One aspect of Korean culture that really interests me, is the popularity of cartoons called "Webtoons". While cartoons in American culture are usually considered to be in the children's realm of entertainment, the popular internet service/app "Webtoon" is catered specifically for a teenage/adult audience and has attained enormous success. The authors or lead artists of popular webtoons gain celebrity status, which I saw first-hand through a youtube video. In it, people described their ideal boyfriend or girlfriend to someone who was separated from them by a wall, and when they revealed the artist to whom they had described everything, people were shocked. The person on the other side of the wall was the lead artist/writer of an extremely popular webtoon, and every one of these people who were from all different walks of life, all knew him and were star-struck. This behavior towards the writer behind a comic-book series is possible in American culture, but would have to be from a group of fans of that specific comic series, thereby making it a niche culture; for Korea, it seems to be a national adoration.
However, one of the aspects of the webtoons that contributes to its popularity, is its replica of colloquial Korean, and even the type of slang used in texts.There is a very distinct difference between texting in Korean and speaking normally in Korean, just as there is usually a difference between texting and speaking in English. Often times, people will shorten words like 스타벅스 (starbucks) to 스벅 (sbuck) or even mix different languages like Japanese or English in these shortenings. The meaning of this kind of slang can be hard to decipher at times, and with this kind of vocabulary being used throughout webtoons, it means I need to study it in order to understand what's going on in them. I included in my learning plan that I wanted to be able to read an entire webtoon and understand everything that's going on, without looking anything up, and in order to do so I'll need to learn more about slang along with the general culture of Korea. My Korean teacher Jimin took this into account and showed me clips of Korean variety shows, gave worksheets with lists of Korean slang vocabulary that we then translated and went through common Korean idioms or sayings so I would be able to expand my knowledge of both slang and Korean culture.
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