Alternatively, try to explain to someone with little-to-no English knowledge what something like “simple” or “almost all of” means.
It’s easy to explain “almost all of”: draw a picture of “all”, then “none”, then “almost all”. The first time you do this, you’ll expect it to work, but it won’t make sense to the other person, so you’ll have to do it again, differently. (I think my first attempt would be to draw a bunch of small things, then to show circles enclosing all, none, and almost all of the things.)
It’s harder to draw “simple”. Possibly if you draw some simple geometric shapes (straight line, circle, etc.) and some complex geometric shapes (curved line, several lines or circles, some complicated geometric shape, etc.) and then label some as “simple” and some as “not simple”. Then start drawing comparisons (“more simple and “less simple”) to explain that it’s a scale. Make sure to falsify as many alternate hypotheses as you can think of (such as “one line” and “many lines”).
And this is still much easier than it should be: a foreign language speaker already knows the concepts of “almost all” and “simple” under different names, and this saves you. The foreign language speaker has to do a lot of work to understand the explanation, too.
You quickly learn to not rely on words. Communication, especially with my students, involves lots of drawing, lots of acting, lots of examples, hence what I wrote about having to rely on empirical examples of things. That in itself is a pretty valuable experience I think.
You might be making teaching English harder than it is, since you don’t really have to teach concepts that the students already know in their own language, you just have to translate them. A good English-Korean dictionary would go far. There are of course some terms that won’t map over 1-to-1, but the majority should.
It’s easy to explain “almost all of”: draw a picture of “all”, then “none”, then “almost all”. The first time you do this, you’ll expect it to work, but it won’t make sense to the other person, so you’ll have to do it again, differently. (I think my first attempt would be to draw a bunch of small things, then to show circles enclosing all, none, and almost all of the things.)
It’s harder to draw “simple”. Possibly if you draw some simple geometric shapes (straight line, circle, etc.) and some complex geometric shapes (curved line, several lines or circles, some complicated geometric shape, etc.) and then label some as “simple” and some as “not simple”. Then start drawing comparisons (“more simple and “less simple”) to explain that it’s a scale. Make sure to falsify as many alternate hypotheses as you can think of (such as “one line” and “many lines”).
And this is still much easier than it should be: a foreign language speaker already knows the concepts of “almost all” and “simple” under different names, and this saves you. The foreign language speaker has to do a lot of work to understand the explanation, too.
You quickly learn to not rely on words. Communication, especially with my students, involves lots of drawing, lots of acting, lots of examples, hence what I wrote about having to rely on empirical examples of things. That in itself is a pretty valuable experience I think.
You might be making teaching English harder than it is, since you don’t really have to teach concepts that the students already know in their own language, you just have to translate them. A good English-Korean dictionary would go far. There are of course some terms that won’t map over 1-to-1, but the majority should.