English teacher and author Bella Chung remembers a memorable encounter with one of her young students.

The middle school student walked into Chung’s English class at Korea Herald English Institutes in central Seoul, looking rather miserable and uninterested.

The girl attended an English immersion kindergarten in Korea as a kid, and apparently lost her interest in the language as she enrolled in elementary school.

“She was very pretty but her face was stiff,” Chung said during an interview with The Korea Herald on Tuesday.

“She told me that everything she knows about English is from her kindergarten years, although her mother firmly believes it’s because she’s been studying it throughout her life. She said she hates learning English and broke down in tears. I felt really bad for her.”

Believing that learning English can be fun, Chung recently published a book titled “The Korea Herald Bilingual Reading.” The book includes four life and living stories from The Korea Herald selected from the paper’s weekend editions: stories on cooking, Korea’s traditional houses, tourist trains and “laughter therapy.”

“My focus was to pick stories that are easy and fun to read,” Chung said.

“The first story featured in the book is about the ‘laughter therapy,’ a series of workshops where people learn to laugh out loud and relieve their stress, because it came to my attention that most of Koreans are unhappy. And I picked the story about hanok, Korea’s traditional houses, as they offer a sense of peace. These stories are universal and anyone can relate to them.”

Chung thinks reading English-language papers can be more useful than reading novels for those who have just begun learning English.

“One, newspaper articles are a lot shorter than novels,” Chung said. “So it’s certainly easier for you to finish them. Second, they are real stories that are happening around us, so you can relate to them better than a fictional story which may not have a lot of relevance to your own life.”

Chung’s book is not a typical bilingual edition, where each English-language page is accompanied by its translated Korean page right next to the other. In the book, each English sentence is broken into short segments, and the segments are labeled with their translated Korean version. This way, one can read the English text without having to constantly compare the two different texts all the time, and understand the sentence structure of the English language more effectively, Chung said.

“If you live in a country where English is not an official language, I personally think what you have to focus on the most is reading,” Chung said.

“Once you are able to read, then you can hear, write and talk eventually. And I think this ― reading English text with sentences that are broken into short segments labeled with Korean translations ― is the best way to learn how to read in English, if your goal is to become bilingual, mastering two languages at the same time.”

The second volume of “The Korea Herald Bilingual Reading” will be released later this month, Chung said, and will include stories about taekwondo, wine and local libraries. The third and fourth volumes will be released by the end of this year.

By Claire Lee (dyc@heraldcorp.com)