unsure about.
6. Finish when the sentences feel familiar enough to say naturally.
7. Take a complete break from English one day each week.

Stage 3

1. Look up unfamiliar words from the transcript in a monolingual dictionary.
2. Copy the definitions and examples. Look up unfamiliar words you meet in those entries.
3. Follow the chain until you stop finding unfamiliar words.
4. After about an hour, stop looking things up and read what you found aloud. Jeong suggests repeating each entry about ten times.
5. Stop after about an hour of reading aloud.
6. Take one full day off each week.
7. Finish this stage when you know the definitions and examples well enough to read them easily and have worked through the unfamiliar words in them.

Stage 4

1. Find an English-language video.
2. Watch it once a day with headphones.
3. Once you can follow the dialogue, transcribe it and read it aloud.
4. Look up unfamiliar words in a monolingual dictionary and read the entries aloud.

Stage 5

1. Get a recent English-language newspaper.
2. Choose a short news story, one you can read in a minute or two, and read it aloud.
3. Once you know it well enough, put it down and tell someone what happened as though it were your own account.
4. When that becomes easy, do the same with a second article.
5. When you finish a page, deal with unfamiliar words as in stage three.
6. Work through the whole paper that way, including advertisements, interviews and cartoons.

What Stayed with Me after the Tapes

Looking back, some of this seems obvious. Of course you might begin by listening and speaking, even if you do it in a very different way from the one in the book.

That was a less familiar starting point in the Korea where I was studying. The argument the book started makes more sense against that background.

The part I carried forward was persistence. Give yourself a large goal and smaller tasks you can return to, then find out what helps you keep going.

I began with very little usable English. I combined what the book gave me with other approaches that suited me, eventually did well on an English test and had the chance to work alongside native English speakers. I also came to enjoy things in English without first having to prepare myself for the effort. In that sense, this was one of the books that changed my life.

I now think of it with some nostalgia. It still has a particular place among the books I’ve read.

Book Information

Never Study English (Korean title, translated)

Author

Jeong Chan-yong

Publication date

31 July 1999

ISBN13

9788986167511

View the book on YES24

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