In this episode, I’m going to look back and reflect a little bit on 2022 and share with you about what I’m looking forward to in 2023. There’s a 100% free interactive transcript for this episode that you can get by following the link in the description or by visiting our website, Culips.com. I’ll get started with my reflection on 2022 and my talk about my dreams and goals and plans for 2023 here in just a moment.

But before I do, I want to give you a heads up about a big event happening here at Culips, and that is of course, our annual New Year sale. So, from January 1st until January 15th, for the first two weeks of January, you can save 25% off a yearly Culips membership, which is our lowest price of the year. We only have a sale once a year here at Culips and it is always to kick off and ring in the new year. The new year is a time when many people get focused on their goals, and they set new goals.

And I think for many of you, learning English in 2023 seriously, might be one of your goals. So, if it is, we’re here to help you and that’s why we’re offering our fantastic study materials at this low price. So, with a discount applied a yearly membership is $78 American. $78 US dollars. And if you break that down per month, it’s around six and a half dollars a month. So really, when you think of it, it’s an incredibly great price, considering all the benefits you get with a membership.

Those benefits include helpful study guides for all of our episodes. And in the study guide, you can find a transcript, and detailed vocabulary explanations and usage examples of the key and important vocabulary that you need to know. There are also quizzes and speaking and writing practice exercises. And of course, there are study guides for all of our new episodes, but our whole library as well, and we have hundreds of episodes in our library.

Actually, this week, one of our members, Amhawas, left a comment on our website to tell me that there are around 900 episodes in our library. So, I haven’t counted in a little while, I know there are hundreds, but Amhawas told me there are 900 episodes in our library. So, it’s a huge library of study materials that you’ll get full access to as a member. And in addition to this, there are extra benefits as well like our members only series, which is called the Fluency Files.

And you’ll get an invitation to our live video streams, which happen each month. And there’s more, that is only a small list of all of the benefits that you get when you are a Culips Member. And during the sale period, our memberships will be at the cheapest price that they will be at all year. So, if you’ve been considering becoming a Culips Member, or if you’re ready to take a serious step with your English in 2023.

Or even if you just like to show your financial support for the work that we do here, make sure to sign up and become a member before the sale ends on January 15th.OK, guys, the ad is over now, I promise. And I’m going to start talking about my year in review for 2022. And I’ll talk about what I’m looking forward to in 2023 as well. And I’m going to try and keep my story on the shorter side because I actually have a date planned with my wife for this afternoon to go ice skating.

There’s an outdoor ice-skating rink that’s been set up here in front of the city hall in Seoul. So, we’re going to go there and check it out and go for a skate, I hope. I love skating but my wife says she can’t really skate very well, and this will be our first time skating together, so it should be fun. I’ll tell you about how it goes in the next bonus episode, but because we have that plan, I’m going to try and keep things brief today. Anyway, what I want to do now is take a look back at 2022.

And also talk about some of my goals and plans for the new year. Actually, I was planning on talking about this topic with Kassy and we were going to make a Simplified Speech episode all about it. But at the last moment, as soon as we were about to record, Kassy’s microphone broke, and we couldn’t get it to work. Don’t worry, we bought her a new mic, and it’s being shipped right now. And she’ll be able to record again with me soon.

But for today, unfortunately, you’ll have to hear only my perspective. By the way, and I’m sorry to go off topic here. But speaking about Kassy jogged my memory and made me remember this, but Kassy and I, we are going to be doing a live stream together on January, the 6th 2023. Kassy is in Korea visiting right now we’re going to get together and we’ll be doing a live stream together on January the 6th. So, I’ll post all the specific details and the exact time on our website and Instagram account.

But if you’re interested in checking out that live stream, please keep the date open and available so that you can join us. OK, so let’s get back on topic. Stay focused, Andrew, stay focused. 2022, wow, 2022 I feel like in particular, this year just seemed to absolutely whiz by at the speed of light. I can’t believe how quickly this year passed, like it just went by in an instant. I think in general, it was, for me at least, a pretty uneventful year, it was a year where I got settled into married life.

For those of you who don’t know, I got married in May of 2021. So, this was my first full year of being married. And everything was cool. It was a great first year of being married, was also the year where it feels like here in Korea, we really came out of COVID. And life for the most part returned back to normal, I feel like we’re 90% back to what it felt like pre COVID. The only difference is that we still wear masks inside here in Korea.

But other than that life has returned back to normal, which is great. Of course, because of some of the lingering COVID restrictions, I didn’t really get to travel around too much this year, or go on too many adventures, which was a little unfortunate. The one international trip that I did have planned, I ended up having to cancel after I got COVID only a couple of days before I was supposed to leave.

That was back in August, and I was planning to go to Canada, but I had to cancel that trip after getting COVID. Thankfully though, I was able to reschedule that trip, and it will be happening soon in January. I’m going to go back to Canada for a couple of weeks, towards the end of January with my wife and I’ll be able to see my family and my friends after being away for three long years. So, I’m really looking forward to the trip, it will be the first time that I’ve traveled internationally in a long time.

And I’m so excited guys, I really can’t wait. So, thinking back on 2022, I actually had a difficult time remembering what I got up to. So, I opened my phone, and I went into my photo app, and I scanned through all the pictures that I took in 2022 to try and remember what I got up to exactly. The only problem is I don’t take too many photos in general. And when I do, it’s usually just a photo of my dog or sometimes a photo of my wife.

So unfortunately, it wasn’t too helpful in helping me remember 2022. I should take more photos. Maybe that will be my new year’s resolution to take more photos so that I can remember things more easily and more clearly in the future. I like that resolution. I like that goal, I think it’s a good one. So, because of that I’m just going to go off of my memory. I’m only going to use my memory and try to remember what were some of the highlights of 2022.

I think the biggest highlight of this year has to be starting the renovation project on my house. I haven’t talked too much about this on Culips but just to keep you up to date this year, my wife and I, we bought a very small, little house here in Seoul. But unfortunately, the house was not in great condition. It wasn’t really in livable condition. So, after we took possession of the house in the fall, since then we’ve been working hard to renovate it. And we’re well into the process now.

And at the current moment, the house is gutted, gutted, G-U-T-T-E-D. Gutted, that’s a great word, a very specific word, but the perfect word to use in this kind of situation. So gutted means that all of the insides of something have been taken out of it. So, our house is gutted, because a construction crew came, and they removed everything, all of the floors and the windows, the ceiling, the cabinets, the sink, and everything. So, the house is, at the moment, essentially, is just walls and a roof.

It’s just a skeleton of a house, we’re waiting for the winter to pass, and then in the spring, we’re going to start construction, and we’ll be rebuilding the house from the ground up, essentially. So, it’s been a very stressful project, but an exciting project so far. And of course, the best is yet to come. We haven’t really even started in earnest yet. So, I’m very, very excited for working on this project in 2023. And hopefully, if all goes well, moving into our new house in 2023 also.

I want to circle back and talk about that word gutted just for a moment, by the way, because there’s an extra interesting little piece of information that I want to share with you about it. In UK English, this is a kind of slang expression that you can use to describe your feeling if you feel really disappointed or sad. Like, not just a little bit, but very, very, very, extremely disappointed, or extremely sad, then you could say that you’re gutted. It’s like your heart has been torn out of your body.

To be honest, I don’t hear many people in North America use this expression, but I do hear it in UK English from time to time. So, it’s a good one to know. I actually like this expression, I think it’s perfect for describing the feeling of disappointment or of being let down. And of course, if you do want to use it, when you’re speaking to someone from America or Canada who speaks North American English, they’ll be able to perfectly understand you, so you don’t have to worry about that.

All English speakers will be able to understand this expression, even if it’s not used by North American English speakers too often. Another one of my highlights from 2022 was going for a run around the entire perimeter of the fortress wall of Seoul. It’s around 22 or 23 kilometers, if I recall correctly. And I did that back in March. It’s something that I had wanted to do for a long time and it felt great to cross it off my bucket list.

A little bit later in the year, I even convinced my wife to join me on a hike around the same course of the wall. We didn’t do the whole wall, of course, but we did do a big part of it together. And in 2023, I’m hoping to do more activities with my wife like this. We’ve been talking about doing some kind of couples exercise or activity for a little while now and I hope in 2023, we’ll finally be able to do something together. Of course, I enjoy running.

That’s my favourite kind of exercise. But she doesn’t really like running too much, she enjoys Pilates, but Pilates is not really my kind of exercise. I don’t think it’s really my thing. So, we’ve been trying to find something that we can both enjoy together to, you know, spend time together and stay active at the same time. So, we’ve been throwing some ideas out there about a nice activity that we could do together.

By the way, if you have any ideas, maybe you and your partner do some activity together, and have a good time doing that, you could leave a comment on our website, or you could email me, my email address is andrew@culips.com. And I’m open to all suggestions, I’m all ears. At the moment, we’ve been talking about maybe taking tennis lessons together, or hiring a personal trainer and working out together.

Or even the latest idea that my wife had was about taking a K-pop dance class together and learning how to do some K-pop dances together, which I think could be fun. I’m a horrible dancer, but it’s great when you’re horrible at something, it means you can only improve, right? So, it could be a lot of fun. And who knows, maybe we’ll end up doing that, but whatever we do, I hope that we do actually follow through with it and do it in the new year. That’s one of my goals for 2023.

Something I was proud of in 2022 was my Korean study. So just like you guys, I’m a serious language learner. And I’m happy that for another year, I was committed throughout the whole year to learning and improving Korean. And there were high points in the year where I spent a lot of time studying. And there were other points in the year where I was really busy and I couldn’t get as much done as I would have liked to, but I never quit.

And if I don’t quit studying Korean, then I consider it a success. I spent at least some time every day studying Korean, at least for a little bit. Maybe it was just reading a news article quickly or reviewing my Anki vocabulary cards for the day. But as you know, the most important thing when it comes to learning a foreign language is consistency. And even if you can only spend a little bit of time with the language that you’re learning, if you can do it every day well, that really is helpful.

So, I was consistent all year and even though I didn’t accomplish some of my bigger language goals that I had for Korean, like for example, I would love to try my hand at translating a Korean novel into English, but I didn’t try that in 2022, even though I wanted to. I just feel like I’m not quite at the skill level it takes yet. I’m close, but not quite there. And to be honest, I also didn’t have too much time this year.

And I think committing to trying to translate a novel takes a long time, but hopefully, maybe in 2023 or sometime in the near future, at least I can give it a shot. Actually, as I was scrolling through my social media this morning, I saw a nice little phrase. And that phrase was, that when we’re learning something new, we should aim for “progress, not perfection.” I thought wow, that’s really, really true, isn’t it? We should aim for progress, not perfection.

And even though when we’re learning a foreign language, like you guys learning English or me learning Korean, sometimes progress can be really, really hard to notice and measure. But I know that if I spend time with Korean every day, I am making progress, even though I might not feel like it. And I am inching forward and moving forward towards reaching my bigger goals.

So, for 2023 in terms of my Korean study, I just want to keep putting in the work every day and spend time with the language doing things that I like the most like reading novels and watching movies. But I also want to push myself a little bit more because in 2022, I found myself from time to time out of my comfort zone in Korean.

Like for example, you know, as I told you about this house renovation project that my wife and I are doing because of that, we had to meet with architects, and contractors, and designers about the house renovation. And I found it really hard in these situations, it was hard for me to talk about the topic, because there was so much vocabulary that I didn’t know. I also told you that this was my first full year of marriage, and because of that there were some family events that I had to go to.

And at some of the big family gatherings, I felt like I was outside of my comfort zone speaking in Korean. Those family gatherings were difficult because not only was I trying to learn about who everyone is in my wife’s extended family, but also of course, because they are conducted in 100% Korean. So yeah, it was good in that respect, 2022. I found myself in some new territory and it was a nice reality check, it was humbling, and it clearly showed me that there’s always a lot of road left on the learning journey.

So, for 2023 I’m going to try and push myself a little bit more and spend more time with difficult material and maybe even trying to attend some language exchange meet ups as well, so I can spend more time speaking in depth in Korean with people other than my wife because it’s very comfortable to speak with my wife in Korean on a day-to-day basis. But when I get outside of that situation and I have to talk about topics that I’m not as familiar with, then it can get a little bit difficult.

So, I got to put myself in those situations so that I can improve in them. Finally, I want to talk about the year that we had here at Culips. And I’m extremely proud of the work that the Culips team did in 2022. I think we did a lot of things in 2022 that have made us even better than we have ever been. For example, we started doing these bonus episodes this year. This is bonus episode 34. So, I guess we started about 34 weeks ago.

When we first started with the bonus episodes, we didn’t have a plan to do them weekly. But the response to them has been overwhelmingly positive, and I received a lot of encouragement from listeners all around the world to keep going with the series, to not give up that, you enjoy listening to them. And so, because of all that good feedback and encouragement, I’ve been trying to release a bonus episode every week.

So, if you’re a fan of the bonus episodes, don’t worry, I’m planning to keep creating them in the new year as well. And with your help and your feedback, I hope I can continue to improve the bonus episodes, and to keep making them better and better and better. Another thing that I’m really proud of at Culips that we accomplished in 2022 is launching our interactive transcript feature on our website. It was a lot of work and a big learning experience for me.

I’m not much of a programmer, or a coder, or developer or whatever you want to call it, but I was able to learn a lot by working on this project. And thankfully, we also have a great web developer who helps us out behind the scenes here at Culips named Ahir, so shout out to Ahir, together with his help, we were able to perfect this interactive transcript feature and launch it on our website Culips.com. And if you haven’t tried studying with it yet, I really recommend it.

The interactive transcripts look great on your smartphone, or your computer and they are a very convenient way to learn with us. We also added three new study guide writers to our team in 2022, Austin, Alina, and Indiana. And I’m hoping to get them on the podcast in 2023 in the new year, so you guys can meet them. But they are fantastic English teachers, they’re great writers, and they’ve been helping us create study guides that are very useful and more awesome than ever.

So, it was a big year of growth for us here at Culips in 2022 and I’m really excited to carry that momentum forward into 2023. My New Year’s resolution for Culips in 2023 is to make our community stronger than ever, and to give you guys more opportunities to practice your English speaking. That’s one of the biggest requests that we get from listeners, and I can assure you, we hear you loud and clear and we’ve got big plans in place and are working hard behind the scenes to reach these goals.

And in fact, we’re already building some new features and tools for helping our Culips community become closer and more tight-knit, and also to help you with practicing your English speaking. And I should have some news to share with you about that early in the new year. But definitely for 2023 that is our focus: community and English speaking. And now it’s time for this week’s vocabulary lesson.

Before I wrap things up, I want to teach you about an idiomatic expression we heard in this episode. The expression is a little bit long, so I’ll say a couple of times, the expression is: to try your hand at something. To try your hand at something. To try your hand at something. Or if we use it to talk about doing an activity then we say, to try your hand at doing something, to try your hand at doing something.

I used this expression earlier when I was talking about studying Korean in 2022. Did you notice when I said it? Did you hear it? Why don’t we rewind back to that part of the episode and listen to it a couple of more times? Here we go.

To try your hand at doing something means to do an activity for the first time, so you can see if you enjoy it, or if you are good at it. Think of it like a trial, you’re testing out something new to see if it’s a good fit for you. Essentially, it means to give something a try and see how it goes. Even though this is an idiomatic expression, it’s OK to use it in formal contexts. For example, you could use it at the office to try and impress your boss.

Maybe if you’re volunteering to do something new, you could say, “Well, I’ll try my hand at doing that.” As you may have guessed, already, we can change the “your” part of the expression to match the context of the sentence. So, we could say, try my hand, try your hand, try our hands, try their hands, and so on, and so on. So now that we know the meaning of this expression, let’s take a listen to some examples. I’ve got three prepared for us to learn with.

So, let’s take a listen to number one right now.

Example sentence number one.

Let’s break this example sentence down. In this sentence, we heard the speaker say that he wants to learn to play guitar, so he’s going to try his hand at it next year. Maybe he’ll find a guitar teacher and sign up for a trial lesson and try it out and see if he likes it or if he’s good at it, or if it’s a good fit for him. And if he does like it, he’ll keep going and keep learning. But if he doesn’t like it, then he’ll quit and stop and do something else.

Example sentence number two.

Let’s break this example sentence down. In the sentence, the speaker says that taking a one-day cooking class is a great way to try your hand at doing something new. So remember, this expression, to try your hand at doing something, means to just test and see if something is a good fit for you or not a good fit for you. So, committing to like a long cooking class, like three months of cooking classes or something, it’s probably expensive.

And also, you don’t know if you’re going to like it or not like it until you try it, right? So, in that situation, then, maybe a one-day cooking class is a better option, you can just do the class for one day. If you like it, then you could sign up for a longer class. And if you don’t like it, then you can quit without having to spend a lot of money or making a big time commitment.

Example sentence number three.

Let’s break this final example sentence down. In this example, the speaker says that he has a friend, who is an expert photographer by the way, and this friend has been encouraging him to try his hand at photography. So, he has taken that advice and that encouragement seriously, and he says he’s going to give it a shot and see if he likes it. Of course, to give something a shot is another idiomatic expression that means to try something out.

So, without spending too much money or too much time, you can just do it for a little bit, see if it’s a good fit for you, and then make a decision about whether or not you want to continue.

That brings us to the end of this episode, our final episode for 2022. That’s it for this year everyone! Of course, a big thanks to all of you out there who have been studying English with me all year long, but even if you’re new to Culips, and you’ve only studied with me for this episode, I gotta say thanks for being here with me today. And congratulations on making it to the end of this episode. And from me and the entire Culips team, we want to wish you and your family a happy and healthy 2023.

And of course, we’ll be here for you all year long to help you and support you on your English learning journey next year. So, happy new year, take care, and I’ll talk to you next time in 2023. Goodbye!