I spent around 6 months doing Phase 3, and started to increase my hours slightly. I think I was doing 10hrs/wk GPA, 4hrs textbook. Overall around 170 GPA hrs, averaging 10 new words/hr. There’s a really helpful (probably intentional) logic to Phase 3. All the bible stories give you lots of simple bible vocab. This makes it easier to try listening to sermons. Anyway, here’s my the list of exercises I went through (some tips down below).
Phase | Context/Exercise |
Phase 3A | Place 01 – Lang school Place 02 – Resturant Place 03 – Taiwan schools Script – Brushing teeth Script – Drink milk Script – Good morning Script – Return home Script – Riding bus Script – Shopping Cartoon 01 – Hidden Talents Cartoon 02 – Secret Food Cartoon 03 – Cone of Shame Cartoon 04 – Magic Wand Cartoon 05 – Monster Cartoon 06 – Piano Cartoon 07 – Baby sitter Cartoon 08 – Postman Cartoon 09 – Hippy Cartoon 10 – Turf Wars Cartoon 11 – Prickly Problem Cartoon 12 – Spider Cartoon 13 – Icecream Cartoon 14 – Tree Cartoon 15 – Blitzers Job Cartoon 16 – Dog training Cartoon 17 – Concrete |
Phase 3B | Bible story 01 – Gen 1 Bible story 02 – Gen 16 Bible story 03 – Gen 3 Bible story 04 – Gen 22 Bible story 05 – Exo 9 Bible story 06 – Passover Bible story 07 – Forty Years (B4K) Bible story 08 – Isaiah (B4K) Bible story 09 – Mark 1 Bible story 10 – Luke 2 Bible story 11 – Parable of the sower (B4K) Bible story 12 – Mark 4 Bible story 13 – John 11 Bible story 14 – Cross Bible story 15 – Resurrection Big Pic Bible – NT 01 Big Pic Bible – NT 02 Big Pic Bible – NT 04 Big Pic Bible – NT 05 Folk story 01 – 12 animals Folk story 02 – Pangu Folk story 03 – Houyi Folk story 04 – Fox & tiger Folk story 05 – Qiren sky falling Folk story 06 – Lost horse / Saiwang Fok story 07 – Moving a mountain Folk story 08 – Sword & Shield Folk story 09 – Clam & Bird Folk story 10 – Dragon lover Folk story 11 – Chang-e Folk story 12 – Chinese sayings Folk story 13 – Nuwa Folk story 14 – Farmer Folk story 15 – Hugupo Folk story 16 – A-fu Folk story 17 – White cat |
Phase 3C | Sermon 01 – John 1 Sermon 02 – John 2 Sermon 03 – John 2 |
TIPS
- The Cartoon exercise is fun and worked well. I used free Shaun the Sheep videos on Youtube. I found the GPA manual instructions on how to record this slightly unhelpful, after trying to follow the manual word-for-word, I modified it slightly and following this pattern:
- Watch cartoon once together with helper (both watching).
- Watch again, this time recording helper narrate the action.
- However I let my helper control the stop/play buttons, so she could pause whilst narrating some of the busy parts. This made for a much smoother recording than if she tries to keep up with the cartoon without pausing (GPA manual suggests this). Usually, this method results in a recording about 2x the length of the original cartoon (e.g. 15 min recording to narrate a 7 min cartoon).
- Then, we start listening to the audio recording together, doing the GPA clarify recording / massage recording technique. At this point we usually don’t need to look at the video again.
- Bible Stories was a bit tricky. I tried 3 options:
- Using bible storytelling examples which were already recorded in my target language. This was convenient, but the main issue was recording quality (often poor) and bad accents (non-native speakers).
- Using the translated stories from bibleforchildren.org. My helper would read it out, I would record, and then we discuss. But this was very hard – the translations were not natural language, they were written style. As a result the grammar and vocab was very dense and outside my Growth Zone. I gave up on these quickly. (Also, the stories were quite long).
- Using a translation of the Big Picture Story Bible. This was at least better than #2, because these stories aren’t so dense, and include a lot more simple sentences. However, they were still written stories, and as a result the difficulty level was kinda high.
- If I did this step over again, I think I would focus on finding a Christian to tell me bible stories and make my own recordings. And I might try option #3 a bit.