Week 14: Fifth Cultural Post
For my last cultural post, I would like to summarize what I have learned about the Korean culture. Korean people put a huge emphasis on hierarchy. When learning the language, I also learned that the degree of formality matters a lot. I should be aware of this so I do not offend anyone if I were to converse with someone in Korea in the future. My main focus this semester for the cultural aspect was the idea of beauty in South Korea as mentioned in my previous posts. The whole society is influenced by media and celebrities. The norms of the society seem to play a big role in people's everyday life. People including younger children are criticized by their own parents for not being beautiful and for not being born with double eyelids. People are considered blessed and lucky if they were born with "ssangkopul" because they are saving themselves money by not having to go under the knife to obtain double eyelids. This is just something they have to learn to live with and most of the people in this society has already gotten used to the critical comments from family members and society itself. Girls see k-pop stars on television and on ads around the city and dream about looking like them one day. Parents reward their children's academic success with presents which is agreeing to pay for a cosmetic surgery. I think it's sad that these children's motivation to succeed is to go get surgery done to look more beautiful to fit into society. Overall, this was such an interesting topic to learn about and I thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself with the facts and research I found online!
Final reflection:
This semester has gone much better than the preceding semester since it was structured better and we had a good set of materials to guide us along with the learning process. I am glad that I chose Korean as my target language although learning Bosnian would have also been interesting as well as challenging. I truly enjoyed learning more about the culture of Korea and how it connects to the language. I want to keep practicing what I have learned for the past two semesters so I won't forget anything. It's really fun to show off what little skill I have to my Korean friends. Often they are amazed at my pronunciation and applaud me for doing a great job. I am happy to have had this opportunity to take this class and self direct myself to learn Korean with the help of my partner.
Cultural Project:
Cultural Presentation: Beauty in Korea
This presentation is on the idea or image of beauty perceived by the people in South Korea. It provides statistics and general information on what counts as beautiful and why it is necessary to become beautiful.
Comments