During this month, My language partner and I watched “The Glory” to maintain our listening practice for the language. “The Glory” is a Korean drama that came out in December 2022. It is about a former victim of school violence who seeks revenge on her bullies. She gets kicked out of school so she takes a different path to get her college education into becoming a teacher. Ever since she quit school, she planned out her revenge for ten years. There were five people who bullied her and she became a homeroom teacher at the elementary school of the leader of the bully's child.
I think this drama is very interesting because it portrays how she strategizes her revenge through a game strategy of 바둑 (baduk), which the main character learns to play during the drama. Baduk is a game that has been played in Korea since the 5th century. It originally came from China, but it was more popular in Japan and often called “Go”. This game is similar to chess where two players would play against each other placing either a white or black stone on a board. Most Korean players would follow the sunjang style where they could place sixteen stones on the board as a preset pattern. But in the drama the teacher of the main character explained the game as a long strategy of building your houses while destroying the opponents houses.
As the main character, Dong Eun starts destroying the lives of each of her bullies; it represents how she is referring to playing a big round of this Baduk game. When I first finished the first part of “The Glory” my first comment was that I was a bit sad for Dong Eun because she spent 10 years of her life avenging her bullies. She could have been doing something more meaningful with her life or become more successful than her bullies. Although I would also want to avenge my bullies if I were in her shoes I do not think I would want to waste my energy to put that in action.
A cultural experience we did this month was to go to a Korean restaurant called Yewon. There I had a hard time choosing a menu to order because I really missed all of the Korean food. I ended up ordering 된장찌개 which is a bean soup for korean cuisines. During our meal, the waiter came to our table a lot to refill our side dish. She mentioned how she understands how much college students miss Korean food because of her daughter who recently went to college. It was really nice talking to some Korean adults in the restaurant. It helped us practice the formal language of Korean. I think oftentimes I sometimes forget how to interact with adults because I spend too much time speaking the language with my peers. This experience really helped me switch my brain into a more formal and traditional part of the Korean language instead of the slang languages.
Replies
I think the connection to the show and the baduk game you mentioned earlier is interesting! I always love when shows or films include meaningful cultural or historical content and context, and I think this is a great example of this. Also, I identify with understanding the language better due to watching a series or film, as I am doing the same thing for Turkish, and it does help to identify more words.
Hi Rachel!
I also had a similar experience with interacting with adults while speaking in Korean after meeting a nail tech in Connecticut who taught Korean. I always find the strict rules regarding formality in Korean to be tricky, and I found myself having to correct myself frequently. She was very understanding considering I was a beginner, but I found it quite embarrassing at the moment haha