Over these past two weeks, I did the same thing with Jenna where I watch episodes of Reply 1997 and write a reflection on it. My reflections became longer and longer as I got more into the series and could relate more to the characters. I actually finished the show and thought it was overall a funny, heartfelt series and I also want to watch the sequels with my mom who also enjoyed watching them a couple years ago. I also recorded my podcast with Jenna, and it was nice to review what we have accomplished this semester and how much I have progressed.
At home, I began to realize that I have speaking more in Korean whether it was to my parents or siblings. My mom, sister, and I enjoy watching Korean variety shows on the weekends, so we watched shows like Running Man (variety show with celebrities playing a game) and The Return of Superman (celebrity dads spend time with their young children without the help of his wife). The language used in these shows are fairly simple to understand, so I didn’t need to put on the subtitles. Whenever there was a word or phrase, I was unfamiliar with, I could just ask my mom. She would respond with the answer and sometimes, a whole history lesson about the subject. In an older episode of The Return of Superman, one of the dads tried to make dalgona candy for his son but failed miserably. After watching that scene, my parents felt nostalgic by seeing their favorite childhood street candy, so our family decided to make it. Just like the dad on the show, my sister and I accidentally burnt the sugar the first time. We learned from our mistake and made some more dalgona and imprinted a heart shape on the candy, just like how people running the street vendors would do it.
I’ve also been listening to more Korean music because my parents like to sing older Korean songs while doing their work and my sister enjoys blasting K-pop music from her room. Also, one night as our family was finishing up a game, my mom mentioned how Korean people say that someone’s blood type relates to their personality. People reported that they didn’t get along in relationships with other people of specific blood types. Pop artists in Korea even released songs centered around blood type and personalities in the early 2000’s. According to this theory of the four primary blood types, people with type A are emotional, passionate, sensitive and clever, type B are driven, creative, decisive, and stubborn, type AB are a mix of both type A and B, and type O are daring, outgoing, generous, and confident. There is even a chart that reveals which people with specific blood types are compatible with who. I even took a quiz to see if the it could guess my type; it was close, but not correct. I thought that this was interesting and could be compared to how others look at their horoscope. Even though the blood type to personality doesn’t seem to be scientifically true, it is accurate that blood type correlates to certain physical immunities.
Comments
Hi So Myung, thanks for the sharing. First of all I have watched Reply 1997 for almost five times and I still want to watch it from now and then. This is also how I've been learning Korean from the very beginning is to watch Korean TV episodes and listen to K-POP music. Not only does learning in this way very interesting, but also very helpful to learn words and even slangs used by Korean people right now. It definitely helps to cultivate the language sense by learning this way.
Hey So Myung, interesting post! I also like to watch Korean variety shows and listen to k-pop music, and I think it is a good way to learn Korean spoken-language. Since I have been a fan of K-pop and Korean TV shows for almost 5 years, I found that even though I did not systematically learn Korean before but I still have a good language sense.