by Student Ambassador Yunhee Ahn

There is a holiday in the United States called ‘Saint Patrick’s Day’ ( originally  from Ireland, but also it has been celebrated in many countries.)  On Saint Patrick’s Day in the U.S, people celebrate for the Irish and Irish American culture. Since the U.S had many Irish immigrants, especially in San Francisco, it became a holiday in some cities in the U.S.
The parade for Saint Patrick’s Day starts one day before the holiday. I saw the Saint Patrick’s Day parade while studying ESL abroad at EC San Francisco

“Wearing the green” for St. Paddy’s day.

with my language schoolmates at San Francisco’s  Civic Center. Saint Patrick’s Day is known as ‘the wearing of the green’, so my friends and I wore green items to celebrate it. Saint Patrick’s Day parade was so exciting! Everyone on the parade dressed up with green clothes, and sang and danced together. We also watched musical performances and drank Irish coffee. After enjoying the parade, we went to Irish pub and enjoyed eating food and drinking beer. That day was my first time to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day in my life. It was a good chance to know the Irish American culture and to hang out with friends.

(This is a bit late, but so many EC students in San Francisco have contributions to the blog that it is hard to keep up.)

S.F.’s Chinatown, home of good food and low prices

, I wanted to experience many new things.  Recently, my Intermediate Writing class visited Chinatown.

San Francisco’s Chinatown is the oldest and largest Chinese community in the Western United States.  When I first went there, I thought it was very touristy.  Still, it was very interesting, because of the enjoyable Chinese atmosphere in there.

There are a lot of shops that sell food, tea, fashionable clothing, jewelry and furniture, and of course, cheap t-shirts, and postcards showing scenes from China.  Among these stores,  a shop selling traditional Chinese clothes was the most impressive to me.  As I am really interested in clothing, I really liked that store.  There were plenty of qipaos (a type of traditional Chinese clothing), sorted by color, length, and material.  I was very beautiful.

And, I looked slim when wearing a qipao.  Also, the price was not expensive.  So, I thought, a cheap price is also one of Chinatown’s advantages.  For this reason, if someone is planning to visit San Francisco, I want to recommend that you put Chinatown high on your list of places to go.

Dahee, from S. Korea

Perched above Land’s End Beach, almost as far west as one can go in San Francisco, is one of SF’s four major art museums.  When you study ESL abroad at EC San Francisco

The Golden Gate Bridge, as seen from the Legion of Honor Museum

if you love European art, or just great views, you owe it to yourself to make the journey to the Legion of Honor Museum (formerly the Palace of the Legion of Honor).  The building is the most classic of the SF museums in design, and houses mostly the European collection, along with frequent touring exhibits.  Recently it featured a collection of art and artifacts from the Louvre in Paris, not the museum, but the Palace.  Part of the collection included personal art objects belonging to Marie Antoinette.

While the Legion takes some time to reach (about 45 minutes on the 38 Geary, a two block walk, and a transfer), the views, the architecture, and the collection (including a whole room devoted to Rodin, including “The Thinker”) make the effort more than worthwhile.

An index card (or file card) is a piece of blank cardstock, slightly larger than a standard playing card.  Some have lines on one side; other types are blank on both sides.  They are usually sold in packages of 100, and are very inexpensive.  Yet, for something so simple, they give a quite large “bang for the buck” in language learning.  It works so well that I recommend it to all my students while they study ESL abroad at EC San Francisco.

You can cut these flowers, but can you remember the past and past participle of “cut.”

To use them for irregular verbs, start with a fairly complete irregular verb list, and divide it into 3 groups.  The first group is the verbs you already know perfectly.  Congratulate yourself for your accomplishment in learning these, and set them aside.  You will never need to study them again, unless you stop using English for several years.  Group two is all the verbs where you say “What?  Is that really a word?  I’ve no idea what that means!”  If you honestly have never heard of the verb, chances are you won’t need it very often (if ever).  Set aside all the group two verbs to study when you are so bored that even studying obscure verbs sounds good.

This leaves the third group, the verbs you know about, but don’t conjugate perfectly  -  yet.  Choose 10 of these verbs.  Write the base form on the front of the card.  Write the simple past and past participle on the back.  Now you are ready to go!

The technique is simple.  Look at the front of the first card, say the word out loud (it is important that you hear it!), and try to remember the other parts of the verb.  Say them out loud as well.  Then check.  If you got it right, great!   If you didn’t, say it aloud correctly, two times.  Then go on to the next card.  Go through the card set completely one or two times.  Then set it aside.  Do this twice a day.  When you get a verb right three times in a row, set the card aside.

Now you have a personal decision to make.  Do you like to complete tasks, or keep adding to your task?  You can do the ten cards until you have them all, or you can keep replacing the ones you learned with new ones, so that you always have ten.  In either case, if you try this, you should be able to get at least ten verbs perfectly in three days.  Maybe you can do more, but at a minimum, you should be able to get this perfect for 20 verbs a week.  Suddenly, 200 verbs don’t seem like that many.  (Don’t count how many you haven’t learned yet  -  count the ones you HAVE.)

The cards are small so carry them with you.  Elevator moving slowly?  Do the cards.  Stuck on the bus?  Do the cards.  Is there a line to use the bathroom?  Guess what  -  the cards again.  At most, it will take you 5 minutes, and you will be doing something useful with those odd minutes that your day is full of.

P.S.  This works even better if you can do it with a partner.

Ksenia in San Francisco at “The Crookedest Street in the World” Lombard Street (also the name of a classroom at EC!)

Our recent student, Ksenia had a great time studying ESL abroad in San Francisco and shares this recommendation:

“This spring I spent 2 wonderful weeks in ECSF. In spite of the fact that it’s a short period of time, I met a lot of new friends there and visited plenty of sights. I was glad to found out that ECSF had an excellent location.”

“Teachers are great. My teachers, Kate and Carl, are so talented and charismatic. Every lesson was fun and riveting. EC staff is very friendly and helpful. My classmates were amazing, and it was hard to part from them, but I hope to see them again one day.
I would recommend everyone ECSF  – you’ll definitely get unforgettable memories! I’m planning to return to ECSF this August.”

I went with my writing class at EC San Francisco to walk around Chinatown.  San Francisco’s Chinatown is a cultural center with many shops, restaurants, and traditional healthcare shops.  Chinatown is distinguished by its beautiful architecture and special smell.  It has a lot of different stores where buy souvenirs and other goods.

I loved our trip or walk to Chinatown, where bustling people are trying to sell products, welcome to try food.  I also liked the multicolored lanterns.  Unfortunately, I don’t like Chinese food, especially some specific cooking odors, but this was a good experience while I study ESL abroad in San Francisco

Outside world, seen from Chinatown

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From Kyrgyzstan, I live next door to China, so we often visit China.  The people are very hard-working, “early to rise,” but the cities I have seen are very dirty.  San Francisco Chinatown is nice and clean, a better taste of China.

Udupi Palace is Indian vegetarian, specializing in South Indian street snack food (“chaat”), particularly dosas.  A dosa is a thin, crispy pancake similar to a French crepe, with a spicy filling of potato and onion curry.  It comes with a quite hot soup (“sambar”  -  watch out for the whole dried chilis) and two chutneys  -  a mild, coconut-based one, and a red one that has I don’t know what in it, but it isn’t mild.  There are also other traditional snack foods such as “idli,” a nightly selection of curries, and a couple of “thali” platters, a mini-feast with a variety of curries, breads, and flavored rices (try the lemon rice.)  Prices are midrange.  If you get a thali, you will have some food to take home.  You can eat a whole dosa at one sitting (barely), but you probably won’t want dessert.  The kitchen is wholly vegetarian (although not all dishes are vegan), so you don’t have to worry about stray bits of meat, fish, or poultry winding up in your food.

Udupi Palace is an easy 5 blocks from the 24th and Mission BART station (3 long blocks on Mission, 2 short ones on 21st), located on Valencia at 21st.  There are several other excellent vegetarian / vegan restaurants in the area, so it’s worth becoming familiar with the journey.  Your stomach will thank you.

However, while vertical development of vocabulary is necessary for any communication to take place, it is not enough for fluent communication.  If I say “I am very tire today,” you will understand me, but you will also know that my English abilities are limited.  Obviously, I should say “tired,” not “tire.”  This ability to choose, not the correct idea for the word, but the correct form (part of speech), is based on what I call horizontal vocabulary.  You cannot consider yourself fluent in English if you use the noun form of a word when you intend the verb.  Therefore, horizontal vocabulary development should be an ongoing component of vocabulary study.

The idea is really simple.  When you set out to learn a new word, investigate the word to uncover its forms for the different parts of speech.  You can go further, and look into the collocations (words that always go together, such as “afraid of” [rather than "afraid about" or "afraid on"]).  You can do even more, and find the related phrasal verbs, the idioms, the slang.  But let’s start just with the parts of speech.

I’ll give a simple example  -  the word red. It can be a noun  -  “Red is my favorite color.”
It can be an adjective  -  “I have a red shirt.”
So, what else?
Adverb of manner? (usually I just add -ly to the adjective  -  can I do it?  Redly?  YES!!!  “The sun sank redly behind the smoke.”)  Is this a common use?  No, but who cares?  I’m on my way to increasing my vocabulary (and accuracy in English) almost painlessly.  [I've just increased my understanding of "red" by 50%.]                                                                             What about a verb?  Can I “red” something?  No.  But there is the verb “redden.”  “His face reddened in embarrassment.”  (Can something “greenen,” or “bluen?”  No, but it can whiten or blacken.)                                                                                                   Can I find anything else?  Well, there is “reddish,” meaning sort of red.  And of course, for later study, there are multiple meanings, such as the American use of “red” to mean a communist.  But for now, let’s just focus on the more basic horizontal vocabulary.

horizon  -  noun          horizontal  -  adjective      horizontally  -  adverb

For more detailed, hands-on work towards fluency, come study ESL abroad at EC San Francisco

What can you do “horizontally” with “flower?”.