This week I attended both Wednesday and Saturday classes, so I definitely feel like I have learned a lot this week.
First of all, outside the class, I have started watching a few Korean dramas, mostly romance dramas, since I think the words and sentences used in there are easier to understand and don’t contain too much jargon. I learned a few common phrases. For example, “여보세요” is what people say when answering a call. I was wondering about the origin of this word, so I did a little digging. I found a great youtube video explaining it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPL4V1eCGqo. This phrase means “Hello” but it is almost only used when you answer the phone. 여보세요 is originally the combination of 여기 and 보세요, which means “Look here.” or “Hey, look.” and even though it’s mostly used when you are answering the phone, 여보세요 or 여기 보세요 can also be used when you want to start talking to someone and show your frustration, like “Hey, look.”
The youtube channel that posted this video has other similar video and I think this can be very helpful to learn some common phrases. Watching Korean dramas mostly have improved my knowledge and understanding of the Korean culture. The dramas I watched have settings in college and also working environment. Alcohol seems to be a very important part of all social life and networking in Korea. In the drama, coworkers would organize get-together after work and it’s usually at a beer place or Korean barbeque place where a lot of drinking is involved. Also, they would switch to a different place to start another round of drinking if the first round involves eating. When the characters in the drama get home, the first thing they do is to get a can of beer from the fridge and start drinking, especially the male characters. It seems like beer is a very important part of younger to middle-aged korean’s life, at least from what I see in the dramas. Also, hierarchy is clearly present in all the shows I have been watching, no matter what the setting is. In the college setting, students are not supposed to disobey professors or offer an opinion different from their professor’s because that would be considered disrespectful. The main character in the show Cheese in the Trap got an unfair grade because of the professor’s prejudice and ridiculous policy. But she gave up on arguing with the professor to get a better and fair grade. I’m currently in the process of trying to get the shows in Korean and English/Chinese subtitles so I can both understand and also see what the Korean characters are.
In this morning’s class, we did the 369 game in the class where we got to practice counting in Korean with both Korean and sino-Korean system. In addition, we did a new exercise I haven’t done before. We went over the song Arirang and then wrote down the song while sing/saying the lyrics. I’m actually surprised about how much I learned from this song. Even though I already kind of knew the lyrics, transcribing them down word by word from the phonetic sounds is actually quite different from reading the lyrics. I learned so much more about pronunciation in relation to word structures. I would like to continue doing similar exercises.
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