Part 11 of 21 improvements BJJ has had on my life. This was inspired by Tangled Triangle: 21 Days of Improvement. You can read my Part 10 here! 11/21 Improvements from BJJ: Interacting with non-English speakers I came to Korea in 2010. I could say “hello” and I could count to 10 in Korean. I started teaching Korean […]
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Tag: Language
Negative achievements
I’ve been back at BJJ twice, after being gone for nearly 6 months due to my herniated disc. On Saturday I made it to the huge, teamwide training and had the opportunity to roll with the purple belt from my academy. On Tuesday I made it to my own personal BJJ gym. There were only […]
Feeling a bit blue
Because I’m a happy new BLUE BELT! 4 days shy of my one year BJJ anniversary. It was a surprise to me! There were so many people at our gym that night because my friend Roy is leaving. (Goodbye, Roy!!!) Roy was the guy I played “Strip BJJ” with several months ago. 🙂 My instructor […]
Talk dirty to me
I once had an accidentally dirty conversation about BJJ. I was completely unaware of this. My friend Steve and I were discussing flow charts and BJJ and I thought nothing of it until I heard our coworker say “Should I leave the room?” We had apparently made him feel uncomfortable with our talk about what […]
Describe yourself on the mats
Today there was a visitor to our school. My instructor introduced him in Korean, but being that I don’t speak Korean I had no idea what was going on. After the translation I said to the guy “Hey, nice to meet you!” My instructor remarked that I was very outgoing. Actually, what happened was that […]
The foreigner in class
I’ve never had a BJJ class from a native English speaker. My experience has been entirely in Korea, taught by Koreans. Because of this, my experience is much different than others I know in the states–though I only know this by their blogs 🙂 I thought I’d share with you what it’s like to be […]
BJJ Fluency: applying what you’re learning
BJJ is exactly like ESL. I brought this up in this post. Now to expand a bit. In our TESOL certification program, when we teach lesson planning, we use an E-I-F framework: Encounter, Internalize, Fluency. During the “Encounter” portion, students are introduced to the new vocabulary or grammar or situation. In the “Internalize” section, students […]
Similarities between BJJ and ESL part 1
The guys in my class don’t see it, but I do. I’ve been teaching methodology for the past 2.5 years, and I’ve been studying about ESL for the past 5 years. BJJ is exactly like ESL. For clarification purposes, ESL is English as a Second Language, but for this post I mean it to be […]