For these last two week of SDLAP 112 lecture, I met with my language partner Somyung and Joon over Zoom on Friday. We started off our lessons once again by talking about how our weeks were in Korean. This was in an effort to start practicing one of our goals for this semester which is to speak in only Korean to help retain the language and keep practicing our skills. To change things up however, we started watching shows during our class to improve our Korean comprehension skills with the continued homework of watching a Korean show. We decided to watch Reply 1988 on Netflix and overall it is a very interesting and immersive experience. As mentioned before this show follows the lives of a group of five friends in Ssangmun-dong, a small neighborhood in Seoul. This show is really about the ups and downs ranging from struggles to memorable moments of these 18 and 19 year olds during 1988 and really does a good job of depicting the 180 degree change that Koreans in Seoul experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One kind of fun thing about this drama series is that the viewer has to guess who one of the main girls ends up out of the remaining 4 main characters ends up marrying as it has a cutback scene to 2016 with that character.
I would like to bring it back to my class as we watched two different episodes of shows in each respective class. Last week, we watched a program called 아는 형님 also known as “Knowing Brother” with the guests from Mr. Trot. This episode was from earlier this year during COVID and the issues they were talking about then were still relevant now as COVID has not let up yet. The format of the show is kind of like a high school concept where the cast members are dressed up in school uniforms and act like students in a classroom while guests come in every week as newly transferred students. Most of these segments portray activities that every student in Korea would do with their classmates which is pretty neat and the program often diversifies itself with segments outside of the school concept which has made this show very popular in Korea. A notable aspect regarding the show is the usage of banmal 반말, which translates to informal language, manner of speech despite age or seniority on the show. This is big because this manner of speech is disregarding the Korean language’s adherence to strict seniority rules with spoken language and the sunbae-hoobae hierarchy in the Korean entertainment industry but it is also unique and nice to see because this more casual setting allows guests and cast to interact with each other like schoolmates do and be comfortable with teasing one another and being honest to provide a fun show experience. This episode mainly focused on the Top 7 of Mr. Trot show and their group dynamics and how they rose to fame. This was part one of a three part series as Mr. Trot was a huge success in Korea and there was a huge fanbase as there is a current rise in popularity of trot music, a genre of music that has lots of repetition and has lots of cultural significance since it was famous during the Japanese colonial rule of Korea. This was a fun experience as it was pretty cool to watch and see Korean being used in an entertainment setting and the content was relatively easy to understand even though they used bigger vocabulary words due to context clues in their responses and interactions with one another which really made use of my listening and interpretation skills.
The other show episode that made me utilize these same skills was 미운 우리 새끼 or “My Ugly Ducking”. This is a reality show where the celebrity mothers watch their celebrity children’s daily activities and share commentary on them. This was an interesting show for me because instead of the typical shows where you watch celebrities’ lives this time you get their parents watching the celebrities’ lives and commenting which has its funny and entertaining moments as they react to hilarious moments like eating the super spicy ramen in a kind of eating broadcast format for one of the cast members in the episode that we watched. It was very fun to see and something that I could relate to in seeing his parents respond that way as my mom would also laugh and react similarly to the celebrity’s mom when I decide to cook the super spicy ramen and eat while watching a show or sharing a meal with her. When writing my reflection for this episode since we will discuss this episode in more detail next week, I wrote a lot about the parts of the 소개팅 (sogaeting) which is essentially a blind date and I found this fascinating as well because sogaeting is such a big thing in Korean culture and a way for people to meet and find someone that they want to be in a relationship with. This episode was also very teaching as it taught me longer phrases that I can use in my vocabulary in the future and allowed me to practice my enunciation to improve my Korean language skills. I also challenged myself by trying to write some phrases and form paragraphs in Korean to improve my writing skills as well.
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