For my cultural artifact, I watched the Korean weather forecast on YouTube. The forecast is from today, December 1st to the end of the week (December 8th). Currently, it is raining in South Korea and will soon turn into snow/slush mix. While I was watching, I noticed that Korea uses Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. It was weird seeing single digits like 3 or 4 degrees. Jenna has taught me before about Korean temperature vocabulary. I saw the words for max or min temperature in the video when referring to the highest and lowest temperature it will reach during the day. I also saw the different days of the week and Jenna taught me the days of the week in Korean a couple weeks back.
In my opinion, I found it pretty hard to keep track of all the words and understand all the words she was saying. But I found that I could read a lot of the words written on the video such as the days of the week, max and min temperatures, and other topics and quick facts. It was interesting to see how simple and serious Korean weather forecasts are when compared to American news stations, where it is more loose and playful. The top right has the time, which starts at 18:49 which is equivalent to 6:49PM. Korea uses military time.
There were many phrases that I still didn’t understand, but I was able to slow down the speed of the video and search up the meaning of the sentences I didn’t understand by playing it on voice notebook. Another thing I found was that the accent of the news broadcaster was very different than how Jenna and I normally talked. The news woman talked in more formal language with a different accent I was not familiar in.
The video also talks about how the rain will stop at night. When referring to the amount of precipitation, they used cm instead of inches. It is also interesting to note that they don’t report the weather anything above the North Korea/South Korea border. The weather is supposed to decrease over the next week. When I first saw the video, it was hard to understand the whole video, but after watching it a couple times, I was able to pick up many phrases in Korean and understand what she was saying. After transcribing it on voice notebook, I still don’t know what some words and phrases mean, but I will make sure to ask Jenna this week in class about what it means. I think learning vocabulary about Korean weather is a great way of expanding my vocabulary, since weather can be used as small talk with almost anyone during a conversation. The topic of weather is also a great way of expanding my dictionary of words like maximum, minimum, temperature, hot, cold, warm, rain, water, wet, etc.
I will continue to watch Korean news not only about weather but also about global and current news in order to further expand my Korean vocabulary. I actually enjoyed transcribing words and taking time to understand it. I now feel confident in my ability of listening to fluent Korean speakers and understanding them. https://youtu.be/yIgb3Rleews
Comments
Interesting post! I think the topic of the Korean weather forecast is really innovative. I feel related to this paper since when I first arrived in the U.S, I was so confused because people here use Fahrenheit while I grew up using Celsius. What do you think caused this difference?
Great cultural post Jiwon! It is interesting that you chose to do your cultural post on the weather forecast in Korea. I never had seen anyone do something like this before. I think it is interesting that we are the only country that uses Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. I also can relate to you when you say that you feel confused when other countries use different ways to measure length and temperature.
I had a similar study with my language partner in studying the weather. I believe that every other countries use Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. I felt that there were extremely difficult vocabularies involved in weather forecast! How do you come about in understanding and knowing the difficult vocabularies?
Interesting post! I think that watching the weather forecast and news is a really great way to practice Korean. I'll definitely keep this activity in mind when my Korean improves enough. I also thought it was interesting how you noticed a bunch of cultural differences between Korea and America. These are small things that we don't really think about, so it was cool that you were able to pick up on it. I wonder what other small cultural differences exist between Korea and America.