biweekly post #6

[Yewon Son]

These two weeks, I watched some different korean tv shows to try and widen my range of both cultural understanding and language comprehension. I sometimes watch korean variety shows on television if my mom is watching them at home, but I had never gone out of my way to watch one on my own. I thought it would be a great way to not only continue listening to native speakers for at least an extra hour or two a week, but also to finally understand why my mom thought they were so funny. I remember when I was most likely in elementary school, my family and I would all sit and watch some of these korean variety shows on television on the weekends, so watching them now in college was a really interesting and nostalgic experience. I started watching episodes from a very popular korean variety show called knowing brothers because they had a lot of episodes on Netflix. Knowing brothers is essentially a talk show, but the main theme of the show is to kind of emulate a korean high school. All the celebrity guests who come on the show wear school uniforms and the group of comedians who host the show also wear school uniforms. Each week, there is a new group of celebrity guests who range anywhere from actors, to kpop idols, to comedians--pretty much all entertainment industries were welcome. The show’s set was a classroom and the celebrity guests were introduced as transfer students. I thought the concept of the show was really new and unique, and added even more of a kind of fun informality to the typically relaxed atmosphere I remembered variety shows having from my childhood. I think watching the variety show helped my language comprehension skills because the speed at which people talk in variety shows is completely different from how people talk in korean dramas. While this may seem like an obvious point given that one is scripted while one is not, this difference in not only the speed but the speech patterns themselves was also really interesting and insightful. Because there would not be nearly as much need for suspense or a proper way of speaking, I was able to see different dynamics and different speech patterns in action (in fact, one of Knowing brothers’ unique characteristics is that they forbid everyone on the show from using the formal or respective form that is usually used when talking to elders). Watching the korean variety show was also really helpful in increasing my cultural awareness and understanding. Watching professional comedians and really clever celebrity guests joke around with each other and play games together, gave me a chance to see what slang is popular in Korea these days, what types of jokes are trending and more. Most importantly, I felt really confident after watching these shows (not only because I felt happy from laughing so much) but because I felt like I could understand the current culture in Korea just a little bit more.