We did more speaking exercises in week 4. We started by catching up with each other, and then we did a conversation exercise on the issues that recently happened in Korea. Vivian mentioned a Korean artist's scandal lately, so we discussed our opinions and feelings towards it. We then moved on to a culture in Korea - mukbang, which refers to the YouTube channels where the YouTuber eat a lot of food in one video. Some eat only one kind of food in one video, and some eat a variety of food - but in common they eat a huge amount of food. I've watched few mukbang videos before, but Vivian has watched it a lot for 대리만족, which means gaining a sense of satisfaction by seeing somebody else doing it. I didn't know before Vivian told me that mukbang started in Korea at first and then went popular around the globe.
Vivian introduced me the concept of mukbang and showed me a channel that is really popular on YouTube. It is a girl who looks pretty and slim but eats a lot. She eats the amount of my three meals in that one video. We discussed the message that this type of video is conveying - that you need to eat a lot but stay slim and pretty. This is a very unhealthy but common idea in Korea but also in many East Asian countries. There are also scandals about the mukbang channels. People have found that quite a few mukbang YouTubers have been advertising for brands without telling their audience, which is illegal in Korea. In Korea, if you are advertising something, you have to let people know, either explicitly or implicitly. Another scandal about the mukbang YouTubers is fake eating, that they put the food in their mouth, chew it, and spill it out. And they edit the videos so the swallowing or spilling out part is not included in the whole video. These two scandals raised an issue of untrust in YouTubers in Korea, and some YouTubers just shut down their channel because of this.
I then read through a news article on the mukbang issue that Vivian found. It was still very hard for me to read - there were quite a few phrases that I've not encountered. What we did was I read it first, Vivian read it again, we went over the vocabs or phrases I don't understand, and then I tried to translate the whole sentence into English. It was a struggle for me, but I did learn a lot of new phrases from the passage.
For weeks 5, 6, and 7, we each picked an episode of Korean drama we wanted to watch and watched them together. I started with the last episode of Hospital Playlist, which is my favorite drama of the year. Then Vivian recommended the Squid Game, which ranks first on almost all regions on Netflix right now, but it was too scary for me. This week, we watched Hometown chachacha, which is a comedy romance drama that I really enjoy. During each class, we would turn off the English subtitles and have the Korean one. I could understand most of the plots, but there were times when I was just lost and couldn't guess out the phrase I didn't understand. We would pause in the middle and Vivian would explain it to me, either what is going on or what the important phrase was. I was really motivated by this type of class because I always want to know what happened so I would really focus on listening and reading the lines. I've been taking notes about the words I didn't understand and I need to review them frequently so I don't forget.
Comments
Hi Maggie! I enjoyed reading your language learning journal. I was able to relate with a lot of things you said and I found the information about mukbang so interesting. I never knew that there were mukbang scandals on youtube. I also love watching mukbang videos on youtube, but now I am curious to see which channels were involved in the scandal. I also had no idea that mukbang started in Korea! My language partner and I also watched squid game together without subtitles, and if I did not understand something, we would go over it. It really is a fun way to learn Korean and it really helps with listening comprehension skills.