Cho Seung-yeon’s Fluent — What Lies Behind English Fluency

English plays a larger part in Korean education than in most people’s daily conversation. It also has practical importance in a country where companies do much of their business abroad.

Students encounter English from an early age and keep studying it through school and university. It can remain important when they apply for a job and after they start work.

That puts a premium on speaking and writing it well. English is one of the things that can open a door to a course of study or a job someone wants.

A Long Shelf of Books about Learning English

Korean readers have long bought books about how to learn English. Jeong Chan-yong’s provocatively titled Never Study English, published in 1999, made a particular impression.

The market for English education remains large. Some families enrol very young children in private programmes that offer more exposure to the language before they start school.

Cho Seung-yeon’s Fluent

Cho’s contribution is Fluent, subtitled The Secret of English Fluency. He asks why English seems difficult from a Korean starting point, then looks at what a learner can do with that difficulty.

His explanation emphasises culture alongside the languages themselves. Differences in familiar patterns of expression can slow a Korean speaker learning English or an English speaker learning Korean.

The familiar parts of another language can give learners something to build on. Where the differences are greater, it can take longer for an unfamiliar pattern to feel natural.

Cho uses the historical circulation of Chinese characters and Chinese-derived vocabulary in Korea as one example. That background can offer some points of recognition to a Korean speaker studying Chinese.

Korean and Japanese also share some patterns in word order and grammar. A learner may be able to carry certain habits across even while learning a new writing system and different vocabulary.

What Happens between Korean and English?

English and Korean differ in word order, sound and writing, and come with different conventions for putting a thought into words. That creates work in both directions.

It is possible to communicate well before a listener would take you for a native speaker. The two goals ask different things of a learner.

A Korean speaker who writes or speaks English with near-native ease has usually put a great deal of time into it, just as an English speaker has when learning Korean to that level.

Why English Can Feel Hard

The book has two main concerns. The first is the question of why English can be hard for Korean speakers. The distance between the languages is part of Cho’s explanation.

The second is what to do about it. The contents show how far he ranges, from pronunciation and grammar to poetry and philosophy. The headings below reflect Cho’s arguments and terms.

Contents

1. Part 1. Finding Your Way through the Language Wars
   1. Move beyond colonial ideas about English
   2. The lingua franca of the twenty-first century
   3. English has no single standard
   4. Why we fixate on pronunciation
   5. What grammar is for
2. Part 2. Thinking in English and Korean
   1. Looking for the whole and looking for movement
   2. Where Korean feelings are hard to carry into English
   3. English between abstraction and intuition
   4. The subject is one part of the sentence
   5. How English bends and Korean joins and separates
3. Part 3. How English Sentences Work
   1. Practise subject and verb together
   2. Understand grammar in three stages
   3. What makes “be” different
   4. Building an English sentence like a high-rise
   5. Develop a command of grammar beyond memorisation
4. Part 4. How Words Work
   1. What you miss when you only memorise
   2. Two ways to find out what a word means
   3. Every word has a story
   4. Look for the shape behind a word
   5. Trace what loanwords have left behind
5. Part 5. How Context Works
   1. Build the ability to read a culture
   2. Read poetry aloud
   3. How to read the classics
   4. Get to know Western philosophy
   5. English in the past, present and future

Cho’s Account of Differences in Perception

Cho connects language with what people are used to noticing and how they group the things they see. This is his cultural framework for approaching the problem.

In broad terms, he contrasts starting with a whole and moving toward its parts with starting with parts and building a whole.

He also contrasts attention to relationships with attention to categories. These are broad cultural comparisons, and the book uses them to think through what can feel unfamiliar in English.

For Cho, recognising a difference gives learners something to work on. Parts three, four and five put the idea into practice.

They deal in turn with sentences, words and context.

Two Ways to Look at a Word

Cho proposes two approaches to learning a word and finding out what it means.

1. The approach he associates with Émile Littré starts from the meanings a word has in use.
2. The approach he associates with James Murray traces a word backward through its history and roots.

Reading the Context around English

The last part looks at how readers develop a sense of context. Cho suggests reading poetry aloud, spending time with the classics and trying works of Western philosophy.

There is something to gain from those books. A reader who is already able to work through philosophy in English is also starting from a fairly advanced level.

Who Will Get the Most from Fluent?

I would put it in the hands of someone who has been studying English for a while and is ready to ask a different kind of question about it.

The book aims at a more natural command of English, and the work it proposes can be demanding. Following an argument about grammar or reading a difficult text is already a substantial part of the practice.

For someone who wants to go beyond the stage they’ve reached, there is still plenty here to work through.

Book Information

Fluent: The Secret of English Fluency (Korean title, translated)

Author

Cho Seung-yeon

Publication date

20 October 2016

ISBN13

9788937846243

View the book on YES24

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