Tuesday (the 30th) I met with Haneul. She was taking a TOEFL test at the time we normally meet, so we met after my class. She had a friend along who is visiting her from Chicago. The last time we had met I told her that I had a video to show her, but we didn't get a chance to see it then, so we watched it this time. This video was by Mister Duncan in England (he has lots of English teaching videos on Youtube that are worth checking out, and he only has a mild British accent) and was on the subject of intonation, which most/all language learners probably struggle with at times. After the video we discussed the subject of intonation, noting various ways that it enhances the breadth of communication, such as enabling sarcasm, enabling various shades of meaning within the same set of words, etc...
After discussing intonation we somehow got onto the subject of accents, which turned into a rather interesting topic. I noted that I grew up in the South, and while my accent isn't strong (I don't think it is), people from other regions in the U.S. are able to hear it. It turns out there are different accents coming from different regions of South Korea too. I wanted to demonstrate some really strong Southern accents, so I got some Jerry Clower videos on Youtube (very culturally interesting, IMO). Unfortunately it was so strong a Southern accent they weren't able to understand enough to make it profitable for them. I found another example of Southern speech (a North Carolina girl demonstrating her accent), but that too was outside their comprehension. They were wondering why I thought it was so funny, so I had an interesting time trying to explain how it just sounds so different that it's funny. They had heard that there was a New York accent, so I found an example of that as well. They were able to understand what was being said (it wasn't a strong accent), but they didn't hear all of the differences [from 'normal' speech] that I did.
After all our accents were intoned (or maybe our intonations were accented...) Haneul had some car buying questions for me. Along the way she said something about the year that the car was born, so we had another language learning discussion about how to describe age, model, date of birth or manufacture, etc... Our meeting lasted somewhat over two hours.
Accents were one of the things that all of my students talked to me about. they said that it could be really hard to understand some people in America, and I asked if it was because of our southern accents. They told me yes, but only for people who have a thicker accent than I do.
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