biweekly post #5

[Yewon Son]

I started watching a relatively recent korean drama during these two weeks called Hotel del Luna, which stars a very famous korean singer named IU. I remember listening to the singer’s top hits when I was much younger and watching her act in a kind of cheesy teen korean drama too. I had this image of her as a really young, peppy pop singer and was surprised to see her acting performance on the drama. During these two weeks, I watched one episode each week because each episode is an hour long. I tried watching without subtitles because I figured I could really challenge myself that way. Unfortunately, there were a couple of scenes in each episode where the actors and actresses spoke in a dialect (which is called 사투리 in korean) and it was really difficult to understand at some points. I think this issue is one of my biggest concerns in my language learning journey because although Korea is a fairly small country, it is divided into many different districts. A lot of those districts have very distinctive dialects that sound completely different from the standard korean dialect. These dialects not only sound different, but also have different vocabularies. Sometimes different words will be used only for slang, but a lot of times, commonplace words will have completely different pronunciations, spellings or just be completely different words altogether. Along with hearing a different dialect, I was also able to listen to native speakers talking in a variety of different situations about a variety of different topics that I normally would not have the chance to casually listen to. For example, I was able to listen to people talk about committing a crime, running a hotel and many other uncommon topics for conversation. I felt simultaneously proud of myself and kind of discouraged with language learning these two weeks. I could sense that my reading skills in Korean were improving from the newspaper articles my language partner gave me, but I was also a bit discouraged because I was having such a hard time understanding the dialects. I’m sure that is a goal I can tackle later on, since I probably will not have to talk to people with dialects so strong that they are incomprehensible. The family members I have on my mom’s side live in an area in Korea where the dialect is either not that strong, or does not exist at all. The family members I have on my dad’s side also live in an area in Korea where the dialect is either not that strong, or does not exist at all. I realized that this frustration and concern of mine will most likely be an aspect of my Korean language learning that will not be used very often. However, the practice I got through watching the korean drama in listening and understanding standard Korean was very useful. Since all the conversations I heard were done by actors, it helped to listen to people having conversations in clear, understandable sentences.