Tag: KOREA

Prime Time Genre and Cultural Difference in Narrative Construction — Or, The Theme of Work in Western TV

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This week is hectic in part because the biannual Student Presentation Contest is coming up. It sounds more, er, voluntary than it actually is: a contest lends at least a little more of an air of excitement to what is a graduation requirement: every student must give a ten minute presentation to the department. Well, no, not to the department, but to an audience. It turned out that if we actually ran the contest these days the way we did originally, there would be something like 450 minutes of speeches back-to-back, or run over two days, and no human being …

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Expat Social Fallacies: Conclusions

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This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those just joining us, this post is part of a series. I recommend that you skip this post for the moment, and check out the menu at the bottom of the post to start reading these in order. Conclusions I’ve already traced how I think these influence interactions among expats, and between expats and Koreans, as well as generally what I think the causes and consequences are. As for what to do about these fallacies — and others, which, if you think of any, I’d appreciate you point out in the comments! — I think that, as with the …

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Expat Social Fallacies, Part 5

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This entry is part 5 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those just joining us, this post is part of a series. I recommend that you skip this post for the moment, and check out the menu at the bottom of the post to start reading these in order. Expat Social Fallacy #5: Separate But Equal This is one of those subtle fallacies that leads to a very off-putting dynamic in many expat gatherings. It is gendered, though maybe it expresses itself in other ways I’ve not seen. I don’t tend to join in on foreigner-gatherings, but when I do, it almost never fails. You see a table surrounded not …

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Expat Social Fallacies, Part 4

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This entry is part 4 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those just joining us, this post is part of a series. I recommend that you skip this post for the moment, and check out the menu at the bottom of the post to start reading these in order. Expat Social Fallacy#4: It’s My Right (Sung to the tune of Bon Jovi’s “It’s my life.” Heck, I’ll even throw in the video for you to listen to as you read the rest of this.) I once heard a British woman speaking in loud, slow English to a Laotian waitress, with a very thick accent. So thick it was hard for …

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Expat Social Fallacies, Part 3

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This entry is part 3 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those just joining us, this post is part of a series. I recommend that you skip this post for the moment, and check out the menu at the bottom of the post to start reading these in order. Expat Social Fallacy #3: Everyone’s Got Standards Not to be confused with the Korean Social Fallacy of the “Good Expat” versus the “Low Quality Expat” (one that has also started to creep into expat discussions and thinking, mind you), this is the social fallacy wherein certain expatriates see the role of the expatriate in Korea, at least, as sharply delinated in …

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Expat Social Fallacies, Part 2

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This entry is part 2 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those just joining us, this post is part of a series. I recommend that you skip this post for the moment, and check out the menu at the bottom of the post to start reading these in order. Expat Social Fallacy #2: He/She Isn’t the Problem, Korea Is… … and that’s why, for example, he/she bitches all the time. This second Expat Social Fallacy isn’t restricted to bitching and complaining, of course. The “difficulty” of living in Korea becomes an excuse for all kinds of behaviours: illegal, stupid, antisocial, boring, and otherwise. But the case of bitching is a …

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Expat Social Fallacies, Part 1

gordsellar10 Comments
This entry is part 1 of 6 in the series Five Expat Social Fallacies

For those who don’t know of the thing I’m riffing on, well, you should go and give a gander to The Five Geek Social Fallacies. It’s a list of five fallacious beliefs that many geeks seem to take for granted, and which all too often (and too-annoyingly) govern social interactions among geeks, along with some psychological analysis of why this is the case. It seems to me that there are also some Expat Social Fallacies, some analogous to the Geek Social Fallacies, and probably for comparable reasons. Over the next five days or so, I’ll be trying to identify some …

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Indonesians Avenge the Mangling of English on Korean Notebooks by Mangling Hangeul on 대어 오ㅜㄴ 노트보ㅗㅋ

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Often, expats in Korea like to share some of the crazy English that they see on things like the covers of notebooks, on T-shirts, and so on. I myself included one example–taken from a T-shirt I got at the Jeonju International Film Festival several years ago–in a story titled “Country of the Young,” where a carry-bag has the enigmatic phrase, “And Of Course Carrot!” which, if you know enough Korean, is not at all enigmatic. Basically, it’s a transliteration of a pun. As far as I understand it, in Korean, 당연 (dang-yeon) means “naturally, of course, certainly”, and a similar-sounding–but …

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Losing Your English

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The specter of “losing your English” is something that haunts TEFL teachers living abroad. I’m not sure if it haunts mommies or kindergarten teachers in the same way, but I’ve heard TEFL teachers tyalk about it since I first arrived in Korea, and I, yes, indeed, have even experienced it a little bit too. The idea is, well, simply put, with language, use it or lose it. We know this is true since we see it in our students. Those who speak English seldom loose it, even when they pratice for an hour a day in a class. When not …

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