During our lessons for the past two weeks, we decided to focus on some modern cultural developments. The first week, we watched a web-drama that has become very popular in South Korea called XX. Web-dramas are different from regular TV dramas because they are easily accessible on mobile devices and are very short, about 20 minutes. Regular TV dramas can be an hour to an hour and have plot developments more similar to movies. Web-dramas serve as a quick break from school, work, or running errands as they can be watched while stopping to eat or taking the bus. In XX, the plot is fast-moving enough to have some development in only 20 minutes yet is still intriguing to keep watchers engaged throughout the series. Even though new episodes are still coming out, the earlier ones are available on YouTube with English subtitles. Something I realized while I was reading the subtitles is that I understood the meaning of the words and the flow of the conversation deeper than what was being portrayed at the bottom of the screen. My understanding of cultural practices and observations of conversational interactions between people in Korean for so many years has allowed me to understand something more than just a translation. The subtleties and hints at social cues and contextual meanings of the dialog are obvious to me even if the subtitles don’t capture it quite right. I’m glad to notice a change like this that isn’t explicit knowledge of grammar or vocabulary, but an understanding of cultural application. This is encouraging because this realization reveals that I will know how to execute the language once I become fluent.
I mentioned in a past journal that the spoken Korean language is filled with assumptions of small details that are given by circumstances or the speaker's allusions. I was saying how I found it frustrating how so many implications could be in one sentence because it made it difficult to understand. My reaction was in response to a conversation that we were reading in class to one another. Because I was one of the speakers, I had a hard time understanding some implied components of the conversation. However, when we watched the web-drama, XX, I realized that I could grasp more than what the subtitles were telling me. When I realized it was the implications I was beginning to understand, it gave me some relief that it wasn’t quite as difficult as I had previously believed. I’m glad that the time that I have spent listening to conversations not only has allowed me to better familiarize myself with how the language sounds in terms of cadences and intonations but also the more detailed meaning of what is being said. Something I would like to do as an exercise is to watch another episode of XX and choose a conversation between two characters to dissect. I can take what the subtitles say and compare it to my understanding of the dialog and then run it by my language partner to see how accurate the translations really are and if I understood the implications properly.
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