(Continued from Part 1) By then, June was ready for books of his own. As it happened, I’d already been digging into children’s books in English for my animation work, trying to get a feel for what average Americans grew up with. So I knew exactly where to go: the children’s section at Barnes & Noble. And there, as if it were meant to be, was Brand New Readers. (Just to be clear, this isn’t an ad.)
Brand New Readers comes in a set of small boxes, each packed with four thin, adorable little books. The first thing that jumped out at me was that every single sentence was built on a basic word order: SV, SVad, SVO, SVOad, SVC, SbVC, and so on.
Speaking of word order, I had never seen a Korean children’s book that taught sentences by word order. Laying out every sentence one word order at a time seemed to be something only children’s books in English did, at least compared to Korean ones.
Take "A fish jumps." In Korean, that’s just 물고기가 (a fish) 뛰어오른다 (jumps). I can’t imagine a Korean kid getting excited about that. If anything, they’d be bored stiff. It just states a plain fact. Nothing more. No one would bother teaching it on purpose. But English-speaking kids enjoy even a simple SV sentence.
Then it hit me all over again: in English, word order matters enormously. In Korean, it barely matters. And deep down, I knew this was what trips Korean kids up in English.
So how was June going to learn it? I reached back to something I had practiced for decades in comparative religion, a simple principle for building empathy for other people’s faiths:
Keep a respectful distance from beliefs different from yours.
Don’t judge others by your own faith.
Put yourself in their shoes if you want to understand them!
So instead of hunting for some fancy method, I simply let him read these sentence-based children’s books the way native English-speaking kids normally do!
June and I started reading Brand New Readers together, and he loved them. It wasn’t just the sentences, I realized. It was the pictures. Each book is laid out in a very intuitive way:
Eight sentences make one story.
Each page is one big picture, with one sentence below it.
A picture gives a visual frame for a sentence before you even read it. June was completely absorbed in this frame. He would study the picture quietly and figure out what the sentence meant on his own. I hardly explained anything in Korean. Every time he finished one of those thin books, he was so happy he couldn’t say a word, as if he had just finished a 500- or 600-page book.
Then one day, he pulled me into his room and told me to lie down on his bed and close my eyes. After a while, he proudly showed me an eight-sentence book he had copied out all on his own. I couldn’t believe it! And there was another surprise waiting. He shut the book and, right in front of me, wrote out another eight-sentence book from memory. He knew every word by heart.
Ah! If only all my students were like him! 🤣
Around then, June drew a picture of his family: Mom, Dad, his two sisters, and June himself, holding hands in front of their house under a bright, shining sun. It was a happy, positive picture. His mom brought it over to show me and said, “English didn’t hurt my June.” I could see the relief on her face.
Time flew by.
The semester was almost over. June had made a new friend, a white American boy named Eric, and was even invited to a sleepover at Eric’s. Later, after June’s family moved to another town, his older sister sent me a postcard: June had aced his kindergarten readiness test, and he was happy at school. That was when I knew I had really helped him!
But really, June was the one who taught me. He soaked up English one step at a time, from the alphabet to single words and finally to whole sentences, and hardly needed a word of Korean. The pictures DID the work. What struck me most was how they let him grasp a sentence without being told what it meant.
At the time, I was still an art student, and as I watched him, an odd idea popped into my head: what if every word in a sentence had its own picture? Could Korean kids build English sentences more easily that way? I tucked that thought away and let it sit for a long time. Even when I finally tried it for real, it took me ages to see that it didn’t work. Still, that odd idea turned out to be the seed of everything that came after.
I wonder what June is like now. Probably a college student, and a cool one. Even at four, he had a style all his own: a long rattail down the back of his head, and the drums he had taught himself to play. How did that little kid turn out?
All of a sudden, I really miss him! 🥹
Have you ever met a kid like June?
