This past two weeks in Korean class, my learning partner and I mainly discussed the Korean news. Being able to watch the news in Korean has been a long-time goal for me since much of the words used in the news is formal language. The news anchors also talk extremely quick and it was always hard to understand what the news was talking about. To practice understanding the news a little better, my partner and I looked through several current news stories on YouTube. Most times, there were no subtitles, so it was difficult to understand certain phrases and words. However, I realized that some topics were easier to comprehend than others. For example, news about politics were particularly hard to understand. A lot of the news about this topic was filled with technical words and names. An example of this type of news would be the one about the current trade war going on between South Korea and Japan. There were a lot of vocab words I had to look up to understand the full context of the story. Something that helped me a lot was being able to pause and resume the video and get feedback from my language partner when I was unsure of the meaning of a phrase or a word. Some words in this story that I didn’t know at first were things like, “경제 전쟁” which literally translates to “ economic war”. Another difficult word was “속죄” which meant “atonement”. Because the trade war started because South Korea felt that Japan has yet to atone for past crime, this word came up. The story was about how Japan and Korea stopped trading goods with each other because of past relations being brought up again. Japan is withholding goods like semiconductors. Korea’s response was very dramatic as citizens refused to buy anything of Japanese origin and were smashing Japanese goods on live television. Many citizens took to the streets with signs that read, “노 아베” which meant “No Abe”. In end however, the anchors admit that a trade war will be harmful for both economies. Another current news that we watched was a very recent event. It was about pop culture and was therefore easier to understand. It was about the recent death of the Korean celebrity named Sulli. The cause of her death was determined to be from suicide. Because the topic was about pop culture, I had a little bit of an easier time understanding the news. However, because the topic was about death of a person there were still many former words since the news wanted to be formal and respectful of her death. A word that came up often was “무공개” which meant “private” or “non-disclosure”. Another hard word that came up often was “조문”, which meant “condolences”. Many believed that Sulli was driven to suicide from toxic fandom. It was known that Sulli was constantly bullied for her unconventional persona and was depressed.
Over the last few weeks, I learned a lot about new strategies on how to better understand the news in Korean. I found being able to pause and replay the news was very helpful. I also took time on my own to watch more news online and read more news stories.
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