biweekly post #8

[Yewon Son]

For the past two weeks I continued watching the variety show but since finals week was coming up, I recently started watching some short Youtube videos of a comedy show that is apparently really popular in Korea called Comedy Big League (often called cobic for short because big would be pronounced like bic in Korea). While the variety show was definitely an introduction to comedy in Korea and the social norms in Korea, watching a comedy show really helped solidify my image of it. Not only did the comedy show feature common jokes and other common comedy tropes that most Koreans would know, it also acted as a kind of real-time update to the cultural moments going on in Korea at the time. It was also much more convenient because the clips were only 15 minutes each. Because comedy is often used as satire or as more easily digestible social commentary and critique, I was inadvertently able to learn a lot about what was currently an issue in Korea. I feel like I was able to learn a lot more about the current social and cultural moments occurring in Korea through SDLC. I was also able to improve my reading and writing skills significantly. Even though I have been wanting to improve my reading and writing in Korean for a while now, I never had the initiative to go out of my way to read a Korean book or write anything in Korean. However, I was able to get the motivation to try and improve my Korean reading and writing skills with the help of language partners, and was able to become more culturally and socially aware and educated through watching korean dramas and variety shows. By watching clips of comedy shows on Youtube, I was able to see just what exactly most Korean people right now think is really funny, and what they think is a problem. Along with these new developments in my language learning career, I’m really satisfied with the progress that I’ve made through this whole process. I’ve learned a lot more vocabulary, read and wrote in Korean significantly more than before, and my social interactions in Korea will be much more socially informed than before. I think that these new skills will really help me when I’m talking to my parents, or even when I need to talk to anyone in Korean in the future. I haven’t had much experience talking to people my age in Korean so it will be a really interesting and rewarding endeavor to try and approach younger Koreans with my newfound cultural knowledge. I also gained a new appreciation for Korean celebrities from watching the variety shows and comedy show. They endure so much pressure and scrutiny and I had no idea how intense it must be to have to be funny in front of so many people and so many cameras. Occasionally, both the variety show and the comedy show clips would show the amount of cameras facing the celebrities or the size of the audience.