My phone died a nasty little death a few days ago. At first, it just started dropping calls. Then it started turning itself off at random times. Finally, it wouldn’t turn on at all. This was a little distressing. Suddenly I was out of touch with Lime, who works on the other side of town. I was out of touch with the office, which is bad because there’s a tendency for news to reach me at the last minute. I was out of touch with anyone who didn’t send me an email. And, then again, in some ways, distressing wasn’t …
Category: KOREA
Heard on the Subway
I was on the subway with Lime last night — she dropped into town by chance and I just happened to get my malfunctioning phone working and call her before she gave up and left — and we heard the funniest conversation, or rather, one side of it. The young woman sitting beside her said, “… soju dubeyong…” in the most gleeful tone. Lime translated the conversation this way: “Well, if you got yourself a job, you could eat like me. I have a bunch of nice seafood for dinner, and two bottles of soju, and then some coffee, and …
Surprises Galore!
I asked some students to compare the Korean and English languages. Stupid me, I should have know that this would provoke all kinds of weird knee-jerk claims that Korean is somehow “superior” to English. Weird because, if you know anything about language (and I’d imagine someone who majors in foreign language study would bother to learn about language too), you know that there aren’t more and less “primitive” languages, or that “better” and “worse” aren’t really objective qualities of languages. (A language might be better for some purposes, but this does not make it a better language in essence.) It’s …
Full of it.
Quote from Lime tonight: Me: Yeah, Andre Kim is pretty weird. Lime: Andre Kim is full of weird. I don’t know why, but I really do like that one. (For those abroad: He’s a scary fashion designer in Korea… apparently quite a nice guy, but he looks quite strange.)
Protestin’ for Bus Station Something Whatever
One of my students was an hour late for class. Apparently the city of Bucheon has decided to convert one of its bus terminals into a housing zone, and some people don’t like that. So they lay down in the street and held up traffic tonight… for over an hour. Now, I can see the point in protesting something like that, but… when you know you can lay down in the street and hold up traffic for an hour, for just about anything you disagree with, then it seems to me that: you’ve lost whatever stake the protesting had. You …
Weirdest Line Yet
Okay, here’s the weidest line yet, in the fifth of five dramas I’m editing for my students: (Kelly, Erin, Nurse3 are flapping their chops in a lounge.) I’m pretty sure that someone out there has a very weird idioms function in his or her dictionary.
The Superiority of Hangeul
Yep, having collected the majority of those assignments from my writing class students, it turns out that more than one group decided to write about how Hangeul is superior to English. When you ask people to compare and contrast something, it’s interesting how some immediately feel the need to prove that whatever they feel is theirs is absolutely superior.
Great Review of a Book I’ll Never Read
Kingbaeksu has a review that basically eviscerates, with clear, sensible logic, that “What’s So Good About Korea, Maarten?” book that’s been on shelves for a while. I was put off by the white guy wrapped in the Korean flag (you can see the cover at the link above) and the contents look pretty poor too. Repeating the blather you’ve heard from friends is no way to write a book. A blog, maybe, but not a book. However, there are some good books recommended at the bottom of the page. I think I’ll bear that list in mind next time I …
Play Editing
I’m currently editing the plays that my students have written, just to tidy up the grammar and, occasionally, to ramp up the suspense and/or tension in a few scenes. Among the very colorful language in a few of these plays, the most shocking to me was the following: Mike: Damn, you dirty bitch… I’ll teach you to talk to me like that… (He grabs Trish by the neck and strangles her to death.) No need to worry that it’s sexist: everyone in the story has a nasty streak, and almost everyone dies, I think. It’s looking that way, anyway. Some …
Ask, Receive
Lately, I have thought about asking whether anyone reading this site knew of films about Indians that are not Bollywood films. What do you know? Bruce Sterling recently posted a link to filmholic, where I found links to some titles! Easy as that! And worth viewing, for a first pass, isthe film linked here, which is “Pria”, a story about an Indian-Canadian girl who tries to lose her accent in order to meet the boy of her dreams. I’m considering playing it for students who worry so much about sounding like a “native speaker”.