Pragmatic expressions

On Labor holiday, we went to Estes Park for one night and two days. Fresh air made us feel we were the part of nature. We had sort of B.B.Q. party at the grill outside and it was wonderful to have a sam-kyub-ssal party (what is called 3 layer portion of pork) in the wood. All wives were busy cooking rice and stew in the kitchen, while the husbands were barbecuing sam-kyub-ssal. That time, kids had much fun hanging out altogether and firing some toy-rockets up to the sky. Peace and full. Just watching my kids in excitement was more joyful than anything else. I wished my husband had been there with us. Then, everything would have been perfect.

After dinner, the wives sat at the table together getting some coffee for talks. Our topics were varying from cooking through education to English. It looked like all of us wanted to speak in English fluently, but how? That was what we have faced long time. For this, different solutions were introduced, and we all nodded to each of them that sounded plausible. It sounded like it was the most problematic that we could not express ourselves properly according to the occasions. There must be some idioms or expression about what we want to describe in some situations, but it wasn't easy to come up with right ones. Indeed, this is what all ESL learners try to get over in classes and outsides.

Some one recommended us to study books which contribute to build-up our idiomatic power as the case may be. However, I have a different ideas about that. First, idiomatic expressions were countless that it wouldn't be easy to memorize even 50% of them. Secondly, it isn't natural when non-native speakers use idiomatic expressions. Rather we'd better communicate with clear and simple utterances. Then, what have to be taught? Korean know grammar(forms) better than anyone else, but we never match the forms to the meaning to speak properly. I have experienced a lot our meanings get changed a little by the forms we put in our sentences. First that we should dig into would be mastering the pragmatic things that how to use some auxiliary verbs, tenses, and occasional aspects. I believe that this is the skeleton to form our speech well that should be accomplished first. Once this is mastered, we could move to idiomatic and phrasal expressions to make our speech rich. Last summer, I'd read the anthology about Focus on Forms, and i found that method could be workable to Koreans. Of course, I need more pedagogical approaches and examinations for which forms should be taught and which orders. It is worthy trying out, though.